RIM on Monday confirmed that it has issued a recall for approximately 1,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. “RIM determined that approximately one thousand BlackBerry PlayBook tablets (16 GB) were shipped with an OS build that may result in the devices being unable to properly load software upon initial set-up,” the company said in a statement. “The majority of the affected devices are still in the distribution channel and haven’t reached customers. RIM is working to replace the affected devices. In the small number of cases where a customer received a PlayBook that is unable to properly load software upon initial set-up, they can contact RIM for assistance.” Shortly after the PlayBook was released, a BGR reader contacted us to report problems with his PlayBook. The device, which was purchased on launch day, would not boot. Instead, it would just flicker and flash randomly while the power button was depressed and then power down when the button was released. It is unclear if this is the same issue that resulted in RIM’s PlayBook recall, but RIM’s description of the devices’ inability to boot on initial setup matched our reader’s description last month. Hit the break for a video of the BGR reader’s PlayBook.

Thanks for the video, Jake

Social networking site Twitter has been dealing with some serious performance issues for the past several hours. The problems seemed to begin earlier today when a handful of users reported seeing unfamiliar tweets and timelines displayed on their Twitter landing page. The issue may have something to do with the new Twitter layout, as the company has temporarily reverted back to the old site design for some users. The site has yet to issue a public statement explaining the issue(s).

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It’s not the update you’ve been waiting for, rather it’s the update the will allow you to get the update you’ve been waiting for. Of course we’re talking about Windows Phone 7, and the small, quirky code bundle Microsoft has been attempting to rollout for the past two weeks. After halting the update to Samsung handsets back on February 23rd, the company resumed sending the software to users’ devices this week. And unfortunately, it looks like Windows Phone users with Samsung handsets are continuing to have issues — problems Microsoft admits via Twitter it is “aware of” and is “looking into.” The small package being pushed by Microsoft patches Windows Phone’s updater mechanism, preparing it for the more significant NoDo update that is set to bring copy and paste functionality, amongst other things, to WP7 later this month. Not the most impressive software rollout we’ve ever seen, but hopefully Microsoft and friends have this whole mess sorted out by the time NoDo is a gogo. 

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Microsoft on Tuesday revealed that a Yahoo! email inefficiency was the culprit of a phantom data bug affecting Windows Phone 7 users. Yahoo! apologized for the bug initially, but later issued a second statement claiming Microsoft’s IMAP implementation was unique on Windows Phone 7 devices, and this was the root cause of the problem. Programmer Rafael Rivera decided to launch an independent investigation into the matter, however, and he posted his findings to his Within Windows blog on Wednesday. In short, Rivera contests that Yahoo!’s IMAP email issues are not confined to Windows Phone 7 devices. He goes on to demonstrate that standard IMAP requests sent to Yahoo! email servers return excess data that falls outside IMAP protocol. Yahoo! has not confirmed or denied these findings.

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Last week, we told you about a pesky SMS bug that has been plaguing some users of  Google’s Android operating system. The issue in question, which Google asserts is quite rare, causes text messages to be sent to unintended or random recipients. In the company’s bug-tracking system, a response has been posted to those users filing complaints in hopes of a solution. Google writes:

Thanks to everyone for your patience while we’ve been investigating these reports. As it turns out, we believe there are two distinct situations being discussed on this issue chain. Fortunately, we have fixes for both of them.

When some users tap to open a message in the Messaging application, they’re seeing a different message appear instead. We don’t believe this issue is affecting many users, but we’ve developed a fix that we’re preparing to deploy. Of course, double-checking the displayed message before hitting “Send” will prevent any messages from being sent to the wrong recipients. We’ve found in testing this issue, it is more likely to occur if you tap on a message before the Messaging app is fully loaded, so we recommend waiting for all the elements to load before clicking on the message you want to display.

Separately, some users have reported that their SMS messages are being delivered to the wrong people. It took us some time to reproduce this issue, as it appears that it’s only occurring very rarely. Even so, we’ve now managed to both reproduce it and develop a fix that we will deploy.

While we don’t anticipate any persistent problems, we’ll continue to investigate in case we come up with additional ways to trigger these bugs. Thanks again for helping us improve Android.

No word on exactly when the fixes will be pushed out to handsets, but if you’re mobile is affected… know that help is on the way.

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Earlier this week, BGR exclusively broke news concerning a bug plaguing several owners of the new Dell Venue Pro smartphone. Users reported an inability to connect their devices to secured Wi-Fi networks. Dell issued an official response to the report on a company blog Thursday morning:

We have confirmed that the Wi-Fi connectivity issue that was reported in blogs like Boy Genius Report and Ubergizmo resulted from a software glitch during Dell’s manufacturing process. The issue affected some of our initial phone shipments and was not a hardware issue or a Windows Phone 7 one. Customers who purchased Venue Pro smartphones on Monday or Tuesday (November 8 or 9) at a Microsoft Store and who are experiencing the protected Wi-Fi network connectivity issue also have the option of bringing your phone back to the Microsoft Store for an exchange, beginning at the end of next week. Your new phone will fix the Wi-Fi issue as well.

Dell’s claim that the issue was neither hardware or software related is rather odd, but the important news is the solution. According to Dell, affected phones were all sold by Microsoft Store locations. Users experiencing the bug should return their devices to a Microsoft Store location beginning “at the end of next week,” at which time working replacement units will be available.

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If you own a pair of Apple-friendly Monster headphones that haven’t been very Apple-friendly lately, you’re not alone. A source at Apple recently told BGR that customers are complaining en masse of “erratic behavior” associated with music playback on Apple devices. The problems affect the iPhone, iPad and Apple’s iPod range, and include random pausing, playing and skipping forward or back through songs. Apple has determined internally that these problems are being caused by a variety of Monster headphone models that make improper use of Apple’s Remote and Mic technology despite advertising compatibility with Apple products. Specifically, the problematic models “use conductive flanges, which can result in electrical shorts that cause an iPod or iPhone to pause and play erratically.” According to Apple, these headphones “do not meet Apple’s technical specifications,” and the company is afraid customers might think Apple products are responsible for the associated malfunctions. Offending Monster headphones include the Jamz, Lil Jamz, Turbine Basic, Turbine Pro and Heartbeats product lines.

UPDATE: Monster has issued the following statement to BGR:

Monster was recently made aware by Apple that some of our Jamz™, Turbine™ and Heartbeats™ headphones with ControlTalk™ may experience some irregularities under certain circumstances (it does NOT affect ControlTalk™ Universal).  This irregularity potentially affects a very small fraction of our headphones and to this date we have received no customer complaints. However, because the customer experience is our top priority, Monster immediately stopped shipment of all potentially affected products.

With the exception of the black or chrome Heartbeats with ControlTalk™, this issue does not affect any other of the Beats™ by Dr. Dre™ products.  If you think you are experiencing a problem with one of the headphones listed below, please contact Monster customer service [http://www.monstercable.com/service] to receive a replacement.

Potentially affected products include ControlTalk versions of Lil Jamz™, Jamz™, Turbine™, Turbine Pro and Heartbeats™.

Hit the jump for another screen shot showing Apple’s full list of problematic Monster headphone models

To be honest, we haven’t heard all that much complaining from DROID X users running Android 2.2, but apparently Motorola has. In a forum post, Motorola listed several issues being experienced and reported by DROID X users who have upgraded their devices to Android 2.2. The list includes: stuck on Motorola logo after boot, random rebooting, Wi-Fi connection stability, Battery Manager “Force Close” error, media not playing, and music files cutting out early. Hit the jump for the full explanation and let us know if you’re seeing any of these issues.

If you have already upgraded to 2.2 for Droid X, you have found some new capabilities. Unfortunately, some owners also found new issues.  Here are some of the known issues raised by forums members, with some information about each. It is not intended to be a complete list at this time — there are many more fixes and improvements in the works. I’ll update this list as information becomes available.

• Stuck on Moto logo after reboot – this was tough on a few owners. Very sorry about that. A fix has been developed for this and should eliminate the problem. It will be distributed in a future software release. If you are still experiencing this issue, click here.
• Random rebooting – while there always seem to be new conditions that can cause an electronic device to panic, we do have improvements coming that address and eliminate identified panic states. They will be distributed in a future software release.
• WiFi connection and stability – improvements in WiFi have been developed, to address several problem areas. They will be distributed in a future software release.

• Battery Manager “force close” errors – under some circumstances, pressing the battery icon under Menu > Settings > Battery Manager results in a forced close error. A fix has been developed for this and should eliminate the problem. It will be distributed in a future software release.

• Media won’t play – includes “sorry the player does not support this type of audio file,” custom ringtone stop working, video won’t play, etc., until after a reboot. We believe we have identified the cause of these errors. A fix has been developed for this and should eliminate the problem. It will be distributed in a future software release.

• Music files cutting off the final four seconds or so – a solution has been developed. It will be distributed in a future software release.

At this time I don’t have information about when the next software update will be available — when I have it, I’ll share it here.

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Those of you trying to get some Internet stalking done may have noticed that “the Facebooks” are currently down. This is the social networking site’s second major outage in as many days. All we know for the time being is a DNS error message is received when trying to resolve facebook.com. We urge everyone to stay calm, as we’re sure this will be resolved soon. However… what are you going to do in the meantime?

UPDATE: The Book appears to be back up. We’ll post a link to Facebook’s technical explanation if provided.

UPDATE 2: Here is the explanation.

Here’s an interesting one… Search company Yahoo! has published a press release stating that analytics company comScore misreported their page view numbers for June of 2010. How far off were they? Only about a billion page views. comScore had reported Yahoo!’s page views were down 7.4% in June and Yahoo! is refuting the claim — saying by their numbers views were only down 4.7% (that’s better right?). Yahoo!’s statement read:

Due to the size of the error, Yahoo! is making the announcement today as comScore does not generally issue restatements of its published reports. [...] Yahoo! believes the factors that led to the error have been corrected and continues to have confidence in comScore data.

If you’re Yahoo! you want those one billion page views, and if you’re an analytics company you definitely don’t want to be off by a billion anythings. comScore has yet to release a statement.

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Palm confirmed on Thursday that the rollout of  webOS 1.4.5 has stalled after discovering a programming error that caused some PDK applications to crash. After releasing webOS 1.4.5 to O2 Germany and SFR in France, customers began reporting that their PDK-based applications, mostly games, were crashing. Palm halted the rollout of webOS 1.4.5, investigated the problem, and discovered that webOS 1.4.5 did not update a key system file, “/etc/fstab.” As a result, the “/media/internal drive” is viewed as read-only by PDK applications, a situation which causes the apps to throw an error when they require a storage location that is read and write-enabled, not read-only. Despite the presence of this error, Palm has decided not to delay the update any longer and is going to roll out webOS 1.4.5 in its current state. Palm confirmed that it is working on a fix but it will not be available until the next version of webOS is released. Application developers whose apps are affected by this bug are encouraged to re-write their apps to store game data in another location. Wow.

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Ruh roh, Shaggy. According to an unending stream of tips flowing into our inbox, iPhone / iPod touch activation servers just bit it, big time. Apparently Apple and AT&T underestimated the wave of Apple handset users dying for OS 3.0 and the swarm was just too much to handle. If you’re trying to reactivate your phone post 3.0 update, sit tight and things should be back online soon. Oh, the agony.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Ahh the Samsung Impression. It’s arguably the sexiest feature phone AT&T carries right now, with its 3.2-inch WQVGA AMOLED touchscreen, slide out QWERTY, 3 megapixel camera, HTML Web browser and plenty more. Specs aside however, the Impression appears to be the next victim in a still-forming line of Samsung handsets from AT&T stricken with severe bugs. First was the Epix, which was plagued with freezes until a patch fixed the random error and brought on uncontrollable crashes. Next up, the Samsung Impression. If a user enables T9 and then types the letter “I” followed by a space, the handset will crash immediately. “I” of course, happens to be a pretty common letter to be followed by a space. Now, we all know that every phone has bugs. All of them. The issue here is the severity of the bugs plaguing Samsung handsets that available from AT&T. We’re talking about consistent freezing and crashing here, not a random blip or glitch that is easy to pass over. We love the direction Samsung is headed lately on the hardware side of things, but we sincerely hope the combination of Samsung and AT&T doesn’t turn out to spell continued problems where quality control is concerned.

Thanks, Amir!

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Microsoft has allegedly sent out a notice to former employees (those who were recently laid off) to come back so they can pour a little bit of salt in their wounds. Apparently, human resources in Redmond made a little oopsie and overpaid severance for some ex-workers. According to the notice, the folks in question have two weeks to send a check or money order back to Microsoft to cover the overage. The error may have also caused underpayment of severance for other former employees. This isn’t shaping up so well for Microsoft and for those who are being forced to send in payments to correct an HR error. Imagine receiving news of your impending layoff and then being sent packing with your check, only to receive a notice later that effectively reads, “Our bad. Send some of that money back, please.” No official word from Microsoft as to when the error occurred and why.

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T-Mobile customers who have pre-bought the G1 may notice that their data connection suddenly stops working. D’oh! Don’t panic there is nothing wrong with your G1, this is a problem on T-Mobile’s end. Remember that free week of data that you all got when you pre-bought your G1? When that week is over, T-Mobile is turning off the free data and not turning on the paid data for your plan. A quick call to customer service will re-enable the data plan and fix the problem. You can also login to your account and manually add the data plan back on if you prefer to deal with a computer instead of a human. Nothing major, just a heads up for you all G1 owners.  We wouldn’t want your data to go belly up at an inopportune time and have you throw your G1 out the window.

[via Phandroid]

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