Earlier this week, Kaufman Brothers analyst, Shaw Wu, made waves when he asserted that Research In Motion’s highly anticipated BlackBerry PlayBook tablet could be delayed due to “battery issues.” Mr. Wu’s exact statement was as follows: “RIM needs to improve its relatively poor battery life of a few hours compared to 6 hours for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and 10 hours for [Apple's] iPad.” Today, RIM has fired back with a concrete statement of its own, claiming that the PlayBook battery issues Wu reports are nonexistent.

Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented. RIM is on track with its schedule to optimize the BlackBerry PlayBook’s battery life and looks forward to providing customers with a professional grade tablet that offers superior performance with comparable battery life.

There you have it. We would love for RIM to be a bit more forthcoming as to when — approximately — the device will be released, but we’ll just have to take this statement for now.

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We’ve just gotten wind of a vicious little rumor that we wanted to share. We’re hearing that Verizon Wireless will be slowly discontinuing the Motorola DROID 2 that it launched last month and will soon only be carrying the yet-to-be-launched DROID 2 World Edition. While the move makes complete sense — from a manufacturing and inventory perspective — it may rub those who ran out and purchased the original DROID 2, sans world capabilities, the wrong way (especially if they price it at $199). This is just a rumor for now, but we want to know what owners of the original DROID Duece think? If this comes to fruition, are you going to be upset?

Yesterday, Facebook acknowledged that their recent Android application update — version 1.3 — contained a bug that was draining handset batteries. The post looked like this:

Hi folks, a number of you have commented on seeing a battery drain on your device since installing the new Facebook for Android app. We have identified the bug that is causing this battery drain and are working on a fix now. As soon as the patch is ready, we will push out an update. Thanks for the quick feedback and for your patience as we get this fixed!

Today, the company has released an updated version of the software — version number 1.3.1 — that, according to a subsequent Facebook post, “includes a fix for the battery drain problem some of you were running into.” Hit the Android Market to install the update. Anyone experience unexpected battery drain after installing Facebook 1.3?

[Via Androinica]

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Because the advent of Second Life just isn’t frightening enough, Sony made it known quite some time ago that it would be jumping into the virtual world game with its PlayStation Home product. PS Home has been in the wild in closed beta phase for a while now but it clearly can’t do enough damage among the socially awkward masses that way. As such, PlayStation owners can look forward to an open beta phase beginning some time this month. What’s more, it is now looking like potential users won’t have to leave the house or even interact with anyone in order to obtain PS Home as rumor has it delivery may end up being via a firmware update or a simple PlayStation Store download. Fan-tastic. Those of you who do get sucked in, please at least try to open a window every now and again…

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