RIM just reached out to us with a statement regarding our post from this morning in which we reported that a big box retailer provided us with information surrounding BlackBerry PlayBook sales and returns. RIM’s response is as follows:

The source of the reported comment is anonymous and unknown to RIM, but the comment is certainly inconsistent with the positive feedback we have received from our main retail partners. As previously indicated, RIM will provide a business update on BlackBerry PlayBook results on June 16.

For reference, here is a public statement recently offered by Best Buy:

“Best Buy has had great success selling BlackBerry smartphones in North America, so our sales expectations for the BlackBerry PlayBook were very high. To date, we have far exceeded those expectations and we’re finding that customers are even more interested in purchasing once they’ve tested the PlayBook in the store.”

While we appreciate RIM’s comment and we have no doubt that PlayBook sales at Best Buy have exceeded expectations, we stand by our source and our story from earlier today.

According to a trusted source from a major big box retailer, sales of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook have fallen far short of expectations. In addition, we’re told that the PlayBook is being returned at a higher pace than the Motorola XOOM. According to our source, PlayBook sales at this particular retailer missed internal sales targets by more than 90%. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the PlayBook is “being returned at a much higher rate than the XOOM,” which has a very high return rate itself at 7% according to our source. RIM launched its PlayBook tablet on April 19th and sales have been fairly impressive so far according to some analysts. Our source is singing a different tune, however, so let’s hope other major retailers are having better luck with the PlayBook. We’re rooting for RIM, but maybe amateur hour isn’t over yet?

UPDATE: RIM supplied BGR with an official statement in response to this post.

Following a string of misguided reports, Samsung on Thursday issued a comment suggesting that recent claims of high Galaxy Tab return rates are wildly misguided. ITG on Monday released the findings of a wonderfully unscientific study that claimed 15% of Galaxy Tab buyers in the U.S. returned the Android tablet following their purchases. The report went on to compare that astronomical figure to a 2% return rate for Apple’s iPad — though ITG only looked at iPad sales from a single third-party vendor: Verizon Wireless. In any event, Samsung today issued a statement on its Samsung Tomorrow blog. “ The return rate of the Galaxy Tab in the US as claimed by an North American market research firm is incorrect,” the company said. “According to Samsung Electronics Mobile Communications Business the return rate is below 2 percent.” Samsung did not address earlier claims that the Galaxy Tab’s sell-out rate was very poor, though the basis of those claims turned out to be a misquote of a Samsung executive’s statement during the company’s recent earnings call.

[Via Mobile News]

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Acting as armed guards protecting the honor of the Queen, tech blogs and press across the Internet exploded in unison yesterday in an effort to right wrongs committed against the magical, and apparently peerless iPad. A report on Monday suggested that Android tablets — namely the Samsung Galaxy Tab — had finally put a dent in the iPad’s consumer tablet market share, causing it to drop from 96% to 77% last quarter. The firm issuing the report was immediately ambushed by the iPad army… those are shipments, not sales to end users, it cried. Of course Strategy Analytics, the firm behind the report, was indeed comparing apples to apples, of course, using Android tablet shipments as well as iPad shipments in its report.

As it turns out, however, Apple fans may have stumbled upon a more legitimate claim against Strategy Analytics’ report. Another study, this time conducted by ITG Investment Research, claims that the Galaxy Tab has an unusually high return rate. This, coupled with a vague comment from a Samsung executive, could mean that Samsung’s sell-out and retention figures for the Galaxy Tab are less than stellar. ITG Investment Research used data collected from almost 6,000 U.S. retailers from November through mid-January to determine that the Galaxy Tab has a high return rate.

The study found that 15% of Tabs purchased in the U.S. were ultimately returned. The only frame of reference offered by ITG’s study, as reported by the New York Post, is that only 2% of iPads sold through Verizon Wireless stores have been returned. In other words, these findings are based on sales of less than 18% of global Galaxy Tab shipments and iPads sold only by Verizon. Verizon Wireless is hardly thought to have received the bulk of the 7.3 million iPads Apple shipped last quarter, but 2% is of course an impressive return rate nonetheless. ITG also neglects to give any indication of the Galaxy Tab’s performance in markets outside the U.S., where an estimated 1.65 million out of Samsung’s 2 million Galaxy Tabs were shipped.

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Here’s the skinny on this situation… We had heard various return rates on the Verizon BlackBerry Storm from three (actually four, but we’ll discount the last one) extremely credible sources of ours. These ranged from 35-50% in some markets/regions. That is an absurdly high figure, folks. While we trust our sources, we wanted to continue to dig until we wrote up a post on it here. We let a publication quote us on that, because that is what we had heard. No harm, no foul.  But we weren’t going to post on it here until we had 100% confirmed it.

Verizon Wireless hit us up and here’s what a Verizon Wireless official had to say: “The Storm has the lowest return rate of any of our PDAs and at this point in its life cycle, it has the lowest return rate of any PDA we currently sell.”

We’ll let you guys do all the talking. Own a Storm? Happy with it? Returned it? Know friends that are happy/returned theirs? Hit us up so we can get some good feedback and your thoughts on this.