Tour's Trackball Issues Drive a 50% Return Rate

Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion unveiled a few months ago a new BlackBerry handset, the Tour, which was hailed by a lot of users and carriers around the world and which is already available for purchase in the US via Sprint and Verizon Wireless. However, the BlackBerry Tour came to the market with a trackball that seems to cause more problems than expected, the latest reports on the Internet show.

Apparently, a wide range of users out there have been experiencing issues with the trackball, which needs to be cleaned quite often. In case one does not pay enough attention to it, the trackball gets stuck, and the only thing that can be done is send the device back to the carrier. Thus, the return rate of Tour is reportedly placed somewhere in the 50 percent area, which doesn't sound too great, one should agree.

“We experienced a small percentage of early production BlackBerry Tour smartphones with trackball issues. As soon as the issue was identified, we worked closely with our partners at RIM to resolve the problem quickly. We recommend any customer experiencing issues with the trackball on their BlackBerry Tour smartphone visit a Sprint Service & Repair Center,” is what Sprint had to say on the matter, Engadget reports.

While Sprint apparently believes that the issue can be eliminated through a small increase in quality control costs (up to 3 percent), Verizon is reportedly very annoyed with the situation and plans on shifting its focus on support from the Blackberry Tour to the yet unannounced Motorola Android device, which is expected to be launched in the near future.

At the same time, it should be noted that RIM, which hasn't addressed this issue yet, it seems, plans to leave the trackball aside for its future devices, and equip them with an optical trackpad, which applies to the non-touchscreen handsets the phone maker will unveil in the future. This is not the first time RIM delivers handsets with certain issues to the market, yet we can only hope that it will stop doing so in the future.