14 DAY TRIAL // Logitech, like any other company, knows it has to avoid any faux-pas, whether big or small, but it failed to go through this year's holidays without making a blunder.
Everyone makes mistakes once in a while and it was Logitech's bad luck that it ended up committing its own during Christmas.
Then again, one could argue that the blunder itself was made earlier, when the Revue Google TV set-top boxes were built and loaded with the required software.
Still, the consequences emerged just a few days ago, when some customers tried to authenticate their Revues but failed.
The company's forums quickly saw users posting complaints and notices.
Fortunately, it didn't take Logitech overly long to identify the problem.
Unfortunately, it will take quite a bit for affected users to see their money's worth.
The conclusion reached by the company is that the small percentage of unlucky users ended up with Revues whose firmware is corrupted beyond repair.
“There appears to be corrupted firmware on some of the recently manufactured Revues which is causing the Authentication error,” said Logitech Senior Product Manager Peter McColgan on the forums.
“There is nothing that you can do to fix this and nothing we can do except to replace your Revue via the RMA process. You always have the option of returning to the retailer and exchanging for another Revue or getting a refund. We believe that only a relatively small % of recently manufactured Revues are affected.”
Ironically, Logitech already said that, besides supporting those few customers who did buy a Revue, it was going to drop the idea altogether.
After making too many of these set-top boxes, it set a price that made many customers look for alternatives.
It didn't help that the Google TV service itself proved underwhelming enough that Intel reconsidered its Smart TV plans.