Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and T-Mobile USA Inc. halted retail sales of Motorola Inc.’s best-selling Razr handset, after the vendor informed the carriers that a component glitch was cutting off calls as if the flip phone was closed.
T-Mobile USA halted sales last Tuesday and Cingular followed suit the next day in order to address the problem.
“At retail, it’s virtually impossible to tell which Razrs have the defective component,” said Peter Dobrow, spokesman for T-Mobile USA. “We’re targeting early next week to resume retail sales.”
How does a week of lost sales of the popular handset affect T-Mobile USA?
Dobrow sighed. “Obviously the Razr is one of our most popular handsets and we are currently not meeting our customers’ expectations. It’s too early to tell what the impact is on T-Mobile in terms of dollar sales.”
“I can already tell you,” Dobrow continued, “it’s not going to go on beyond next week because there’s already shipments of Razrs without the defective component either in our distribution channel right now, or soon to make it to our distribution channel by the end of this week. The defective component was present in a limited number of Razr shipments in the month of February only, as per information from Motorola. So we know that the Razrs shipped in March are without the defect.”
Motorola offered an e-mail statement on the matter, but did not provide a spokesperson to address questions about the situation.
“It appears to be a quality-control problem, not a design problem,” said Roger Entner, analyst at research firm Ovum. “So whoever manufactured this component fell asleep on the job. It’s an expensive hiccup, because Razr is one of the hottest-selling phones in the country. So it’s one week of lost sales. But it’s something that’s easily detected and fixed.”
