The story goes like this: A TownHall Investment Research director was quoted by Barron’s as saying that Sprint is seeing almost a 50% return rate on the BlackBerry Tour primarily because of trackball issues. We ran a simple poll where 36% of participants said they have returned a BlackBerry Tour because of trackball problems and another 16% have returned the phone for other reasons – that’s a 52% return ratio btw. But a PR firm just sent us a little note stating that both Verizon and Sprint are calling bullshit (our words, not theirs) on the claim.

I thought you would be interested to see that both Sprint and Verizon Wireless have refuted the unsubstantiated comments made by TownHall Investment Research. We would appreciate it if you would also consider updating your story as soon as possible given that both Sprint and Verizon Wireless have strongly refuted TownHall’s claims about the carriers’ return rates.

It’s not surprising that the companies that profit off of these handsets would publicly refute damaging statistics. But the fact remains that if you search the forums at CrackBerry, HowardForums, or others, a lot of users are having tackball problems. RIM has used the trackball with what I guess could be called moderate success over the last few generations, but perhaps this is why the new models will have trackpads instead.

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