Adding insult to Sony Eri csson’s injurious bottom line, Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U shops (the UK’s largest mobile phone retailers) have halted sales of the SE’s Symbian-powered Satio handset after a high number of customer returns and complaints. A “software glitch” reportedly causes Sony Eri csson’s flagship device to power down when users try to access certain applications — unfortunately, the issue can’t be patched via an over-the-air update. A little digging into CPW dis cussion forums reveals multi ple complaints of freezes, crashes, under-performing batteries, and bizarre interface behavior. Both the Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U will off er “new phones” to customers fed up with their Satio. Richard Dorman, senior marketing manager at Sony Ericsson, concedes the issue and assures us that it should be sorted by Christmas. Until then, you can still purchase the handset directly from Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile… but really, why would you? The Satio’s not the only dubiously-speced 12 megapixel cameraphone on the market. [Thanks, ugotamesij]

Apple’s new Core i7-based iMac might be a performance monster, but it looks like the whole family’s having some problems getting out of the g ate: in addition to the previously-noted performance issues with the Core 2 Duo models, a quick glance a cross Apple’s support f orums and on other Mac boards around the web reveals that some machines are showing up DOA and / or with cracked screens. We’re a little more familiar with the DOA issue, since the new i7 we just bought doesn’t boot at all, but the cracked screen issue seems to be equally common and mostly affecting the bottom left cor ner, from what we can tell. Now, our review Core 2 Duo 27-inch iMac is perfectly fine, and Chris Ziegler’s new Core i7 machine doesn’t have any problems either, so these obviously aren’t universal issues, but if you’re about to stick one of these under the tree for someone it might be wise to do some surreptitious testing first.

Dozens of owners of Apple’s new 27-inch iMac are reporting performance issues ranging from sluggish Flash playback, erratic hard drive behavior and buggy operating system installations.

The most common complaint seems to revolve around poor Flash performance, whereas videos play back very choppily and appears to cause CPU spikes. The YouTube video below attempts to document the problem.

Some customers complaining in Apple’s support forums also claim there’s a bug forcing the hard drive to spin down, while others have complained their iMacs shipped with a corrupt Snow Leopard installation.

Apple began shipping the 27-inch iMac on Oct. 20. The all-in-one desktop costs $1,700 and includes a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

Having problems with your shiny new iMac, too? Report your issues in the comments below.

Via Engadget