PowerManagementUnit

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  • Editorial: bugs on unreleased phones don't matter (update: Motorola says phones will 'ship as scheduled')

    by 
    Chris Ziegler
    Chris Ziegler
    01.26.2011

    There's a story going around today about an alleged problem in the power management unit affecting Motorola's first two dual-core smartphones -- AT&T's Atrix 4G and Verizon's Droid Bionic -- that leads to a hodgepodge of issues: overheating, weird RF fluctuation, the list goes on. Sounds like a tragedy in the making, doesn't it? Worst yet, the PMU problem is said to be a "major unfixable flaw that will plaque [sic] it forever." Bummer! But let's back up and consider the facts here. First, as best we can tell, the sources are two posters in a HowardForums thread, one of which doesn't even have the information firsthand -- he was allegedly given the news "by someone who is testing the devices." Furthermore, there's really no such thing as an "unfixable" bug; you might need to peel away several layers of software and hardware to fix an issue depending on how fundamental the flaw turns out to be, but engineers have proven time and time again that "unfixable" isn't really in their vocabulary (white paint aside, of course).