If you're looking for Cingular's new Samsung Sync music phone in stores today, well, wait until tomorrow. Cingular had to recall all (yes, all) of the phones distributed to stores because of a manufacturing bug that made them unable to play any protected music - a big bummer for a phone being promoted in cooperation with Napster and Yahoo. Fortunately, Cingular did the right thing: they discovered the bug before phones were supposed to go on sale, and immediately shipped out new phones with fixed firmware. They could have fixed the bug over the air (as they did on my sample phone), but as phones aren't supposed to be in peoples' hands yet, they decided it would just be easier to replace all the units.

"We have among the most rigorous testing processes in the industry," said Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel. "As sometimes happens, processes aren't perfect. We found this flaw in the device, we will move to fix it, and we will use it as a learning experience." I see this as reason to celebrate. Bugs happen. Cingular admitted there was a bug, moved fast to fix it, and will be putting working phones in people's hands just 24 hours later than scheduled. In an industry where too many companies try to hide bugs rather than fix them, this is good work.