PS4 hardware fault complaints mount as Foxconn intern blames sabotage

expertreviews.co.uk-siena -

Reports of launch-day PS4 consoles arriving with serious hardware problems continue to grow, with around a third of all Amazon customer reviews complaining of issues. A new report suggests these problems may be down to sabotage at the factory.

Sony has already admitted that a very small percentage, around 0.4 per cent, of PS4 consoles have manufacturing defects, but at the time of writing, 594 Amazon customer reviews are complaining of defects.

Amazon customers who purchased the stand-alone PS4 Launch Edition console pack have left one star reviews claiming that consoles have been received with damage or faults, including an error that has been dubbed the 'Pulsing Blue Light of Death' - following on from the 'Red Ring of Death' that plagued early-model Xbox 360 consoles some years ago. With 1,335 customers having left five star reviews and reporting no issues with their consoles, those disgruntled customers account for around a third of all Amazon reviews - far higher than would be expected with Sony's claimed 0.4 per cent failure rate.

One possible, though unconfirmed, explanation for the failure rate is sabotage. A poster claiming to be an intern at Foxconn, the company that makes PS4s for Sony, wrote that the consoles were badly assembled by interns at the factory in response to poor working conditions - accusations that have been levelled against Foxconn, which also makes Apple's iPhone 5S and iPad Air, before.

Neither Sony nor Foxconn has commented on the alleged intern's claims.

Launched late last week in the US, but not due to appear in the UK until the 29th of November, Sony's PS4 is based around a semi-custom accelerated processing unit (APU) developed by AMD. It shares the same instruction set as modern PCs, making it considerably more powerful than its predecessors. It's also proving very successful - Sony has said that more than a million units have been sold to customers in the first 24 hours following its release, despite only launching in the US and Canada so far.

Andoid Games