Wow.

Yahoo Finance has posted “A Grinch’s Christmas Guide”, which aims to help holiday shoppers avoid bad purchases. In it, Anne Kadet finds ways to make products that are probably good look bad by complaining about repair costs and procedures.

The most jarring bit of the story is her description of the Playstation 3 and its “glued-shut” “remote control”. Kadet mentions nowhere that it is possible to recharge the controller in any capacity, and goes so far as to claim that when your controller is out of juice you need to pony up $55 for a new one.

It’s all fun and games until the battery dies. Unlike its competitors, which use replaceable AA batteries, the PS3′s remote control is glued shut. When the battery goes, Sony customers have to blow $55 on a new controller.

I really hope that she’s talking about the fact that all rechargeable batteries go bad and stop charging eventually, but the way she words it is very misleading and will likely dissuade many consumers from getting a Playstation 3. The fact that she goes on to review other products based on their repair costs, rather than the quality of the product, shows a real sense of close-to-deadline-desperation.

By the way, the PS3′s controller is not “glued shut” in any way, shape or form. It’s screwed shut, and easily disassembled if you eventually do need to put a new battery in it. A quick Google search returned plenty of resources to purchase batteries for SixAxis and DualShock 3 controllers, and the PS3 manual itself shows you how to disassemble the controller!

Yahoo needs to give this woman a lesson in fact-checking before publishing a story. Who calls them “remote controls” anyway?

Via: Destructoid