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Originally Posted by robko
No idea and they aren't likely to release #. But lets play a theoretical game. Let's assume everyone here that posts represents 99 that don't (for easy figuring). And for easy figuring assume 100 people on here have posted about a bricked Kobo (way high I think). And let's assume that Kobo has sold 500,000 devices worldswide. That would mean 2% of users had a problem. It would seriously suck to be one of those with the issue and I would curse a bricked Kobo, but I think the numbers are why Taming is assuming it's not widespread bricking.
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Also take into consideration that Kobo pulled the firware upgrade pretty quickly. I have a workmate that bought a KT for his wife because I liked and used mine so much (walking to work - yes I walk and read along the way, coffee break, lunch break, walking home from work). I had told him about the upgrade and he was keen on doing it but by Friday hadn't yet gotten around to it, which was a good thing for him. So of those 500,000... I'd say, what, maybe... maybe half upgraded before it was pulled. I can't say for sure, only Kobo would know how many hits they got from people trying to upgrade before they put back the old firmware.
Did some Googling... interesting stats:
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The Kobo e-reading platform has become the dominant player in Canada, with research firm Ipsos Reid estimating that Kobo e-readers represented 46% of the Canadian market as of January 2012.[18]
As of spring 2012, Kobo has 50% of the market share in France.
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July 10, 2012 - Kobo Inc., a global leader in eReading, and its parent company Rakuten, the world’s third-largest e-commerce company, today announced that the Kobo Touch™ is selling like hot-cakes in Japan. Since the companies began offering the award-winning Kobo Touch for pre-order on July 2, the eReader has been the top selling product among the over 100,000,000 products available on Rakuten’s supermall.
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January 5, 2012 - Kobo, a global leader in eReading with over 5 million users worldwide, today revealed record sales for the holiday season. This year the Kobo eReader was a very popular gift with people around the world receiving new Kobo Touch, Kobo Vox eReader and Kobo Wifi devices, driving company sales to a record high.
Kobo saw strong momentum with a 10X increase in new customers from the company’s pre-holiday period, and hundreds of thousands of devices were activated each day since Christmas Eve,
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Sooo... that 500,000 is probably a pretty low number... How many actually upgrade right away and how many had problems we'll never know.
I also found this:
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Kobo has just announced that they’ve scored a new partner in their plans to expand into the European ebook market. The Mondadori Group, publisher of magazines and books (as well as one of the large media retailers in Italy), is going to carry an Italian language version of the Kobo Touch this fall.
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For those not wanting to do the math, even at a low 500,000 - 2% of those affected would be 10,000 customers. That's a lot of unhappy people telling their friends what a POS a kobo is, each of those friends tells 2 of their friends not to buy a Kobo... you now have 10,000 unhappy people and another 30,000 avoiding buying a kobo which translates into $4,170,000 in lost device sales and another $239,700 lost in just each of those people not buying 1 book.