If they sell 25k to 50k with a possibility of a .1% possible fault percentage caused by manufacturing, packaging and shipping then you're looking at a total of 25 to 50 possible faulty units: . .1% is a great ratio considering the fact that this is made behind the back of Nintendo (this is close to many official products). So to be more reasonable to this situation let's say 2% are faulty (that's a 2% chance you will get one of these faulty units). That is 500 to 1000 faulty units. That is just in the range of stuff that you can expect to have issues. There isn't an actual issue with the gear until the fault percentage get to about 10% or greater. You were just unlucky (or lucky however you want to look at it). Mine works fine as does everyone else's. At least it's not like the DS-X where they had for a moment 90% of there units shipped out faulty. Also you have the same chance or greater on getting a faulty hard drive or piece of hardware for your computer. Trust me I had one time I was going 3 out of 4 hard drives I had were bad on receiving them. I just also want to say my numbers aren't official; I just want to shine some light on your problem so you know why you got a bad R4. Better luck next time. Also if you're super desperate you can always use duct tape, which fixes everything.
so that's a very long way of saying you like to play with imaginary numbers?
while we're making up numbers let's pick a sample we can guess at more closely. How many of these were given away for review at DS 'backup/release' sites? Probably 10-20, and 20 is probably very generous. at least one of those was defective (sinkhead's) so the numbers could be looking more like 5-10%. Or if another tester was bad, the percentage could be a great deal worse.