It’s been a rough week for struggling handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson, with issues affecting two of its flagship devices in the UK.

Earlier in the week high street retailers the Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U pulled the Symbian S60-based Satio device from sale after customers began returning the device due to a software issue when using certain applications.

Operators Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3 and O2 are still selling the device, and there is some speculation that those carriers which put their own user interface on the handsets – Orange and Vodafone – are not seeing the problem. This suggests that the bug may be in Sony Ericsson’s own UI layer.

Sony Ericsson said that only a “small number” of consumers have experienced software issues and the company is working quickly to solve the problem.

Then in the last couple of days, Sony Ericsson’s Aino device, which runs the company’s in house developer OS, was also flagged up with software issues affecting the touchscreen interface. The Aino is still on sale in the UK and again, Sony Ericsson claims “only a very small number of handsets” are affected.