Oops! Looks like someone at LG got into the happy juice before we ushered in the new year, because the LG LX260 Rumor — available from Sprint — has been pulled for store shelves for a very specific issue. You see, if a customer happens to “accidentally” hits a certain keypress sequence during startup, it can “trigger a complete erasure of the phone’s firmware.” And this is a known issue.

The reason why the phone wants to chuck the firmware out the window is that the LG Rumor was shipping with a specific debugging menu that was “intended for LG engineers to work on the device during development.” Of course, this menu was supposed to be removed before they shipped the QWERTY-fied handset to the public. The debugging menu can only be accessed during startup, so you should probably avoid touching anything until the phone is completely up and running (about 30 seconds).

The kicker is that once the debugging menu has done its firmware erasure thing, it cannot be fixed by Sprint customer service and will need to be shipped back to the factory. Ouch!