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Last week Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile pulled Motorola's slim RAZR cell phones when the manufacturer informed them of a bug that cut off callers or shut down the phones when users flipped them open. The popular handsets have slowly started reappearing on store shelves this week.

Cingular received new RAZRs from Motorola on Friday and began shipping the phones to stores on Monday, while T-Mobile expects to start offering the handsets soon again as well.

Motorola traced the bug to a faulty component in a bad batch of RAZRs shipped to operators between January 18th and February 28th. And since it only affected GSM editions of the cell phone, Verizon Wireless - a CDMA operator - customers weren't affected.

Alan Buddendeck, a spokesman for Motorola, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the RAZR would be "widely and readily available...Within a matter of days."

That’s pretty optimistic, according to Bear Stearns. RCR reports the equity research firm predicts RAZR-supply trouble will last until the end of the month—when Motorola is expected to return fixed batches of pulled RAZRs to carriers.

Meanwhile, both Cingular and T-Mobile's Web sites show the Motorola cell phones as out of stock (see bottom image from blog enadget).

More than 12 million RAZR cell phones have shipped since their introduction in 2004.