Back to the original post, sounds like a coincidence to me. I don't think removing the tab had anything to do with the phone not recognizing the battery. Just two bad things happening around the same time.
Back to the tab....I've had them in various electronic gizmos since the 1970's from keyboards to electronic football games. The original simon may have had one too. BUT, NONE of them had any writing on them. At the time, there was simply no other obvious function for the tab but to remove the batteries once inserted.
I did, however, find that many times relatives would have insterted batteries in their toys and then carefully placed the (usually red-colored and velvet like) tab back on top of the batteries. Not much good at that point!
In the age of lithium-ion backup batteries and coin batteries in certain devices, it is common to have tabs which are removed prior to using the device, and this is where the confusion comes in.
Now that there are tabs which have to be removed on certain devices, it's easy to see why someone would think to remove a tab in their phone that had the word "Pull" written on it.
Making the tab red or burgandy and out of some cloth material with NO words written on it would have clearly been a better, retro design!
