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Craig here, I know some of you must be choking for news at the moment, so I thought I'd write another status update for you.
As you may be aware, in terms of the economy there could not be a worse time to be building the worlds first community driven
hand held device;
No credit on parts, banks who say 'no thanks' to your 4000 orders, long lead times on parts which only a few months ago were
plentiful, currency collapses and lots more.
But we prevail, the project must go on!
One of the saving graces of this project is of course you guys - the community, thanks to you we have no debts, continuing
support and a ready and willing user base. We are very aware of how lucky this situation is - especially in the current climate,
if we had done this with a loan from a bank we are well aware the loan would have been called in by now and the project canceled.
And it is your support which is making us try to make the Pandora as perfect as it can possibly be. I know some of you want us to
just release it already, some of you hackers would not care if it had flaws, but as some of you will remember the whole point of
the Pandora was to not make the mistakes of previous open consoles.
On that note I'm pleased to say next weekend we will be building the first fully working Pandora with controls and keyboard and
making some videos of it for you to see - this does not mean the work is finished - there is bound to be something which needs
adjusting, but it is a major near final milestone.
Also we know some of you are frustrated by the slow refund and reorder process - believe me so are we - this situation could not
be more of a nightmare for us especially as we had no idea it would happen, it's a good thing we now have a bank who understands
this project and supports us with it.
Those of you who are angry about the situation please understand that what happened was not our choice, someone who was clueless
to the project saw our bank balance, paniced without speaking to us, and set the wheels in motion for a pointless refund process.
Those of you who might think we could discuss this like adults with the bank in question are very mistaken - you may as well try
to talk to a brick wall, the whole banking world is in panic mode and we are small fry to them.
But even after all this we are still working away, finding routes around the problems all with one goal still in mind - making the
best and most powerful handheld ever.
As for new things to see some of you might like this render of the case top we went with:
It addresses the boxyness of the case which some of you didn't like, making the Pandora slimmer and more rounded, this is the
design we will be going with unless a major flaw is found.
On another note, those of you emailing asking if there will be any space for new orders after the refund process is complete I
can say there will be some available - I will post information when you can place a new order.
As for a shipping date - until we get the final delivery dates for some parts we still can't give an accurate time line but we
are working as hard as we can for it to happen as SOON AS POSSIBLE, it may be comforting for you to know another ~15 dev kits
went out to some of the best developers on the scene in the last few weeks who are furiously working on software as we speak.
One of the main problems with production is that parts are not available as easily as they were a few months ago - companies are
not keeping stock and only manufacturing to order, another pitfall of the global economy right now.
In slightly better news it's possible we might be able to ship some units reasonably soon to those of you who are more the hacker
type, these units may come without a battery and with a beta OS installed, the battery could be sent on at a later date at the
postage cost.
I hope to have more news for you soon.
