Pandora News, dated 25th January 2010.

Quote from EvilDragon:

Nope, we’re not playing Lemmings, but I guess a lot of you wanted to know what happened to those cases.

Well, we too wanted to know – the last status update we had was that they were shipping on January 15th and therefore we assumed the cases should have arrived last week.
Unfortunately, Fatih had business to do in Dubai… and he is the only one the Chinese actually do talk to (except for if they encounter any problems, then they also send a mail to Michael. But they didn’t do that).

So we didn’t know until he returned a few days ago that the cases hadn’t been shipped yet, they were still working and tweaking as they really wanted to make sure this will be the last case they need to send to us before we start the mass production.

We’re still trying to find out the complete story of what happened and why there was another delay. A friend of Fatih (who can speak chinese) will help us here, as communication with them isn’t easy, and there might even have been some misunderstandings, etc.

Whoever does think that that company is a small, cheap company that only tries to rip us off:

Nope, that’s definately not true. Fatih has been working with them since years. Also, they created some other parts for the Pandora which have been finished long ago and didn’t make any problems. It just seems the case was much more complex than they had thought.

Some of their other customers are Sanyo and Toyota and they have been established 1998, so one thing we know: They are reliable… but (as it is the case with many chinese companies): They do need some time to finish it off.

So, rest assured, the cases aren’t screwed, we just don’t know yet when exactly they will arrive. We have been promised they will ship enough mass produced cases before the chinese new year. I leave it to you whether you want to believe it or not – I just will pray it will be true.

So much for the cae situation. I hope you can now understand why we chose that company. Believe us, it’s a pretty annoying feeling having everything setup for mass assembly and then wait in anticipation for the cases.

Oh, I have one more information that will probably make second batchers happy: We already ordered the parts for the second batch to decrease the waiting time.

Finally, some small OS informations:
* We got a new WiFi driver, thanks to Palm 🙂 We’ll need to test it out more, but it should work better than the one we have.
* pmenu is finally working fine in the image, so we have an almost completely working image (for a first release) ready.
* We also did a quick try with the Ubuntu netbook-launcher-efl.
It compiled and worked nicely. Only the icons were missing, but that’s because it uses the Human icons from Ubuntu which we haven’t installed yet. The nice thing about it is that it does support finger scrolling. It might not make it into the first release, but I doubt it will take long until it will be included into an update. I personally prefer XFCE4 and pmenu though 🙂

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=152