Author Topic: Has mass production started?  (Read 23284 times)

SimonL

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Has mass production started?
« on: January 03, 2018, 09:36:58 am »
Has anyone heard if mass production has started yet? I believe the plan was for it to start on 1st January but I’ve not heard anything to confirm this.

Varti

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Has mass production started?
« Reply #1 on: January 03, 2018, 09:48:40 am »
Quote from: SimonL
Has anyone heard if mass production has started yet? I believe the plan was for it to start on 1st January but I’ve not heard anything to confirm this.
Yes, according to this update they should already have started the production, though I have not found any recent confirmation for this:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-p...374#/updates/36

It would be unfortunate if they have missed this deadline, since in this case they won't have any final revision of the device on show during the CES.

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SimonL

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Has mass production started?
« Reply #2 on: January 03, 2018, 09:59:43 am »
Quote from: Varti
Quote from: SimonL
Has anyone heard if mass production has started yet? I believe the plan was for it to start on 1st January but I’ve not heard anything to confirm this.
Yes, according to this update they should already have started the production, though I have not found any recent confirmation for this:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-p...374#/updates/36

It would be unfortunate if they have missed this deadline, since in this case they won't have any final revision of the device on show during the CES.

Varti

Fingers crossed that they’re well into it then, and that we’ll get our units soon!

Georgius

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« Reply #3 on: January 04, 2018, 05:25:45 am »
well, as Czech keyboard is not designed yet, I do not believe too much for January deliveries ... :-(

Varti

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« Reply #4 on: January 04, 2018, 05:36:40 am »
Quote from: Georgius
well, as Czech keyboard is not designed yet, I do not believe too much for January deliveries ... :-(
That's interesting, was this news from an official comment from Planet?
It might be that just not all keyboards are ready, so they'll for now start shipping only the units that have a ready layout.

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Georgius

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« Reply #6 on: January 04, 2018, 06:56:39 am »
Quote from: Varti
Quote from: Georgius
well, as Czech keyboard is not designed yet, I do not believe too much for January deliveries ... :-(
That's interesting, was this news from an official comment from Planet?
No, this is not the official statement, so I presume they probably start shipping on first-comes first-serves basis (I backed them in spring 2017) and start with "ready" keyboards. I do not know how much work/delay is in defining the keys on HW  

SimonL

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« Reply #7 on: January 04, 2018, 07:01:27 am »
Quote from: jutleys
I am sure they said production will start on 7th jan

The most recent update stated that the mass production cycle would run from 1st to 7th January. That was back in November, however, and all seems to have gone quiet. It would be good to hear something official at some point to say that production has indeed commenced, but my concern would be that Planet's lack of updates would suggest that not everything is going to plan.

ArchiMark

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« Reply #8 on: January 04, 2018, 11:09:18 am »
From reading posts over at the Pyra handheld forum about all the trials and tribulations getting PCB boards, RAM, cases, keyboards, etc, all debugged and working just right, I would guess the Planet folks are probably crazy busy doing QC work to make sure all turns out well for us an them...

As I just ordered yesterday I assume my unit won't be part of the first batch to be shipped. So, setting my expectations accordingly.

Can't wait to get it though...

 

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Varti

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« Reply #9 on: January 04, 2018, 11:22:41 am »
Quote from: ArchiMark
From reading posts over at the Pyra handheld forum about all the trials and tribulations getting PCB boards, RAM, cases, keyboards, etc, all debugged and working just right, I would guess the Planet folks are probably crazy busy doing QC work to make sure all turns out well for us an them...
I also believe that they are probably not sleeping at all these days, so that they can meet the CES deadline

Quote
As I just ordered yesterday I assume my unit won't be part of the first batch to be shipped. So, setting my expectations accordingly.

Can't wait to get it though...
I have read that they'll produce an initial batch of 3000 units, and at the moment there are 3339 backers on Indiegogo, though not everyone has backed for a Gemini. There's a 25$ perk for a t-shirt only, for example, and many have ordered the front camera which is a separate perk, no idea if indiegogo is counting the latter as separate backers... so maybe me and you will be included in this first batch. Otherwise, it would be more fair that they ship them on a first come-first serve basis.

Varti
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depscribe

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« Reply #10 on: January 04, 2018, 03:04:29 pm »
Quote from: Varti
I have read that they'll produce an initial batch of 3000 units, and at the moment there are 3339 backers on Indiegogo, though not everyone has backed for a Gemini. There's a 25$ perk for a t-shirt only, for example, and many have ordered the front camera which is a separate perk, no idea if indiegogo is counting the latter as separate backers... so maybe me and you will be included in this first batch. Otherwise, it would be more fair that they ship them on a first come-first serve basis.

Doing a quick check, I see 764 WiFi plus 4G; 393 WiFi only; 372 "all in"; 7 of the gold-plated ones; and 4 of the 5-packs, or 20 units. Which totals 1556 units. Now, we need to figure at least 100 will be put out for review and sales samples, but even if it is far more than that it would likely total less than 2000. So all of us who have ordered them at this point should get them from the first batch, no?

Which is more than we knew the last time I can remember this kind of salivating interest: in late 1990, when we were all yearning to get our hot little hands on the GA release of OS/2 2.0. The rumors were crazy (even among IBM employees; I lived near Armonk so I knew a great many of them). The semi-official discussion page was, of all places, on the old Prodigy online service (a joint venture between IBM and, of all companies, Sears and Roebuck, headquartered two blocks from my house), and no tea-leaf reading of celebrity news in the tabloids equalled the speculation on that forum!

(Steve Ballmer at Microsoft said he would "eat a CD if OS/2 ships in 1990." It did, technically, to a couple hundred business clients, but Ballmer did not, as far as we know, eat the CD, though if he did it would explain a lot. Meanwhile, those of us awaiting shipment, many of whom were members of something called "Team OS/2," talked up the nonexistent product and worshipped Lee Reiswig, head of IBM Personal Software Products and nicknamed "The Blue Ninja." And it was the first time most of us ever heard the acronym FUD -- fear, uncertainty, and doubt -- which was what Microsoft, with its puny Windows 3.0 delayed and delayed and delayed, was spreading about our glorious OS/2.)

Every time it got delayed by a few days there would be great anguish and the rumor that IBM had scrapped OS/2 -- which is, actually, the kind of thing IBM would do (ask the XYQuest people. IBM partnered with XYQuest, which had produced the very popular XYWrite, to create "Signature," a GUI version of the program, then discontinued it three days after launch; IBM survived but XYQuest didn't) -- but by late January the new OS/2 had been seen in the wild, though no stores were stocking it. I finally went knocking from door to door at various IBM buildings in and around Armonk and found one lone copy, which had been given to some department that had no interest in it, and a guy who sold it to me for full retail price, in cash, which I'm sure he kept.

There's a moral to the story, but I'm not sure what it is unless it's that we should be glad that the Gemini isn't an IBM product!

(And to nudge this post back onto topic, sort of, I did ultimately get OS/2 to run on a tiny computer, a Zeos Contenda with a 386/25 chip and 4 megs of RAM. Never could get it installed on the Toshiba Libretto, though, because there was no driver for a PCMCIA floppy on the install disk. So the Libretto was a Linux machine -- even so, I had to pull the hard drive and do the install on another machine.)

I'll be quiet now.
« Last Edit: January 04, 2018, 03:22:48 pm by depscribe »
dep

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andrewl

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« Reply #11 on: January 04, 2018, 03:26:49 pm »
I've been involved as a backer in five new products via crowdfunding websites. Fortunately all of them were successful, but they all delivered months  or in once case more than a year after the first estimated shipping date.

I will only back what I can afford to lose, and I am prepared to end up with nothing if it comes to that but this project does feel very different from Vega+ so I am optimistic.

jutleys

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« Reply #12 on: January 04, 2018, 04:09:18 pm »
Some of us have ordered x2 4g wifi units so we have to take count for that too.

depscribe

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« Reply #13 on: January 04, 2018, 04:29:55 pm »
Quote from: jutleys
Some of us have ordered x2 4g wifi units so we have to take count for that too.

I'm thinking that the "claimed" means the number of units, so someone buying two ought to tick the number up by 2. Which is to say thast the total number of backers number is kind of useless. I could be wrong.
dep

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Varti

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« Reply #14 on: January 04, 2018, 07:02:24 pm »
Quote from: depscribe
Doing a quick check, I see 764 WiFi plus 4G; 393 WiFi only; 372 "all in"; 7 of the gold-plated ones; and 4 of the 5-packs, or 20 units. Which totals 1556 units. Now, we need to figure at least 100 will be put out for review and sales samples, but even if it is far more than that it would likely total less than 2000. So all of us who have ordered them at this point should get them from the first batch, no?
Thanks for checking this, I'm now confident I'll receive my unit now, save for last-minute manufacturing issues.

Quote
Which is more than we knew the last time I can remember this kind of salivating interest: (...)
That was an interesting read. I have never tried OS/2 myself, in 1990 we had a family trip to Muenchen, Germany, to buy a Commodore Amiga 500, and that was our main computer at home until we bought a 486 running (cough) MSDOS. A friend of mine though is a fan of OS/2 and I remember he showed me eComStation on his laptop some years ago. I have heard about ArcaOS too, which seems to continue the OS/2 legacy.

Quote from: andrewl
I will only back what I can afford to lose, and I am prepared to end up with nothing if it comes to that but this project does feel very different from Vega+ so I am optimistic.
Same here. I hope that every backer understands that we are actually financing a project, rather than buying a product. I'm anyway also optimistic, I have followed this campaign closely and everything has progressed as I was expecting.

Varti
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