Latest updates on Indiegogo

[maki.jouni]

new updat on the other side....

[tigas]

Although the perks have been produced, the final 9% of Cosmos are still awaiting the clearing process or parts for the units to pass quality control at the factory. If you are in this final 9% of backers still waiting for your Cosmo perk, we are again incredibly sorry for this delay and please be assured that we will be pushing as hard as we have always done with the factory to get your unit to you. Any new parts required for these Cosmo units have been ordered with the latest production run which is underway.

(bolded mine)

I just hope Planet remembers that they're expected to fullfill all perks before the product being available to the general public. I don't know if that's a rule on Indiegogo, but there was a case where a set of playing cards on Kickstarter didn't fullfill all their backers, started selling them on Amazon, and got prosecuted. Or maybe I'm just grumpy, since my contribution has been locked since January.

[Daniel W]

Right now, I'm mainly hoping Planet Computers and its staff manages to stay alive. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't expect to hear anything from them until the "during March" firmware becomes available (in April, I'd guess). However, as the fifteen days (as of now) since Update #47, in COVID time, is quite a while, any sign of life from them, if only to confirm they're still there, would be nice. Has anyone heard from them after March 6, please share here.

[ArchiMark]

Right now, I'm mainly hoping Planet Computers and its staff manages to stay alive. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't expect to hear anything from them until the "during March" firmware becomes available (in April, I'd guess). However, as the fifteen days (as of now) since Update #47, in COVID time, is quite a while, any sign of life from them, if only to confirm they're still there, would be nice. Has anyone heard from them after March 6, please share here.

Yes, indeed.....survival is foremost right now.

I emailed them on 3/10 and received a reply on 3/13.

So, know at least one person was alive as of 3/13.

[Daniel W]

So, know at least one person was alive as of 3/13.

Good to know. Thank you. We can probably presume the company as such was operating somewhat nominally at that date. If a significant number of employees would get ill, I suspect they'd close the office and, thus, wouldn't be replying to support e-mail at all, but that's me guessing.

[Zarhan]

At least they are still posting on Twitter (on 20th of March)

https://twitter.com/planetcom2017

[ArchiMark]

At least they are still posting on Twitter (on 20th of March)

https://twitter.com/planetcom2017

Thanks for sharing the link....

Interesting to see EPOC running on Cosmo.....wonder how that's done?

[Daniel W]

Interesting to see EPOC running on Cosmo.....wonder how that's done?

Well, Ninji thought it would be neat, so he whipped together an emuator:
http://wuffs.org/blog/building-a-psion-emulator
It's slow and clunky at the moment, so more a proof of concept than anything really useful. Still very neat though.

If you want a (really slow) peek, he even made it run in a browser:
https://wuffs.org/WindEmu/index.html
I tried it in Firefox (68.6) on the Cosmo. Typing what's below took me about ten minutes. Still cool.
 [ Invalid Attachment ]
While the emulator reasonably approximates the grey background of the Psion screen, it - thankfully - does not emulate the quite terrible contrast of said screen (anyone interested can download the above image and pull down the constrast by about 70%).

[ArchiMark]

Thanks for sharing, Daniel!

Would be great if it got to point where it was usable...

Mark

[Zarhan]

Promised an update by the end of the day today.

I'm more interested in the *software* update than IndieGogo update to be honest.

[Vistaus]

Promised an update by the end of the day today.

I'm more interested in the *software* update than IndieGogo update to be honest.

Eh, in the past, they also used IndieGoGo updates to tell when a software update was due, so maybe they'll announce that this time as well.

[Varti]

The update is now out: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-co...or#/updates/all

"London in lockdown!

In line with Government advice and wanting to do our best to ensure that our staff are not put at risk in any way, we have closed our London office and are working remotely.  While this does not make the business less productive, it does have an impact on product repairs.  Spare parts have started arriving from China, but we are currently unable to collect replacement parts at our office or to carry out repairs.  We are actively working on an alternative solution, but at the moment repairs will be slower than we would like to complete.  We would love to give you more concrete information but, as we are sure you are aware, the situation is changing daily.  

If your device has been sent in for repair, we hope you can be understanding in these unprecedented times.  We will ensure repairs are carried out and returned to you as soon as we physically can.

Production and shipping

More than 98 percent of our early backers have received their Cosmo perk and 91 percent of all backers in the first year (November 2018 to November 2019) have also received their perk.  This leaves a small proportion of backers that have still not received their devices, including very recent Cosmo backers. In truth, we were not happy with the quality of a small number of devices and insisted on holding these back. We did not want to ship backers like you a product we were not happy with.  This, combined with Chinese New Year and extended global supply chain issues as a result of coronavirus (covid-19), has caused an increased delay to our capability to deliver these perks at this time. We are chasing our factory to deliver as soon as possible. However, covid-19 has made firm delivery dates less certain.

As China is slowly relaxes the initial covid-19 lockdown - our ODM factory still has partial restrictions in place, but the supply chain involved in planned production is starting to engage. We expect and anticipate we will be able to ship the remaining Cosmo perks in April 2020 but I am sure you will appreciate that this is a continually developing situation where things are changing daily.

We promise we will keep you posted as soon as we have new information to share.

Development and Innovation

We continue to innovate and develop whilst Planet is in remote working mode:

Android firmware updates

We are about to release a new firmware update for the Cosmo. The main features of this release are:

* Modified bootloader so that the mobile radio modem and SIM cards will be recognised when booting into Linux, rooted Android and other non-Android partitions;

* Much improved battery consumption for Cosmo in idle (sleep) mode;

* Improved screen rotation function plus soft keyboard availability when Cosmo screen is used in portrait mode;

* Recent Android Security and other OS Updates;

* Notes app: dictation feature can now be controlled via Cover Display;

* Data app: database file export and import functions.

The new Cosmo Android firmware update (V20) will be available within the next few days. We hope that you will enjoy this firmware update.  Most of the changes and additions in the latest Android firmware are a result of valuable backer feedback - we thank you for it.

More from us next week with more exciting news!
Stay safe! Be Well!

Best regards,

Team Cosmo"

Varti

[Vistaus]

So glad the modem on rooted Android is fixed now! Too bad the issue I reported with keyboard shortcuts on Dvorak is not though

[maki.jouni]

The new Cosmo Android firmware update (V20) will be available within the next few days

And V20 update is also available

[Daniel W]

And V20 update is also available

Indeed. Downloaded and installed. Now the security patch level is 5 January 2020, which, while still two moths behind, is a lot better than the previous May 2019 patch level.

Taking screenshots in portrait mode on V19 (on my device anyway) used to be scaled to half size, both ways, and end up in the upper right corner of an otherwise black screen-sized image. On V20, portrait mode screenshots aren't scaled vertically, but they're still shrunk to half size horizontally, and now ends up as the right half of an otherwise black screen-sized image, so it appears they tried to fix it, but didn't completely manage to solve it. Oh, well, if they only managed to significantly reduce the standby power draw, I'm very pleased.

Edit: Notes on V20, so far:

• None of the fingerprints I registered earlier worked. They were still there, just not recognized. I solved the issue by removing them and registering the same actual fingers again.
• When unlocking the device, Planet Voice Assistant briefly shows a seemingly pointless (and harmless) notification.