Some experimental notes

I responded thusly in mail to "why did you return it?":

Hi,

You pretty much have the whole story. In brief from either of two positions:

As a consumer, the device is not quite ready for use. Although the software is developing rapidly, the hardware (particularly that revision) has some manufacturing flaws (display, USB, power, touchpad) and is not fully useful yet. So, that's a solid argument for a polite quick return.

As a possible dev or QA tester, the platform has a lot of great potential and is really exciting. The tools are not well developed and it's frustrating to do even simple troubleshooting. Also, as gently as possible, there is a contrast between community development (Mozilla, Debian, SugarLabs) and helping a company develop it's product for free ... and I paid full price for the product, not to enter the developer's program. In that situation, I'd have given you money for access and possibly gotten a discount on hardware (as per Apple or Microsoft).

On a related note I am uncertain of working with a port of Angstrom instead of actually working with a large upstream distribution. You really must have a large active developer community to drive sales and development. You'll get a lot more positive attention and sales once the thing boots Ubuntu or at least Debian, and I think your custom packages and drivers will have to be integrated into a mainstream kernel/distro to be genuinely useful. IRC traffic and forum posts back this up as of the very few people with TouchBooks a few have already bought additional SDcards and are installing other distros to work on the drivers. I am pretty solid on all of this because of my experiences with OLPC. OLPC went with a highly customized RedHat variant because RedHat was paying for it, and now they are trying to port their whole system to (normal) Fedora Core in the midst of a hardware revision. It's a nightmare to do and worse to have to do later. I think you'd be better off shipping BeagleDebian or possibly even BeagleUbuntu . Of course there are performance and engineering reasons that complicate the matter. And Android looms ... somewhat ominously.

Thanks for reading and gook luck in future endeavours,
[adric]

Hi,

Sorry to bug you again, but as the device starts to ship out and I get , er, hungrier for mine *g* I was wondering where the/a community site is. If y'all aren't going to run one, you might want to link to a 3rd party one someplace so users can talk to each other for support and, "did you get it yet" and well, flamewars and so forth.

I was around for most of that for OLPC's 2007 and 2008 G1G1 sales programs and it can get tricky for users and lawyers if several such sites pop up. We (OLPC volunteers) had a time of it before we got consensus and participation from 3rd party sites, particularly those critical of the project (Wayne's OLPCNews.com). The Android community , for example, is a little fragmented but most of the best stuff seems to be over at xda-developers forums ... which are not user oriented. (T-Mobile forums are next best).

Google found this one for me, but it doesn't look very active yet:
http://innovatingtouch.com/index.php

Thanks again!
[adric]

sent into their info@alias as a reply to one of the earlier mails

Hi folks,

May we please have an availability update? I'd really still like to have a TouchBook, but the expenditure was budgeted in the May-June range and as we slip to August I am having more trouble finding a slot in the budget for it.

An update on shipping would help me secure (new) funding, and I expect would ease other pre-order customers' minds.

I'm sure once a few of us have them in hand to show people we'll be able to secure y'all lots of sales :)

Thanks!

Dear [adric],

I apologize for the inconvenience.

A shipping update is slated to be released very soon. Check back on our website in a matter of days.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to let me know.

Best,
Collin L.
Always Innovating Customer Service