Back online today -
http://www.meetearl.com/updates/
LONG OVERDUE, BUT STILL ON TRACK
I would like to personally apologize to each of you for the lack of communication. There is no excuse for our silence and we can only hope to reestablish your trust through an improved system of interaction from here on out.
When I decided to dedicate myself to this project over two years ago, I knew there would be challenges and difficulties. I surrounded myself with good people and worked tirelessly to get the crowdfunding off the ground. With so much momentum and support, we were eager to get into final development and production. Unfortunately, we underestimated the resources required for social media relations following our campaign. This was a mistake on our part. The overwhelming volume of support and suggestions was tremendous and helpful, but we didn't have the resources to address every comment. And once personal threats, allegations of fraud and claims of misuse of funds started rolling in, we had to step back and reevaluate the best way to move forward. Granted, a lot of this could have been avoided with more frequent and consistent communication; this is obvious now. To put it simply, we were overwhelmed and handled the situation incorrectly. We sincerely apologize and pledge to improve the dialogue with those willing to be patient with us. We hope you will give us an opportunity to earn your support again.
To address the recent issues with our website and forum, we want to assure all of you that we have never deleted any comments on our page or forum and have never had any intentions of going offline. Though it may not seem like it, we are listening to your feedback and it's an invaluable resource for our development process. Your voices have been heard, and we want to turn a fresh page with the community. We've been trying to get the old forum back up since it went down. It's still intact, with each and every comment, but for some reason is failing our servers diagnostics checks. If we can't get it back up in the next couple days, we'll launch another one temporarily. Either way, we give our word to be more active in the forum and give you proper regular updates.
As we mentioned in our last update, we have enlisted an engineering firm in Guangzhou, China to produce Earl. While they currently manufacture devices that run on Android 4.0 and the i.MX6 platform, Earl is a unique tablet that requires extensive engineering to include the additional sensors and radios. With so many components, placement is key and RF interference is a major obstacle. Fortunately, our new partners have a dedicated RF team to make sure we address each issue before sending Earl off to be certified. We are trying to create a device that is unprecedented and they have stepped up to the task. However, this process is going to take more time than we anticipated. At this time, we estimate that manufacturing will start around the beginning of January. I'll be living in Shenzhen for the duration of development so I can be close to our engineers and approve/test each revision of Earl. This will shave off a couple of revisions and save time, but we want to make sure every component in Earl meets our requirements. Again, we know this is last thing you all want to hear. But Earl WILL be worth the wait!
