piercer said:
However I will tell you what does not exist - final production units - and they never will. Have you personally seen a video of a production unit? Have you seen photos of a production unit. If yes, then I am wrong, but please give me a link so I can verify it for myself.
Ahh yes, because final production devices spring out of thin air without testing boards and prototypes. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all have contracts with Santa's Elves and the Fairy Godmother Kingdom to produce their final versions of everything they produce out of magic, wand-waving and sparkly-sparkles.
OpenPandoraLtd. has given us an unprecedented access to their development of the Pandora. Sony's Go has just been revealed, and is slated for retail sales 3 months from now, that includes "Shipping" time, and a few hundred-thousand units to each regional distributor.
They never took any comments during the prototype process, they never released any images of anything that wasn't the final type, you never saw their CNC molds or their R&D engineers rearranging the innards of the PSP to fit a new case...
For that matter many industry watchers were commenting that it seemed Sony was sitting on their hands about the PSP line, noting the lack of UMD publishing as a sign of the failing state of the PSP no more than four months ago, the PSP Go concept had to have been in the works by then or it wouldn't be where it is now. You just never got to see it. No-one got to see it unless they were a part of the project. No one ever gets to see the development process in those big companies because they have an image to spin and sell.
You gotta remember, the big hardware companies are like ordering fast food through the drive-up window. The only thing you see is your order completed and bagged ready to go. OpenPandora Ltd. is like a fine chocolate store where you can see the carmel in the giant brass pots bubbling on the burner while large quantities of popcorn are popping away, and molten chocolate is poured over a cookie sheet of fresh peanut-butter lumps and clusters of almonds. We're watching the production of the Pandora as it happens. We're seeing the behind the scenes that -any- company has to go through, large or small.
So, no, the final production models are aren't there because they haven't been made
yet. It's a process, and they've been showing us that process in images and video, they've been sharing their progress step-by-step, all while maintaining their day jobs doing something else. They don't have an "In" with the leprechauns, and Harry Potter can't conjure them out of nothing without the permission of the Office of Commercial Magic.
Could the project be derailed? Sure, anything can happen. But the lack of a finished product isn't any sign of that having happened.
Welcome to the real world.
Edit:
And of course before we forget the "Well they promised them last year and it didn't happen so it never will..." argument...
The only people who seriously make this argument were apparently living in caves with no television or internet, and wondered why their newspaper wasn't being delivered, in the last quarter of last year when the banking systems of the world toppled like dominoes under bad lending practices. Every loan became suspect and gigantic, established companies couldn't get the routine loans that they regularly used to pay their employees. A small, startup manufacturing firm producing a unique computing device stood no chance of maintaining their existing loans under that level of paranoia and scrutiny, of course things fell apart.
It speak well of the them that they continued working with what they did have and continued improving the Pandora, rather than throwing up their hands and saying "We'll just have to wait until we can get a loan again."
p&|a 
