If this had been out a year ago, as hoped & intended i would say you could very well be right. But by now, more powerful devices that has pretty much the same or better spec's as compared to the Panda is starting to surface. With the "iControlpad" and similar items your simply creating a unit that will give the Panda a run for it's money, and severely limit the Pandas market penetration. Yes, the Panda is small, has a qwerty keyboard, is a clamshell, and so on. But the competing item is a phone. Your going to try and persuade people to buy a extra item they need to carry around, as well as they need to keep somewhat up to date with the phone capabilities. The phone on the other hand offers to let the buyer make 1 significant buy, and then go with that.
It's going to be hard to reach any sort of significant market penetration. These 4K units are pretty much sold out even b4 they are made as far as i know. The few "free" units seam to be buyers giving up on waiting, and canceling there orders, so they already were sold once... So to speak. Making a second batch of 4K might be a lot faster, and might be just as easy to sell. But put it in perspective. Your going to have to sell 250 batches of 4000 units to make just 1 million in sold units. Thats going to be a whole lot.
And, IF this were to seam even remotely likely to any major phone brand, they would release something along the lines of a updated "Nokia N-Gage" device. Bigger screen, multitouch, and a hardware slideout keyboard would pretty much be what it needs to be modified with if you look to the original. It wouldn't be "as good" as the Panda, but in 6 months Nokia could have it on sale, it would cost "phone money" and you would always have it with you, without packing a extra item. And it would have better hardware specs if you look at figures as memory, and computing power. Easy.
No. I hope the guys get a good maybe 10 production runs out of this item b4 they end up with units sitting in there storage and selling slowly. By then they MIGHT feel like bringing out a device for me. Pretty much the same thing, not clamshell, and only a on-screen keyboard. It in turn would probably only yield half as many production runs seeing as how most that wanted a similar device, and didn't go the phone route already got the Panda. Just people desperate enough to want some mouse touchscreen emulation for Amigas and similar without sacrificing proper game controls for arcade / console emulation would get that one.
I'd love for the guys to make a huge hit, but i doubt it. We are the geeks. We buy this sort of stuff. Getting sales by the millions means you have to hit a much more mainstream crowd.
Just my few cents.
B!
