Should I have received my final order eMail already?


Hi, haven't been around here for quite some time. Can somebody give me a brief overview, about the project-status?
I have order-number 700ish. Any dates/plans when they are going to be shipped?
 
tarator said:
Hi, haven't been around here for quite some time. Can somebody give me a brief overview, about the project-status?
I have order-number 700ish. Any dates/plans when they are going to be shipped?
Click to expand...
There have been a couple of setbacks and it appears that not much in terms of production has occurred in the past couple of months. However, I believe that progress is back underway (slowly), and I'm also hoping for a status update at some point soonish.

I think you would be lucky to get it this year though.
 
ClockworkCoder said:
There have been a couple of setbacks and it appears that not much in terms of production has occurred in the past couple of months. However, I believe that progress is back underway (slowly), and I'm also hoping for a status update at some point soonish.

I think you would be lucky to get it this year though.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the update! :) One thing a Pyrat can do is waiting... 2 months™
 
Sent ED a message regarding combining a voucher and a giftcard (both from Dragonbox). Haven't heard back. My Pyra is ready per the "Is my Pyra Ready" link but the link to finalize is now gone. It give a "this page does not exist yet".
 
chomwitt said:
Having been 'burned' once in neo900 and having spent hours visiting and asking and emailng just to learn the most basic question a person could have regarding his order and having
read about @EvilDragon workstress and getting in account the covid-supply crisis chain events and the war that further complicate things i want to say that :

Ok , there is a risk , it was stated in the preorders , more risk was added due to non-controllable factors but it seems very likely that the pyra team made mistakes in how it handles the preorder queue.
I sense a disincentive established in being forthcoming and open about the preorder queue status.

Please prove me wrong . Allow us to the most basic info. In what rank is each order , in what batch it belongs ,and a possibly estimate of delivery.
Click to expand...

Hello @chomwitt

I feel your pain! I had a horrible experience with the predecessor to the neo900 (openmoko). That experience certainly made me more hesitant to buy into this type of thing.

I consider myself lucky that I didn't preorder my pyra, because if I had preordered I would also be pretty frustrated about how long it's taken. It has been a long time - I remember telling a friend back in 2019 that "the pyra might nearly be ready this year!", lol, how naieve I was! ;)

But I have been following the pandora / pyra project for over a decade now (I got my pandora in early 2013 IIRC but had been following it during production), and I can say that in that decade I have only ever seen good faith and integrity from ED. Here are a couple of things that you might not know:

* ED's original partner on the pandora was basically a scammer* who took a bunch of preorders via a second store, then ran off with the preorder money from that store (<-- this is the short, inaccurate summary of the story, I'm sure you can find more info if you search the forums). This left ED in a bad financial situation where he couldn't afford to simply honour all the preorders. He also wasn't technically required to honour those preorders since they were through the scammer's* store, but he did anyway (I think he sent them all out in the end, someone please correct me if I'm wrong) at considerable financial cost to himself. To me, this is a huge indicator of good faith.

* The pandora also took years longer than I had expected it to (I also didn't preorder the pandora, but I also would have been frustrated and annoyed by that delay).

* Despite the problems, in the end ED worked out all the issues and got the pandora shipped out, and it was *fantastic*. Having owned an Openmoko Neo Freerunner (literally the worst phone ever made), I for one was very glad that ED took the extra time to work out all the issues because by the time I got my pandora, it was a rock solid, awesome little machine. I'd rather wait 10 years and get something good than have another Openmoko situation where I paid $600 for a phone that I was told would be usable and I basically got a paperweight.

* ED works really crazy, silly, long hours that he really shouldn't be working (I would consider working the hours he works and getting that little sleep unhealthy). He has an actual IRL job and a family in addition to all the work he does on the pyra. Seriously, asking him to take an extra 10 minutes to update the current status of preorders more regularly is a bigger imposition on his time (and/or sleep) than you'd think. This is a man who really doesn't have a lot of spare time at all.


I can understand your frustration. I've been waiting for my pyra for years, too, and I don't even have a place in the queue yet! It's going to be aaaaaaaaages!

And you're right - it really would be great to see more updates, they seem to have slowed down lately.

But I have only ever seen ED act in good faith, fulfil the agreements he's made, and act with honesty and integrity. I think that he works hard on the pyra and although I'd like more updates, I'd rather him spend the time assembling pyras than writing updates. And I think that if you can just stay patient, eventually, one day, when it's fiiiiiiiiinally in your hands, you'll be glad you were. That was certainly my experience with the pandora :)

Another tip that I have for you is that you can get an RSS feed of the pyra news forum and have your RSS reader let you know when there's an update - that's what I do, saves me coming back onto the forums all the time :)

HTH!

* allegedly. it's more complicated than I've said, but based on what I've read, he's not a good person.
 
* ED's original partner on the pandora was basically a scammer* who took a bunch of preorders via a second store, then ran off with the preorder money from that store (<-- this is the short, inaccurate summary of the story, I'm sure you can find more info if you search the forums). This left ED in a bad financial situation where he couldn't afford to simply honour all the preorders. He also wasn't technically required to honour those preorders since they were through the scammer's* store, but he did anyway (I think he sent them all out in the end, someone please correct me if I'm wrong) at considerable financial cost to himself. To me, this is a huge indicator of good faith.
Click to expand...

not quite accurate. ED wasnt a partner he was a reseller of the pandora. He did the web site as far as i can remember. im sure wally and trashymg will correct me..
ED did pick up the baton tossed asside by he who shall not be named, and took over production and basically kept it alive.
 
spud42 said:
not quite accurate. ED wasnt a partner he was a reseller of the pandora. He did the web site as far as i can remember. im sure wally and trashymg will correct me..
ED did pick up the baton tossed asside by he who shall not be named, and took over production and basically kept it alive.
Click to expand...
Oh really?!? wow, that makes what ED did more impressive! Thanks for the correction! :)
 
antisol said:
* ED's original partner on the pandora was basically a scammer*

* allegedly. it's more complicated than I've said, but based on what I've read, he's not a good person.
Click to expand...

I don't think Craig was a scammer, he was a typical CEO that over promises and under delivers. I am an investor and this also happens a lot in larger companies that are publicly traded on stock exchanges. His marketing skills were great but I don't think he had his finances under control and wasn't honest. Probably at the end he just tried to get out of a failing situation and didn't bother anymore about customers or the product. He did manage to create the Pandora though so it is certainly not all bad. You might have needed a 'just do-it' glass half full guy with imagination to get something done like this against all odds. You can see how difficult it is to create a handheld with a small team. The Pyra isn't a smooth ride either..
ED has a different approach that is more in-line with open source philosophy even though he clearly also is a business man/entrepreneur. He saved the Pandora and hopefully he will make the Pyra a success as well.

Great article about the Pandora and its history.

www.eurogamer.net

The ultimate open source handheld: the return of Pandora

Digital Foundry Hardware tells the story behind the open source Pandora handheld, reviewing the new 1GHz version.
www.eurogamer.net www.eurogamer.net

Waiting for the sequel. A recent interview with all the members of the Pandora team talking about those days... I would pay for that.
 
b_o_b said:
I don't think Craig was a scammer, he was a typical CEO that over promises and under delivers.
Click to expand...
This is how I felt about Craig as well, he also was suffering what was apparently some mental health issues and couldn't deal with anything in the end.
 
Aah right. I'm pretty sure I became aware of it all not-too-long afterwards, and at the time there weren't many positive opinions being voiced.
I recall reading a detailed description of what happened that painted him in pretty negative light, but I can't remember many specifics and I wasn't around to witness it, I was just an onlooker after the fact.
 
antisol said:
Aah right. I'm pretty sure I became aware of it all not-too-long afterwards, and at the time there weren't many positive opinions being voiced.
I recall reading a detailed description of what happened that painted him in pretty negative light, but I can't remember many specifics and I wasn't around to witness it, I was just an onlooker after the fact.
Click to expand...

I think this sums up the negative criticism pretty well.

Openpandora Ltd - Pandora Wiki

pandorawiki.org pandorawiki.org

Seems pretty bad but it doesn't tell the whole story. The only person who knew what really was going on (business and personally) was Craig.

TeDaDeS said:
I remember he made some fun videos promoting the Pandora.
Click to expand...

Indeed especially the roof video was hilarious. Seems to be removed from youtube.
 
Quick answer about the OpenPandora Ltd. / GmbH thingy:

Yes, that was quite a sad story... but as others mentioned: There were two different companies. Mine (OpenPandora GmbH) and Craigs (OpenPandora Ltd.).
I tried to support all remaining customers of OpenPandora Ltd.
When we moved the production to Germany, I asked OpenPandora Ltd. how many preorders exactly they had left, as I would provide them with that number of Pandoras.

And we did - however, it seems that...
a) either he sold these Pandoras to make some quick cash
b) he had more preorders left than he told me

So there wasn't much that I could do. I even offered that he send me his customer list upfront and I'll ship the Pandoras directly to him - but he wanted to do it himself, so we sent him a monthly batch of Pandoras until the number he told us had been reached.

I can understand that everyone who ordered from him and didn't get a Pandora is angry, but we did anything we can to support you.

Back to some more Pyra related stuff:
Things were really slow, we still had a lot of work to recover from the financial damage my former employee did.
Additionally, Askarus (who planned to help with the assembly from October 17th on) was stuffed with his normal work, that he couldn't find the time to help out either.

I've assembled a couple more units last week and plan to ship all currently finalized orders before christmas, which means the next round of orders can begin shortly afterwards.
I'll also do a newspost within the next couple of days, unfortunately, except for the remaining cases there won't be more Chromium editions (we can't get the color anymore), but a copper edition (or copper / chromium mixed edition) should be available from January on.
More news about that soon!
 
Hmm just checked but for some reason I have two order numbers (or order LETTERS more like) for the pyra preorder.

Am I doing it right lmao? Both have different dates too but both say it's not ready or invalid code.
Screenshot_20230109-182340.png
 
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