While it's moving a bit slower than before (which is normal - the final few % always take longer than the rest), there's still things that have happened and that should be posted.

The displays ------------

As you probably remember, the 1080p display caused issues since the rotation of the screen from portrait to landscape slows thing heavily down, therefore we needed to change to 720p screens and a special chip that can rotate the picture in realtime.

We found two for us easily accessible 720p displays (well, three, to be exact, but there's no need to test the third one unless none of the two others is good enough for us). Last week, we finally got all the needed displays (five of each) for testing, as well as non-BGA versions of the rotator chip (we only has BGA samples before). All other needed parts (like connectors, etc.) have also arrived. We were lucky with one connector, as it wasn't available within Europe from stock and the only source within the US had a contract so they were not allowed to export it... well, we got it anyways, thank god :)

Nikolaus already finished the PCB needed to test the displays and as you can see, we already have them here. Global Components will populate them next week and then it's time to write the software and try out the displays together with the rotator chip. Well, and maybe find some issues on the display PCB, as these always can happen - but they can be fixed with manual soldering, so that's no big deal.

I'll keep you informed and post videos of our display tests, as soon as we did them :).

The main PCB ------------

Nikolaus was mostly working on the display PCBs, so the progress on the main PCB was slower, as you can imagine. It's still nearly finished - but that 'nearly' are the last percent that always need a lot longer than the rest.

The case --------

While I'm still trying to find a better hinge (all the laptop-likes are way too big for our small device), the case designers are working on the best way to implement the four shoulder buttons. This is not as easy as most of you might think, actually. Manually adding shoulder buttons is easy - but finding a possibility to do that in mass production is totally different.

The keyboard ------------

We're still looking for a company that can produce the silicon keymat for us. While Fatih is in contact with some asian companies, I'm trying my luck with German companies - but it's hard to find one here: Want to help out? Browse the net, look for companies that can do silicon/rubber keymats and post here, so I can get in contact with them. Preferably in Europe, but anywhere in the world is fine as well.

The battery -----------

We got a 6000mAh battery sample from the same manufacturer as the original Pandora battery and the case designer thinks we can fit it. Unfortunately, we got it without the PCB, even though we should've gotten it with one.

So before we can fully test it, we need to wait for a new sample.

The SoC -------

We're still using the OMAP5, since we don't have much more info on the A80 yet. AllWinner will not offer Linux drivers, but I plan to get in touch with the Cubieboard designers to ask how they will solve their driver issue - but still, switching to the A80 would delay everything for at least 6 months... not an option for us right now, but maybe sometime in the future.

That's it for today, I'll keep you posted.

Discuss about that here: http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/16382-got-displays-looking-for-keymats/