Hi all,
you may wonder what is going on with this project. Did it turn into a black
hole? Or
did someone do a “rm -rf /“ :)
No, nothing of that. Therefore, I think we owe you some short status update on
this project.
There hasn’t been much to report in the last months, but now we have several
news
within some days.
1. I have checked again and we can still get the GTM601W, but the distributor
says
the risk is high that OPTION declares EOL any time and in that case we
would have
to make an order of at least 3000 units so that they restart production
just for us.
This means we must secure these modules for us now, since there is no
replacement
that easily fits into the space constraints of the GTA04 (resp. GTA01/02
board).
Cinterion modules would be nice since they are planned for the Pyra and the
Neo900,
but they are approx. 10% too big.
2. we see some difficulties in getting the W2SG0084 GPS module, but that is some
paperwork the distributor has to do with Wi2Wi.
Nevertheless, this is also a risk candidate for EOL because only one
distributor shows
stock.
3. There are also good news:
we participate in the risk buy of Samsung 1GB RAM+512MB NAND chips (as
planned for the Neo900). So the GAT04A5 gets twice as much RAM :)
This chip has already been tested by reworking a BeagleBoard XM and
modifying
the boot loader (kernel didn’t find the NAND yet, but U-Boot did. This is a
problem
that will jointly be fixed with the Neo900 software team).
4. Production: we still are a little away from the quorum of 100 preorders (at
the
moment of this writing we have estimated approx. half = 45 units). So it is
still
not possible to make final decisions about production dates and final
pricing.
So we need to get a little more support for our project. If you have ideas,
please
let us know or start activities. Many small activities are as good as a big
one!
And we know that this is a niche product that requires an existing GTA01/02
device. So it is not possible to “attract the masses”. We must find and
convince
the previous GTA01/02 owners whose devices are collecting dust. There had
been
produced ca. 15k such devices so that we just need another 1/3% or in other
words only 1 out of 300 GTA02 owners needs to decide for a GTA04A5.
5. Regarding the risk buy of the GTM601W, RAM chips and W2SG0084, I plan to
take the budget (~5100 EUR) that we already have collected.
This will transform the vouchers into ownership of components. So it has the
consequence that we can’t refund in money (cash, bank transfer) any more,
but
only in unused hardware components (i.e. 100 EUR ~ 1*GTM601+1*RAM+1*GPS)…
For future preorder vouchers you would also buy such a component set (which
we
would keep in safe warehouse of course) until we can really build the whole
devices.
So quite some news and I would be happy if we can fill up the missing preorders
[1]
sooner than later so that we can start production. Please think about securing
your
set of components for the last production batch of the most open smartphone
platform
that we already have.
BR and thanks for continued support,
Nikolaus Schaller
[1]: http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04A5
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