eDGe inventories almost completed dried up

Originally Posted by ShiningT1g3R

I cannot imagine selling this product to anyone interested in purchasing one now. I mean, I'm actually trying to SELL mine as it is before "Taps" starts playing and they lower the enTourage flag! :O

I can just imagine Chubulor laughing at us all right now from his computer screen: "You mean you actually DOUBTED me?! I TOLD YOU SO!!!"

Chubulor has an Edge that he needs to use also, so I doubt he's laughing. The waves of undulating flab would make that kind of painful anyway.

Personally, I'm waiting for the price to drop so I can get some Edges to play with and possibly brick. But it would have to drop pretty far.

Hmmm...I never imagined Chubulor as corpulent, but perhaps?

Originally Posted by borisb

Snow usually logs on between noon and 1-1:30 PM (EST), so we'll see then if he has a response.

I guess we have our answer...

Originally Posted by borisb

I guess we have our answer...

Violating forum rules on insults and spamming seems to get their attention.

boris, you are a fetid trollop.

PM me to buy sneakers at half price.

2 points for the use of "trollop" And I'll counter your sneakers with a limited time offer for a special deal on a bridge in Brooklyn.

Originally Posted by borisb

I guess we have our answer...

Even if all our speculation is way off base, it's quite sad that enTourage is doing such a poor job of managing its web presence on its own forum. Here's a point of comparison. A few months ago, I ordered gifts for relatives who were going on a trip. The gifts were intended to be used for the trip. Half the gifts never made their way into the box, despite a complete packing slip and complete payment. I complained via phone first but got no result. I made a post to their website and within three minutes the director of online marketing sent me a personal email asking for details and vowing to correct the problem and issue a refund. Three minutes--and he did get me a refund.

Here's the tricky question: how do we quantify the number of people that would have bought an eDGe if enTourage had engaged the forums actively?

We of course probably can never know as those people came to the forums and went and won't be back now to indicate why they never bought... However, it's possible institutional buyers may have bought one themselves but their institution passed on it due to lack of company participation/communication and these buyers may be around to post their story.

I tend to think the decline of forum presence is an effect of the company's problems rather than a cause. Alienating independent developers with the secret unrooting done by the August 2010 update, plus the lack of released SDK for writing apps to use the e-ink side, was the fatal mistake. It's tough for a startup to compete in this market regardless, but an interested and engaged developer community would have been a serious boon to EE. Developers like to play with interesting technology, and the Edge represented some quite interesting and unique technology.

It's interesting to contemplate the boost the device would have had if third party developers could have developed eInk and eInk-LCD integrated apps, and how much more compelling the eDGe would have been compared to single-screen tablets.

Originally Posted by Corpulent One

I tend to think the decline of forum presence is an effect of the company's problems rather than a cause. Alienating independent developers with the secret unrooting done by the August 2010 update, plus the lack of released SDK for writing apps to use the e-ink side, was the fatal mistake. It's tough for a startup to compete in this market regardless, but an interested and engaged developer community would have been a serious boon to EE. Developers like to play with interesting technology, and the Edge represented some quite interesting and unique technology.

so True... Take it form one of the over caffeinated uber geeked Dev. The things i could of done with a Open root hack, and a SDK

Originally Posted by borisb

It's interesting to contemplate the boost the device would have had if third party developers could have developed eInk and eInk-LCD integrated apps, and how much more compelling the eDGe would have been compared to single-screen tablets.

As a non-programmer and non-developer, even I am frustrated by this. Is there any way to work around their secrecy?

robot did some pretty intense things with the eink side, so it's not impossible -- but to do something sustainable with it would require a lot of work. And what little interest there was in doing that work to begin with will be gone now that they're not actually being produced anymore.

It's possible that if they're trying to sell the company, that they want to keep as much of their stuff (SDK, etc) as secret as possible since, to a business person, this may represent value. This sounds totally warped, and it's difficult to believe that anyone so ignorant of the actual maket could run a business (or, at least, invest in a business) in this field, but I've seen things like that happen. Companies with this sort of attitude frequently fail, of course.

The eReader software is definitely never going to be "open" because it's under license from Adobe. Some of the driver software (for the Marvel chip, for example) similarly may be proprietary (at least in part) to Marvel, and similarly cannot be "open".

I also somewhat doubt any company would want to buy enTourage seeing as the world is going 99.9% with tablets, not dual books... Should another company buy enTourage, I'm quite sure we'd see a radical change in communications.

The fact is, big technology players like Samsung and Blackberry are struggling in the tablet market against Apple's iPad. Regardless of the uniqueness and more suitable purposes the Edge represents for professional and schooling purposes, people usually only have so much money to apply towards a gadget and will most likely purchase the one with the most positive press and market presence. The Edge is just simply not known enough.