It struck me this morning that nothing has "happened" regarding enTourage for a while now.

No new products, or even intentions of new products, were announced at CES 2011 - the show that sets the stage for electronics companies for the year ahead (the enTourage booth looked decidely empty and I didn't see a single article from the major blog sites even mentioning enTourage's offerings at CES). The 3G model seems to have dropped off the radar altogether (it was originally promised for last summer, and then there were Verizon rumours for November which failed to pan out).

There have been no significant press releases (or even blog postings) since early November (with the release of the PE). The Forum Blogs section itself hasn't had a new blog since early June 2010.

There has been no indication of progress on the Android 2.2 (Froyo) update (2.1 - Eclair - was originally promised for last summer, then replaced with a promise of 2.2 instead for last Fall which is currently delayed with no indication of a delivery date). This in light of the fact 2.2 has been round since last summer, 2.3 (Gingerbread) was made available in December, 3.0 (Honeycomb) is currently in the works with most manufacturers (promised for a Spring release), and yesterday I saw that 2.4 ("Ice Cream"/"Ice Cream Sandwich") being slated for a summer release by Google. For perspective, the eDGes are currently running Android 1.6. Worriesome is robot's recent observations that the hardware itself makes 2.2 a real stretch (for the EE) and probably makes any higher releases miraculous at best.

Putting Android updates aside, the number one feature request of all time - landscape eink - remains unanswered since the EE was originally released almost a year ago. I was disappointed to see that even annotation seems to have taken several steps backwards in recent months. You currently can only see annotations if you're in annotation mode, and similarly, to export with annotations, you have to be in annotation mode first. A lot of extra (and painfully slow) taps on the eInk are required for this (true, annotations are beleaguered by problems with zoom, which is probably a fault of Adobe, not enTourage).

Similarly, after some 6 months, the "App Store" has a mere 70 apps (I think it lost an app since yesterday) and is not showing much progress either. It's even ironic that while we all lament that Google refuses to open up the Android Market to all Android devices, the enTourage store only allows you to download apps to the eDGe, even though they work on any Android device.

In the "Development" forum, I've watched developer after developer being stymied in their attempts to even develop straight Android apps that might then show up in the App Store. The long promised SDK (required to make use of the eInk screen) is a distant memory at best. App development doesn't seem to be encouraged at all, with no resources offered to aspiring programmers.

Lastly, the activity on these forums has dropped dramatically over the past month it seems, with just a few posts per day. The crickets are multiplying...

So, I'm left wondering if enTourage has stalled or run out of steam. "To sleep, perchance to dream" or has enTourage's day come and gone? Time to wake up...