[Nate the great]

I've been exchanging emails, and would like to share some of the contents.

The Astak Mentor is a joint project between PVI (screens), Netronix (assembly and design and Touch expertise), and Astak (end design and sales). We developed it in-house in Taiwan and are now refining it in San Jose, California.

The software issue is still being resolved. We have received a ton of help and cooperation from Fictionwise and will include their eReader. We are negotiating in Europe with Mobipocket now. Mobipocket (Amazon) wants exclusivity and we do not want that. Our reasoning is that exclusivity places everybody in Amazon's teeth. We argue that Amazon stands to lose a ton of book sales if they insist on the exclusivity angle. We would have to go without them in at least North America. We are hoping that Amazon will realize this and drop the exclusivity of their agreement. We have released an SDK to Fictionwise for porting.

There is more, but since I don't have explicit permission to post this I decided to only quote the parts that have already been discussed here.