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I haven't been able to logon to the site lately because they claim they are "updating." Let's see what happens.
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Yep, their site has indeed been updated.
OK, here is the deal with zenPad. I was pretty pissed that I'm still waiting and I emailed them quite a few times. This morning, I got several emails from them taking full responsibility for the delay. I was given the link to their blog and was offered a refund if I don't want to wait for the new ship date - May 8th.
It sounds like they had all their funds held by PayPal which explains why their Ebay account was closed. They were lucky enough to get HUGE press and unlucky enough to not be prepared along with having all their income locked so they have no cashflow.
You know what? I'm willing to believe them and wait. Hell, I've been waiting for the Pocketbook 602 for months and months
If you do want a refund, I think you can get it pretty easily. The emails I got were very apologetic and promised to live up to their word.
From their blog:
Enso's Real Story 4/8/10 11:44 AM
This is Alberto Armandi, founder of Enso, a startup specialized in high quality devices running opensource software such as Linux and Android.
First of all I want to personally apologize with our customers, especially those who placed orders before March 30 and still did not get their devices. There are many reasons behind what happened and wish to clarify them here.
In order of importance, the unrequested and sudden coverage from Engadget.com, one of the most influential technology blogs on the web nowadays with an average of 3 millions visitors daily.
As a first step, our website went down following their article about the Zenpad and its 155 USD price tag.
We were not ready to sustain that kind of traffic, and our infrastructure was near to collapse.
We took action, upgraded our server hardware, doubled bandwidth and deployed a caching system for every database operation. This took time and money but we finally succeded and our website was up and running again in a couple of hours.
Despite this outage, our Ebay store received literally hundred of orders.
This triggered a reaction from Ebay and Paypal, our payment processor, they both decided to block our accounts, since they are affiliated. All of this because we received too much money, in a very short time span.
We tried to explain them the reason behind the sales spike, but they instead asked us to provide a tracking number for every order received.
They did not listen to us when we said that we were only a small startup, and we needed the cash to cover manufacturing costs and start shipping. This represented a big problem for us as we were receiving tons of orders but had no real cash flow.
We were running completely on our limited financial abilites. So we took action and travelled back to Italy to seek investments and fill the order as soon as possible. A local bank just granted us a small loan that is enough to cover our travel expenses and fill the first order batch.
The funds will be available to us within the next few days. We never intended to scam anybody, blame Paypal and Ebay for this delay only, because they literally frozen our funds with no tangible reason.
We were not able to place an order within the expected timeframe because of this. Also, with a limited Paypal account there is no way to refund anybody, but Paypal keeps the transaction fees in the bank despite that money should go to our customers who requested it back. Note that this only applies to customers who paid prior March 30.
In the meantime we did complete the porting of Androind 2.1 "Eclair" for the Zenpad, so all the devices will be shipped with this version instead of the old Android 1.6 "Donut". The firmware will be available on our website and all our customers will have access to their private area for downloading operating manuals and documentation.
We sincerely apologize for the long waiting time. Shippings will start within May 8, 2010.
Thanks for your immense patience.
Alberto Armandi
Enso's zenPad launch was an overwhelming success ! 3/31/10 7:13 PM
Enso's team is happy to announce that the zenPad launch was an overwhelming success. Thousands of devices were ordered, barely a few weeks following its arrival on the market. Needless to say that the powerful device drew many supporters due to its appealing price and unpreceded quality/price ratio. We received tons of requests from technology press stating their intention to try and review the zenPad and also received noteworthy enthusiasm from Android's developer community: some application developers are even looking forward to tailor their software's user experience expressely for the zenPad.
That being said, Enso was also victim of its own sudden success. Indeed, the zenPad drew so much enthusiasm that our manufacturing and shipping facilities have a hard time to keep up with demand. Shipping times are longer than expected and sadly, we won't be able to ship most orders before May 08.
In order to compensate for those shipping delays, Enso is happy to announce that we will offer a free upgrade to Android 2.1 to all customers. Needless to say that customers who are not willing to wait any longer can request a refund at any time.
We sincerely apologize to all customers for those unexpected delays. Be assured that we have your interests at heart and that we are actively working on scaling our infrastructure in order to better serve you.