Onyx Now Working on a Lighted E-ink eReader

[Booxtor]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

Ah, but you ignore the fact that this permanent improvement only applies to the M92 and the i-series, and Onyx has forgotten all the promises they made about maintaining other models.

Could you please tell me, which promises you mean ?

You must imagine a simple thing. Onyx is a manufacturer, which offers certain products. There are some distributors, who has contacted Onyx and bought different products to sell them to their customers. Onyx actually makes promises to his distributors - if they have issues with the purchased products - the problem will be solved as soon as possible. Onyx does not have much employees for market monitoring, enduser supporting etc. Thus distributors in first line are responsible for monitoring of customer needs and pushing Onyx developers to fix/improve/develop the software/hardware. But in this regard Onyx is very cooperative. I know some of the IT guys there personally and know that they are working 12-14 hours /day and often without weekends until the task list has been finished. If Onyx wouldn't do it - they just wouldn't get new orders. They also trying to develop innovative products and concepts, but they produce (as mass products) just products, which has been ordered by distributors. So it is merely on distributors to take care about their customers.

If distributors goal is rather to make profit and to sell something - Onyx will never know, what the matter. They would just think it is all right and all are happy.

[iampiti]

Booxtor, I undestand that Onyx is a small enteprise with not many employees, but it's not a good strategy to have little people for user support. Thank god we have you!

[Illudrium]

Ok then Booxtor, now that I know I was wrong, when do you suppose the next iteration of the i62 with this updated hardware will be released? Will it be released anytime soon since it is just a hardware update, or will it be released in the next 9 to 12 months? Also, do you think there will be a significant increase in performance, or will it be negligible? Again, I'm asking because I don't want to spend all my money on a product too soon when I could just wait a little while longer and buy something better.

[Zetmolm]

Booxtor, first of all: I'm not criticizing you. Apparently you're doing a great job supporting the readers you sell, and it is good to know that you've managed to build good relations with the developers in China so that they help you to get things done.

Also, I understand Onyx' business model where they sell to distributors, and distributors sell to consumers.

When I mention broken promises, I actually mean situations where Onyx not only left consumers but also their distributors standing in the cold.

One example: earlier this year the Russian distributor promised us that 1.7 firmware for the Boox 60/A60 would be delivered before the end of 2012, apparently based on an agreement they had with Onyx. However, just a few months ago Onyx decided to stop all development for older devices, and judging from what I read on the Russian forums Onyx did not even properly inform the Russian distributor about this decision.

Another example: when the new owners of BeBook contacted Onyx earlier this year to get a final firmware update for the Club S that would fix all known bugs, Onyx just refused to do that, even though BeBook was willing to pay for the update.

And then I'm not even talking yet about how Onyx dropped support for the M90 and M91 even before they got the major bugs resolved, leaving owners of these devices with an inferior reader, and distributors with hard-to-sell stock.

When Onyx started selling readers 3 years ago they decided to position themselves as manufacturer of high-quality readers. They were aiming to be the best. The first year they sold just one model, and tried to perfect it as much as they could. But since then they lost control. They bit off more than they could chew. They introduced too many new models, more than they could support with their small team. That is where the problems started.

I do understand their dilemma: as an innovator they cannot survive without introducing all these new products, but they also cannot survive if they have to keep on maintaining the software for all those models. So I do understand why they made the decision to drop support for a number of models.

But the other side of this is that now they no longer take responsibility for their own deeds. Most of the products they delivered were not finished yet. There were still a number of serious bugs in them. In my perspective they do have the responsibility to resolve those issues; it is not the distributors that made the mistakes but the Onyx developers, and they should resolve them, especially if they want to be the high-quality company they claim to be.

So, the problem is not that distributors do not properly take care of customers. The problem is that Onyx does not take their responsibility.

[Mono]

I am not going to defend Onyx....

I just want to point out, that even much bigger companies sometimes develop product that is generaly unfinished in time of release and that never gained the fully functionable state. I will name mp3 player Sansa Fuze+ by SanDisk. It is very sad that firmware designed by open project RockBox is much better than close to unusable SanDisk's.
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Fuze/bd-p/Fuzeplus

[Zetmolm]

Mono, you are right. And the example you mention is a very painful one.

But my point is that Onyx led us to believe that they would be different from those companies, and in the beginning they actually were different. But at some point they changed their strategy, and made consumers and distributors pay for that change.

[Mono]

Might be... I do not know much about older readers. From what I read there is mainly problem with M9x, precedesors of M92.

It seems to me that maybe some hardware invoked issues are not solvable at all or at very high cost.

Again. It may happen, that what seemed like good idea turned out as failure. I already named Fuze+. It has touchpad. It seemed to me as great idea, nothing may break, no switches.... In real life it was total failure with SanDisk's firmware and is so, so with RockBox firmware.

Another story of design failure by big company is GPS in tablet Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime. It simply didn't work. Asus first tried to make it work by updating firmware, it did not work. Then decided to remove GPS from specifications. Users were angry and Asus finaly decided to deliver for free something you plug in tablet what made GPS work. It is not ideal solution because of many reasons, but at least something....

I do not know, who is responsible for not maintaining M9x firmware. It depends on agreement between distributors and Onyx. It might be that distributors should pay Onyx for firmware update and distributors do not want to pay...

What is the conclusion. One has to be carefull what he buys, no matter who is the producer. It is potentialy risky to buy an unmature product. It may become mature by firmware updates or not. There is no guarantie despite the size and goodwill of the producer.

I am one of the first users of M92. I bough it only based on experince of one user and bunch of videos he made. For me M92 was OK out of box. I am happy it is becoming better and better. It is (slowly) evolving into a really good tool.

[JoelH]

Does someone know how the google drive support is working?
Is it usable offline?

I dont understand wy they don´t make it easier to use something like instapaper on the ereaders....

[Illudrium]

Bump.

[Zetmolm]

Booxtor: you asked for this explanation, and then no comments from you at all?

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

Booxtor, first of all: I'm not criticizing you. Apparently you're doing a great job supporting the readers you sell, and it is good to know that you've managed to build good relations with the developers in China so that they help you to get things done.

Also, I understand Onyx' business model where they sell to distributors, and distributors sell to consumers.

When I mention broken promises, I actually mean situations where Onyx not only left consumers but also their distributors standing in the cold.

One example: earlier this year the Russian distributor promised us that 1.7 firmware for the Boox 60/A60 would be delivered before the end of 2012, apparently based on an agreement they had with Onyx. However, just a few months ago Onyx decided to stop all development for older devices, and judging from what I read on the Russian forums Onyx did not even properly inform the Russian distributor about this decision.

Another example: when the new owners of BeBook contacted Onyx earlier this year to get a final firmware update for the Club S that would fix all known bugs, Onyx just refused to do that, even though BeBook was willing to pay for the update.

And then I'm not even talking yet about how Onyx dropped support for the M90 and M91 even before they got the major bugs resolved, leaving owners of these devices with an inferior reader, and distributors with hard-to-sell stock.

When Onyx started selling readers 3 years ago they decided to position themselves as manufacturer of high-quality readers. They were aiming to be the best. The first year they sold just one model, and tried to perfect it as much as they could. But since then they lost control. They bit off more than they could chew. They introduced too many new models, more than they could support with their small team. That is where the problems started.

I do understand their dilemma: as an innovator they cannot survive without introducing all these new products, but they also cannot survive if they have to keep on maintaining the software for all those models. So I do understand why they made the decision to drop support for a number of models.

But the other side of this is that now they no longer take responsibility for their own deeds. Most of the products they delivered were not finished yet. There were still a number of serious bugs in them. In my perspective they do have the responsibility to resolve those issues; it is not the distributors that made the mistakes but the Onyx developers, and they should resolve them, especially if they want to be the high-quality company they claim to be.

So, the problem is not that distributors do not properly take care of customers. The problem is that Onyx does not take their responsibility.

[Booxtor]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

Booxtor: you asked for this explanation, and then no comments from you at all?

Hi,
Sorry not responding to every post, which could be addressed to my person immediatelly

First of all I think the topic is a little bit offtopic.

Secondly, I am working with Onyx for approximately slightly more than one year and in this time we never had a reason for complains. All trough us distributed products are good supported. Onyx proved himself as a cooperative and serious business partner.

Actually I just simply don't have time for investigations what happened in the past with other Onyx agents/resellers/old product.
I am trying to spend my time (that I am mostly stealing from my own family) to make products distributed by my company a little bit better and support current onyx users (and not just only ours customers as you perhaps could see

[Zetmolm]

Booxtor: OK, fair enough. Thanks for your reply. Keep up the good work!