[jackowayed]

It sounded like they were planning to do something closer to that, but the higher-than-expected demand made that not a viable option:

from http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/26/questions-answered/

>As previously stated, we misjudged demand for this product. Having too many people wanting to buy your product is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. Our original method for assembling and shipping devices simply wasn’t scalable in terms of cost and time. It was no longer good enough to get easily accessible parts, buy a few hundred or a thousand of them, and pay somebody to assemble them; time and expense would be too much.

[drewcrawford]

But <20% of the preorders paid $5 for the product (source: OP). Couldn't they have assembled at least those and shipped them out by now?

Or, to state it another way, didn't they wake up one morning and realize they had enough preorders? It would be a lot easier to convert the preorder form to "Sign up for more info when we have more units available!" than to convert it to GCheckout, another way of preordering, which is what they did.