[tdewitt]

Well, I'm out. This is disappointing and is starting to have a pretty bad vapor smell. I shelled out the change for a presale but thevpruce difference isn't worth it for unfinished hardware. I'll check back in for v2 but for now I'm thinking a dumb phone will be the way to go. I with them all the best and appreciate the announcement but with all the delays and now a timeline showing just how far from a finished product they are, my confidence is low.

[mike-cardwell]

"vapor" ... they just said they're shipping the first phones in 19 days...

[tdewitt]

I'll clarify:

The batch of phones going out in 19 days is not a finished product. It's expected to be loose fitting, not have endcaps on the switches, not have properly functioning power management and updates have to be done using a terminal. That's beta hardware, at best.

The next few iterations are improvements on the beta hardware but still not yet a finished product until Evergreen. That speculatively Q2 2020 but they've been off by miles with all the previous delivery dates so I won't hold my breath. Until that hardware comes out, which is what a consumer grade product should be, the only hardware delivered will be various levels of beta/release candidate.

By then, you might as well wait a few months for the hardware refresh. I appreciate the goal and the work done and if the hardware was polished and all the pain points were software, I'd be singing a different tune. Software can be fixed after the fact but poor fit and finish on hardware is forever. (And I've been Linux-as-a-desktop since the latter half of the 90s, so I can take a lot of pain. I'm all in on a Linux phone but I'll go buy a dumb phone while I wait for v2.)