Yes, since the BOM (components needed) is significantly lower for VGA, and the HDMI encoder chip comes with nasty royalties (at very least 5000EUR for one year, possibly even more. iirc) and NDAs we can't accept for a free device. While VGA actually only needs pretty simple D/A converters basically. Anyway without a proper standardized convenient way to connect a cable to any such signal, both have same likelihood to make it into Neo900: zero. For HDMI there's that weird USB abuse stuff that comes with a 10pin USB receptacle. But HDMI is out for above mentioned reasons. And same connector doesn't cut it for VGA I guess.




Now for something completely different: We managed to find some 3 or 4 suppliers for our major headache component: the 500246471 Molex display connector

We can probably source this obsolete component from surplus/returned volumes. However we need to do this NOW and we most likely won't be that lucky again in 6 months or one year.

So everybody who wants a Neo900 (complete device) or a GTA04-NeoN swapboard (mainboard only) please consider to do a "preorder" donation for a 100% rebate voucher on http://neo900.org/#donate

Odds are we can't build a device for you when you don't preorder now, due to critical components like this display connector might not be available anymore later on.
Again, your donation counts as 100% discount/rebate on a later purchase, the estimated cost for the bare board is still ~700EUR with a tendency towards <600EUR when we can reach higher volumes, we hope we can offer complete devices for no more than 150EUR on top of the mainboard price (incl mounting and test), with a tendency towards <100EUR - though the latter is way more complex to predict, due to it depending on N900 spare parts market.
And while we need to spend some money of the donations now (beyond the 25k we announced for R&D) to purchase the critical components, we still can say that for now we would pay back ~40% minimum of all donations, in case of unlikely catastrophic failure of whole project. Of course you're not obliged to buy, when you "donate" 100EUR now, you probably could find somebody else who wants to purchase your voucher when you're not interested anymore when we finished development and real sales open up. Anyway donations are basically not refundable.

For those who haven't noticed: this is the first call for "preorder window going to close (partially)" I announced previously. And sure, we will try to handle this issue as much in favor of our current and future customers as possible - I.E. we will consider how much more than the already preordered devices we can order for the critical components. But this is limited, we can't buy 10k of the connectors to get prepared for the next 3 years Neo900 production. But we could probably find somebody to build 10k connectors for us if we really would need that much. Same can't be done for 500 or 1000 connectors. So get your preorder completed now :-)

Best Regards
jOERG