The recent estimation on schedule is like * Proto_v3 around new year, either before or after. * Production start first quarter of next year if nothing gets in the way.
We had a terrible delay since February at least, due to a number of causes like setting up webshop and handling vouchers and preorders, managing sourcing issues (now finally solved for the N900 mech parts, see below), and last not least Nikolaus being busy with Pyra which now seems to have finished (Congrats! Looking forward to Dragonbox Pyra).


The preorder window for complete devices originally meant to close a few weeks ago, then got extended to end of this month, then to one month from now, and now I finally managed to negotiate a splitting of N900 orders into two batches of which the first one will get ordered this month and the next one (for late complete device preorders) is not yet fully determined and will probably happen in maybe no sooner than 2 months. For the first batch the risk that the sourcing fails is virtually zero, for the second it's still estimated as being pretty low but higher than for first batch.


current number of preorders:

Neo900 DOWN PAYMENT Neo900 complete device -180
NeoN DOWN PAYMENT NeoN bare board -97
+1EUR Down Payment top up -7899

There's no update on final price estimation yet. The quotes we received so far for BOM didn't reveal any substantial saving opportunities, so the total BOM right now is maybe a 50 bucks lower than we initially calculated, but the real savings will probably come from our production facility company offering a total BOM plus assembly quote to us, which won't happen before maybe end of year.

There was a lot of acknowledging feedback from the some hundered visitors at Neo village and attendands of the talk. And there was quite a number of people attending the lightning talks. I also tried to help out a few N900 users, alas not always successful since we seen issues like eMMC not mounting anymore. I hope the guy was able to recover his data via rescueOS later on.
I heard several visitors went to our shop preorder page right away while visiting the village, but I can't tell how many new preorders the camp generated (there been a total of roughly 50 new orders during last few weeks) - the majority of them will come in during next weeks anyway, since usually the decision for such a commitment is not made ad hoc.

We are about to implement bitcoin payment in shop, dos1 and antiatom are working on it. And I'll now finally sort out the paypal stuff so hoping for that option to return RSN too.
For now dos1 said that worst case he could handle single bitcoin transactions on behalf of Neo900 UG, please contact us via "dos1" <contact at neo900 .org>

Sorry, we don't have better data available than what's already on http://neo900.org/faq#networks and in the documents linked there. We also don't know of any other modem variants than those listed there. There's a certain chance Gemalto will react on such new requirements for EU modem type if technically feasible, but we didn't hear of any details indicating they will actually do.

cheers
jOERG