CTitanic of UltraMobile PCs Tips is reporting that TabletKiosk has had to delay some shipments of their UMPC, called the eo. While that is surely disappointing news to those who had pre-ordered, the reasons stated in an email posted on CTitanic's site makes me believe that TabletKiosk did the right thing. Here's an excerpt:
As the end of April rapidly approaches, we find ourselves in the position of having to balance our commitment to quality with the expectation of a timely product delivery. After the process of quality control was completed on the first eo™ production units, it was determined that there was an issue in the tooling of the back panel that affected the operation of the system fan. Because of this problem, the back panel had to undergo a slight redesign and thus the initial shipment is going to be only a fraction of what we had anticipated. Additionally, we expect the supply of the eo™ to be extremely tight for the next 60 to 90 days as the production supply catches up to demand. If you are one of the lucky few who receives your eo™ on time, congratulations and we hope that it meets and exceeds your computing expectations. If not, we want to offer our sincere apologies and let you know that we are working hard to assure that the delay in receiving your order is as minimal as possible.
We've seen OEM's have problems on initial shipments before, but it sure is refreshing to see a little transparency regarding the issue instead of the usual sales and customer service mumbo-jumbo. Kudos to TabletKiosk for valuing quality and communication with their customers. Kudos for doing the right thing.
Here's a link to the full post.
UPDATE: TabletKiosk has posted a statement on their site. Good move.
