What happened in April 2017

Helios · June 30, 2017, 10:00pm

This is a collection of announcements and updates from the Eve team. It provides a look into the history of the company and its projects.

Please note that this is a collection of old news: plans may have been altered since based on new developments, and statements may have been superseded by more recent ones. Polls are no longer active (results are included wherever possible) and links (both to other community posts and external resources) may no longer be valid.

April 1, 2017: Last week of March short wrap up

On another topic

Hi guys!

Community has been super active lately which is awesome!
I would like to provide you short update on things before going to sleep and ending last week of March.

Prototypes:

We have fixed most of the prototype round 1 testers feedback in the units that are coming to round 2 prototype testers.

We have started shipment of 2nd prototype round this week and some of the members have already received theirs. i7 Prototype testers would need to wait few more days to get their prototypes shipped. We need to use them for our internal testing first so we could not have shipped them to you immediately.

Some of the round 2 testers will receive housing of darker color as vendors don’t like to make slight changes to the color for small batch of units as the have to recalibrate machines every time.

Main issues getting fixed:

We are having a call with Intel and Microsoft engineering team every 2 days and as a result we have quite a good speed.

Most of the remaining issues are minor software issues upgradable with firmware or software update OTA

Some of the remaining non software related issues are: keyboard flex, keyboard Bluetooth performance

We will see feedback from second round prototype testers regarding what issues are left there

About SSDs:

Main issue is finding SSD supply in the market for our volumes (That are too small for manufacturer directly and pretty substantial for distributors)

We have tested intel 600p, Samsung 960 and 850 Evo as well as now we are testing couple more OEM SSDs. We were not able to find Crutial MX100 in the market.

Currently among SSDs tested best Bang for the buck is Intel 600p. 850 Evo had terrible power consumption of 500 mw, intel 600p had 200mw and 960 had power consumption of around 60 mw. We will keep testing SSDs and checking their availability and pricing. Currently 600p seems like a great option as we think we will be able to further improve its power consumption with intel.

Shipping date:

We have already started receiving some of the components to our warehouse and we are on the same last week of April schedule as before.

Cheers guys! It was an amazing week. lets keep it up and cant wait second testing round!

April 1, 2017: [Eve V Status] Eve V Speakers, Pen magnet, Keyboard, Manufacturing & MORE!

On another topic

Greetings! The V is soon coming from Shenzhen

Center of Futian district in Shenzhen, China

Hello guys!

During the past month we’ve been intensively squashing the bugs to ensure all the way great an experience when the V soon ships!

We had a couple of delays in shipping the prototypes to the community, mainly because we wanted to be sure that people would be getting the latest fixes already implemented. We had to wait a bit more as our button supplier didn’t ship us enough revised buttons in time as well as there were some delays with housing delivery. This does not affect the production schedule as its common for manufacturers to stall delivering small quantities of samples.

The prototypes are/were delayed, does that mean the schedule is delayed too?

Nope! Some of you guys have had concerns about this but let me assure you, the two are not correlated!

That’s because the engineers’ work schedule is not affected by production. We’ve been steadily rolling forward with the R&D, despite having suffered some delays on the prototype production side.

As Konsta mentioned, this time around the protos have been / are produced at the final factory. This means the factory can already see potential production issues, and attune their assembly methods accordingly.

I also encourage people to check out Konsta’s footage at youtube, which he has generously put up there impromptu for u guys I’m sure he will add more content to the channel as time goes by!

How are we doing with the V!?

Jolly great! We’ve stomped around 65 issues to the ground during past month and are staring at only a few before we can ship. Among the most important we’ve made the following improvements:

Pen magnet’s improved to enable docking to the side

The uglier the prototypes look like, the more the team behind them is doing them!

We built connected standby mode

Now the V will wake up in less than a second and will also be able to prompt notifications even whilst sleep. In case you want a half-hibernate half-sleep solution, the V also supports stage 3 sleep, from which it can wake up in roughly 3.5-4 seconds. (Advanced users stuff this)

Display was professionally calibrated

Expect the colors of the prototypes have nothing on the real deal. Seriously. We promise. The display will live to your expectations. We guarantee! The bad news is that you’ll just have to wait for it to see it

Speaker performance was tuned

Even though we heard no complaints from the prototype testers when it came to our speaker’s performance, we still felt we owed you guys a bit more! We engaged with our speaker surroundings- and our sound chip vendor to deliver more.

We noticed you can actually “overclock” the speakers as there is so much power under the hood. Normal drivers would utilize less of the max performance than what’s available. We’re now optimizing the drivers to the best of our abilities! If you have very, very demanding ears for DBs (unlike the testers) you may find yourself in need for a specific EQ tuning software.

Additional small fixes were as follows:

Light sensor is not affected by the luminance of the display anymore

hull switch does not put the device to sleep when keyboard is folded behind the V

and a few more fixes here and there. One of the reasons why could announce a firm shipping date (from development point of view) for your awesome computer was that all hardware issues have been fixed during the past 2 months. If any hidden issues remain, we can issue hotfixes via software update

How are we doing with the keyboard?

V Keyboard with green backlight, prototype gen 6 (text not blurred intentionally)

The keyboard has been a funny animal of its own. It has been travelling on its own development path, not per se following the speed of the V, which is by now, pretty much fully ready. Apart from a few software fixes.

But how are we doing? Very good actually!

Main updates to the current (second last before production) generation prototypes have been:

- Significant improvement of rigidity

The V keyboard is now on the top level of sturdiness when it comes to folio keyboards! Twisting it does not make the trackpad click, nor does it feel wobbly anymore!

- Magnet strength

The keyboard won’t detach so easily anymore when being bent over behind the V. To do this we added 2 more magnets to the bottom side of the V chassis, and switched the magnets in the keyboard’s pogo pin connector bar to ones with more strength.

- Magnet alignment

All the magnet poles were matched so that the keyboard docks in nicely each and every time you’re connecting the two devices.

Ugly prototyping vol 2. While starting the docking from an intentionally misaligned position, we specifically left that small piece of trash there to demonstrate how the increased magnet strength will throw it away!

- Added antenna for bluetooth performance

Even though it was very hard to make the wireless communications in the small keyboard mechanical space, we’ve managed to squeeze out an acceptable level of wireless performance out of the keyboard. In normal conditions even the gestures work now pretty well Certainly no more packet loss whilst typing.

However it is good to know that windows PTP is USB-protocol only, so PTP settings and some of the gestures only work properly in pogo-pin-connection.

That’s that for now guys!

If you have concern of any issue being unfixed, let us know. Its is very very likely that its already fixed even though it is not mentioned in the post

p.s. Sorry that this post took so long to appear and I was not able to produce an update before. I had a very hectic last week in China last week and I fell sick of a hefty flu almost immediately when landed back to Finland (getting better and back on track now already!)

April 3, 2017: Community Support Part 2: Brainstorm!

On another topic

Thank you all for participating in the discussion about community driven customer service!

We will definitely try it out. As you can see most of you voted that we should go for it!
Here is the link to previous discussion.

Now, to try it out we need to have little community brainstorming session here

Key to succeeding in the implementation of community support is to work in little iterations. And if we cant get it to work we either improve or abandon the idea altogether.

So here’s how we will implement community driven support:

We brainstorm ideas in this thread

We present our core idea and implement it

See how it works.

Brainstorm more on how to improve, review and improve,

It is important to implement community service in small iterations to see if the idea works as we can spend 2 month designing custom solution to only find out that we need something completely different:)

Lets get our hands dirty and get down to business!

In this thread it is important to get conversation started. The main goal of this thread is:

Have enough ideas to come up with basic structure

Brainstorm on more specific problems.

Please don’t side track here to get the max out of this discussion

firstly find below summarized previous discussion as some great ideas have been already created there:

1. Purpose of community driven support:**

Resolve end user problems fast and effectively helping eve team to tackle common problems

Give users humane support

2. Main challenges of community driven support (based on previous discussion):

Having the information factual, correct, accurate and up-to-date.

Making sure that when customer base grows users don’t spam main forum section and create duplicate threads.

making sure that support tickets are not part of the core community and don’t ruin current vibe. Making sure that having all customers in community would not lead to trolls and compromised voting results for future products.

making sure we don’t end up as OnePlus community full of trolls and angry customers

3. Main ideas created so far to address the challenges above (To be filled after we brainstorm) :

Now to make sure we have a real brainstorming session I have not listed any particular ideas as locked to make sure we don’t get fixated on certain idea

How should you proceed?

Let’s keep this thread relaxed and try to come up with many ideas as possible. After we have enough ideas we will draft up some more concrete structure. Below you can find ideas that were mentioned during previous discussion (make sure to add your idea if I did not add it)

Try to find solutions to the challenges above as well as brainstorm on the following topics:

If you are not sure what to start with below are some ideas:(help me brainstorm more things here too ):

Community support structure
Do we start a separate section in community? Will support tickets appear as latest or not? If not how will members see them?

Rewards for users who help the most
How most active guys get rewarded for their help

FAQ
Ideas related to FAQ

Chat solution (Telegram, what’s App, etc)
What’s the best way to get answer from the team quick? Do we even need chat solution?

User flow

Resolving more private problems
In private messages or in chat, etc?

We will add more stuff tomorrow!

Below are key ideas from previous discussion: (need some formatting i have for now copy pasted them)

Thread creating page idea:

slader.com live q&a as an example

FAQ suggests if question was asked before

The people who are searching for help must identify very clearly who is from eve-tech and who is “only” a community-member.

Eve credits to reward

Perhaps a separate “helpdesk” category (with sub-categories) that only approved users can reply to threads? (but anyone can create) Is that even possible?

support category

The community is growing fast now, there are daily new threads and to prevent a flood of them a support section should be put next to the community in a subsection not visible at a first glance.

Force the user to categorize his question before to post it in order to get a quicker answer.

Give every supporter a trust level which should not be confused with the trust level gained in the community through likes and threads read.

What about showing the mother tongue language next to the name of each supporter?

FAQ is separate thing

auto response to support email sayng new community system is implemented and tested

April 5, 2017: Supporting the V just the way you need it…brainstorm!

On another topic

Hi all!

This is the first of many future supply-chain posts and I’m super excited to have my first official post!

In the spirit of community-driven everything here at Eve…. I need YOUR help to help me develop our V support process and warranty card. We will manufacture the V, package it and get it shipped to dedicated fulfillment centers around the world so that it can be efficiently shipped to end-customers.

But what happens once we ship out the V?

Things can break, devices can malfunction and we will need to support those that experience that. So here are our thoughts on how we manage this.

Warranty Cases

Eve provides a warranty for the V. If a customer receives a malfunctioning device, then we will ship a device at the same specs as fast as possible to the customer. Customer can then ship the faulty V back to the manufacturer for repair at no cost to them.

Repair Cases

If the device has software issues then we can troubleshoot within the community, cause quite frankly dough.community is much faster than a lot of “professional services”.

Now…here is the question. What should we do if a screen is broken, a kickstand falls apart or a device is dropped and requires repairs? What is the best, most efficient and cost-friendly method? We’ve brainstormed a few of ideas and wanted your vote!

Eve Repairs @ Factory: The traditional method would be for the customer to send the device to Eve, we analyze the situation and send it to the factory (all the way in China) for repairs. This process is typically lengthy and the factory may not give repairs first priority. On the plus side, they will be more equipped to repairing the device (since they made it) and would have the parts handy.

Outsourced Service Center: We can search for service centers (or better yet…you can recommend us some) and partner up with them to repair the V. Customers will ship the V to them to get it fixed. We will provide these service centers with the parts and instructions on how to fix the V.

DIY: Our customers are tech-savvy and quite skilled at fixing devices. What if you tell us what you need, we ship you the components and you fix it yourself? This is assuming you know what is broken and what needs to be fixed of course!

Community Repair Center: Our community is full of gems. We have highly technical individuals that are capable of repairing devices. What if we had select individuals from the community to fix our V issues? Of course, Eve would send over the components. The V would be made by the community and fixed by the community.

How should we repair the V?

38%Send it back to factory!

34%Hire a service center.

14%We can fix it ourselves if you send us the parts!

14%Made by us, fixed by us.

159voters

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Of course, on the back-end we will set up a DHL account for V support purposes and map out the process based on what the community votes for! Cost incurred will either be paid by Eve (warranty cases), split by both parties, or paid by the customers (repair scenarios). We will brainstorm as a community on what the best approach is!

We don’t anticipate many issues since all V devices will be tested for quality control before shipping. But stuff happens. We have to include some legal stuff to clarify what is and isn’t covered by warranty. Here is what the lawyer came up with (Please note: 1-year warranty is a standard factory warranty, but all Indiegogo buyers will receive 2-years warranty for being our first supporters and deserve extra perks ).

ISSUES COVERED BY THIS WARRANTY

Summary

(i)EVE Products purchased on EVE.COMMUNITY come with a limited warranty of 1 year (Warranty Period) starting from the date of delivery. Unless otherwise specified, this warranty covers the hardware components of the Product as originally supplied and does not cover, or partially covers software, consumable items, or accessories even if packaged or sold together with the Product. This warranty is only redeemable within the original country or region of purchase;
(ii)The limited warranty only covers product defects caused by workmanship or build materials. To make a claim, present your original Proof of Purchase (invoice), model and serial number of the product, and photo evidence of the product’s defects to EVE Customer Service;
(iii)Any repair and replacement service covered by warranty, along with shipping and handling, will be free within the first 1-year period;
(iv)EVE may use rebuilt, reconditioned or new parts and components when repairing any product. Alternatively, we may replace the defective product entirely with a rebuilt, reconditioned or new EVE product.

ISSUES NOT COVERED BY THIS WARRANTY

Summary

This Warranty does not apply to any non-EVE branded hardware products or any software, even if packaged or sold with EVE hardware. Manufacturers, suppliers, or publishers, other than EVE, may provide their own warranties to you – please contact them for further information. Software distributed by EVE with or without the EVE brand (including, but not limited to system software) is not covered by this Warranty. EVE does not warrant that the operation of the EVE Product will be uninterrupted or error-free. EVE is not responsible for damage arising from failure to follow instructions relating to the EVE Product’s use.

This Warranty does not apply: (a) to consumable parts, such as batteries or protective coatings that are designed to diminish over time, unless failure has occurred due to a defect in materials or workmanship; (b) to cosmetic damage, including but not limited to scratches, dents and broken plastic on ports unless failure has occurred due to a defect in materials or workmanship; (c) to damage caused by use with a third party component or product that does not meet the EVE Product’s specifications ; (d) to damage caused by accident, abuse, misuse, fire, liquid contact, earthquake or other external cause; (e) to damage caused by operating the EVE Product outside instructions. (f) to damage caused by service (including upgrades and expansions) performed by anyone who is not a representative of EVE ; (g) to an EVE Product that has been modified to alter functionality or capability without the written permission of EVE; (h) to defects caused by normal wear and tear or otherwise due to the normal aging of the EVE Product; (i) if any serial number has been removed or defaced from the EVE Product; or (j) if EVE receives information from relevant public authorities that the product has been stolen or if you are unable to deactivate passcode-enabled or other security measures designed to prevent unauthorized access to the EVE Product, and you cannot prove in any way that you are the authorized user of the product (eg. by presenting proof of purchase).

CUSTOMERS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

Summary

CUSTOMERS SHOULD MAKE PERIODIC BACKUP COPIES OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THE EVE PRODUCT STORAGE MEDIA TO PROTECT THE CONTENTS AND AS A PRECAUTION AGAINST POSSIBLE OPERATIONAL FAILURES.
Before receiving warranty service, EVE or its agents may require that you furnish proof of purchase details, respond to questions designed to assist with diagnosing potential issues and follow EVE’s procedures for obtaining warranty service. Before submitting your EVE Product for warranty service you should maintain a separate backup copy of the contents of its storage media, remove all personal information that you want to protect and disable all security passwords.
DURING WARRANTY SERVICE THE CONTENTS OF THE STORAGE MEDIA WILL BE DELETED AND REFORMATTED. EVE AND ITS AGENTS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSS OF SOFTWARE PROGRAMS, DATA OR OTHER INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THE STORAGE MEDIA OR ANY OTHER PART OF THE EVE PRODUCT SERVICED.
Following warranty service your’ EVE Product or a replacement device will be returned to you as your’ EVE Product was configured when originally purchased, subject to applicable updates. EVE may install system software updates as part of warranty service that will prevent the EVE Product from reverting to an earlier version of the system software. Third party applications installed on the EVE Product may not be compatible or work with the EVE Product as a result of the system software update. You will be responsible for reinstalling all other software programs, data and information. Recovery and reinstallation of other software programs, data and information are not covered under this Warranty.

Important: Do not open the EVE Product. Opening the EVE Product may cause damage that is not covered by this Warranty. Only EVE should perform service on this EVE Product.

What do you think about this warranty card? We want to work with the community to define what is and isn’t covered by warranty as legal jargon can be quite vague. Also, we want to know what the community thinks will be consistent repair cases so we can prepare for those scenarios!

Here are some preliminary thoughts of repair scenarios based on prototype experiences!

Broken screen

Kickstand coming loose

Pogo pins breaking

Dents to housing

What else can happen to the V? We want to make sure we’re prepared to fix the V if the situation arises.

we always manage to solve the puzzle in time regardless of the chaos we’re in

Just to summarize, I will be dividing this into 2 parts; the V support process based on what community votes for and our crowd-developed warranty card so we can define what is and isn’t covered and key repair situations we need to prepare for. Can’t wait to hear what you all think!

April 7, 2017: What’s inside Eve V?

April 8, 2017: V speakers are loud!

April 8, 2017: Noticed laser cat?! Read this thread! Community Service ver 1.0

On another topic

Hi guys!

Based on the previous discussions:

https://dough.community/t/community-support-part-2-brainstorm-rainbow-ocean-volcano/6124/
https://dough.community/t/keep-on-disrupting-tech-industry-with-eve-community-fire/6069/

We have put up a basic structure of our community driven customer service!
Thanks you for your amazing suggestions. As always they made implementation work much easier.

As discussed previously main we would like to try out having customer support handled in community so that Eve team and community members could help V users together.

In the previous thread we were able to outline key challenges of community driven support.

Structure we have put up in place addresses those challenges.

Goal of this thread is:

For you to get an understanding of structure we’ve put up.

Try this structure out and let us know what you think

We continue improving existing structure or scrap it and think again

Key challenges:

Making sure that when customer base grows users don’t spam main forum section and create duplicate threads.

making sure that support tickets are not part of the core community and don’t ruin current vibe. Making sure that having all customers in community would not lead to trolls and compromised voting results for future products.

making sure we don’t end up as OnePlus community full of trolls and angry customers

Having the information factual, correct, accurate and up-to-date as well as having clear distinction in answers between Eve team and normal members.

After consulting folks at Discourse (our forum provider) we feel there is a great solution!

Solution

1. Custom user groups

User groups are a very flexible building block in community structure. Groups can be used to:

Allow users in the group See/ Post/ Reply in a certain category

Grant users special title, post color, flair, and other visual differentiators

User groups can be tagged as a whole like @Team (everyone in our team will see such message)

How can users join certain group?

Users can be assigned to a group by Moderators and Admins

If the group is closed other group members could invite/approve non-group users to join the group

To put it in a nutshell user groups provide us with possibility to differentiate and manage rights&permissions of:

Eve Team members

People interested in crowd development and users who made this community possible

Normal users who join community to ask some product related question or for help

etc

So we have now created the following groups:

Normal Users

Creators

Eve Qualified Doctors

Team

*Group names are just to get a general idea we will come up with better ones together

What each group actually means

1. Normal User

Normal users are people who join community either because they are interested in community development and tech or for after sales support reasons. Normal users in this case pose the biggest risk to community culture and our great vibe. Also it is very likely that amount of normal users will explode after we start sales again and send Vs to press.

Normal users will be able to:

View any community thread or discussion

Post in support category only (more on support category below)

Post in dedicated community subcategory in which they would tell why they would want to join creators group and participate in product development

Be promoted by @Team and Creators to Creators group

So basically community will become invite only. It will be an open knowledge base to everyone on the Internet but in order to participate in any other discussion than support you would have to be approved by Creators or Eve Team.

2. Creators

Creators are heart and soul of the community. These people made Eve and what it is today. Some of you guys joined earlier when we were just starting out some of you later during the Indiegogo. Without you we would simply not exist. Your passion for tech helped us make V and I am sure many more products and other cool stuff to come.

Creators group will be able to:

Create / Reply /View all of the threads regarding product development, community, etc.

Use community fully

Have special badge or other way to differentiate from others.

Invite new users who show potential to join the group (group will be closed and it will be possible to join only by Invite or by letting @Team assign you there.)

What users will be transferred to creators group?

We think it would be fair to transfer all of the existing users to the group as you all guys joined super early! As after we open up sales again and send out press review units our user base could easily explode. Other option is to come up with certain cutoff point like activity in the community.

So here goes the first poll:

Should all existing members join creators group?

52%All except the ones with zero activity

24%I think we need a harder to pass selection criteria like at least 30 likes received, etc

20%Yes, I think it’s fair!

4%Other (please propose below below)

125voters

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3. Team

That’s quite easy Basically it’s all of our team members and we will have all kinds of rights! Like for instance adding laser cats to Creators profile

4. Eve Certified Doctors

I know the name is weird. We will make it sound better. Feel free to come up with suggestions

Eve certified doctors are few members selected from Creators group that can provide official answers to Normal users who post in Support category. Eve Certified Doctors would have special post color or mark so that it would be easy to distinguish them from others.

To summarize

By implementing suggested user groups we will be able to preserve community from becoming full of haters, trolls and other nasty stuff even if we have 1 billion users

As only people who are actually good fit for our community would be able to join it in full.
As mentioned before our community would still be open for everyone to view and join. But newly joined members would be able to post in Support category and in a special subcategory providing a chance to give your reasons why Creators should let you join the tribe!

Products and all the cool stuff will be done by Team and Creators!

We have now added 400 most active members to creators category and you can see it from laser cat next to their profile pic Don’t worry if you are not in creators yet we will be adding more people after we are done with testing here.

What do think of proposed structure?

59%Step in the right direction but needs actual testing

39%I like it!

2%Step in the wrong direction

0%Hate it!

112voters

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Now about support category!

I know this post is super long so thanks for reading! I have mentioned several times support category in this thread.

Based on your suggestions it is:

A category for people to post questions (quite obviously )

Will not be featured under latest so you will not see support questions on the front page

Does not allow users to post in Support category itself. Users have to choose subcategory. To see support category choose category view or follow this link #help (Pictures will be changed )

Phew… That’s it for now!

Next steps

Have a look at everything created so far.

Let us know what you think regarding questions asked in this post

After we have some feedback and are able to agree on fundamental community structure we will move onto FAQ and other finer details.

Community Rocks!

BASED ON DISCUSSION THINGS TO CONSIDER :

Get few levels of seniority for Creators moderate the group @mlivesey

Have issues solved more visible @benej98

April 12, 2017: Latest Updates: Shipping Timeline, Screen Calibration and more

On another topic

Hello Community!

It’s time for the latest updates from our frontlines!

1. V’s coming your way…Soon!

Most of the components needed for production are in our warehouse already.

Intel 600p SSDs, component we were most worried about, have arrived as well. Don’t take my word for it! See it yourself

A lot of SSDs can fit in those boxes

Packaging and housings are arriving next week!

Thanks to prototype testers feedback we were able to speed up the bug hunt and development process. @Mike is writing update regarding latest fixes later today.

We are moving at a very good pace and we are starting our first pilot production run at the actual factory floor on 25th of April!

Previously all of the units were hand assembled in prototype assembly room. Now we will go to the factory floor and make an actual production run of 50 devices, call it mini mass production.

The goal of this small production run is to test if there are any potential hiccups during manufacturing process. By having small production run first we will ensure that the rest of first batch devices would come off the assembly line without any problems and would not have to be reassembled or produced again.

During mini mass production we:

want to make sure that we use the optimal assembly process so that no screen, housing or other part gets scratched or damaged during assembly.

will run our first round of on site screen factory calibrations

will test the incoming quality check and outgoing quality check process (we want to make sure that no faulty device leaves factory floor so we will test each one of them before shipping to you)

will run a lot of other assembly tests

This stage will take us around 10 days and then assembly of the remaining units will take 2-3 days more after which they will be immediately shipped.
I will of course be in China together with most of our team during the production of the first batch of V’s and will make sure to keep you updated. I am not coming back before V’s are shipped to you!

We will start production of second batch of units immediately after first batch is produced. Second batch production is as before planned to be done in 30 days. We are considering splitting up production runs for the 2nd batch so like producing 500 devices first and shipping them 2 weeks after the first batch, making 500 more and shipping them few days later and so on before all 2000 devices are produced. This would help us to ship part of the limited birds faster than in 30 days! The exact timeline of the second batch will become clear after the first batch is produced.

2. Shipping addresses will be locked in 48 hours!

As we are preparing to enter all the order details into our shipping partner system you have 48 Hours to change your address in Backerkit. We have also sent you a notification email about it!

2. Each screen will be calibrated individually at the factory floor!

We want to make sure that all of the Vs have as close to amazing colors as possible. In order to do that we have partnered with the US based company Portrait Displays that has been in the business for years. Each an every V will follow standard we discussed in the community and we hope will be one of the most colorful displays out there!

This little buddies will be used on production line to make sure each and every V leaving factory floor will follow our color calibration requirements.

You can see our color performance here:

https://dough.community/t/eve-v-display-factory-color-calibration/6127

3. Certifications

We got good news here too! We have passed most of the tests now and just received FCC certificate

4. Sleeves

Sleeves are in production now and are looking great. We have shipped sleeves to one of our community prototype testers and he will soon (this week ) will share his thoughts on sleeves as well as pictures!

5. Prototypes

Last but not least few words on prototypes! First we would really like to thank all of the participants of the prototype testing program as we were able to find and resolve a lot of issues without having to wait to ship the product!

Most of the prototype units have been already shipped and received by community members. So far we’ve seen reviews of DVT1 and DVT2 prototypes. We are shipping few more DVT3 (final hardware) prototypes this week. Prototype testing is especially great for eliminating software and firmware related issues so make sure to keep posting your bug reports and general thoughts about them!

On another topic

Thanks for asking and sorry for taking a while to respond. @mulenga has put it quite well!

On another topic

it’s the 500 units for Hyper Early Bird (first batch) that will be shipped 7-10 May. The 500 two weeks later are already for the Limited Birds (second batch)…

So basically provided mini production of 50 units goes well we will assemble Hyper Early Bird devices (500 more) around May 7th shipping on May 10th (to stay on the safe side)

After seeing how the first production went we will either assemble all of the 2000 remaining Limited Bird devices in one go, meaning 30 days from Hyper early bird assembly

OR

We will start producing them in batches of let’s say 500 units stating 2 weeks from Hyper Early bird assembly.

Let me know if it clears things up

On another topic

It’s hard to explain but we get even more frustrated everytime there is a delay. We just can’t ship you product that is not the best we can make it!

To be frank the main reasons for this delays is that we are pushing boundaries of what was done before in the level of performance and design with this project. And sometimes you just really can’t know that there might be a small delay. A lot of companies are participating in this project and it is impossible impossible where delay would come from.

The main challenge is that it hard to know when all of the issues are resolved because there is no way to know how long fixing a problem will take before it is actually resolved.

Oftentimes we start fixing one problem and then it appears that something absolutely else was causing it and then we need to talk to whole bunch of vendors to fix it.

I mean think about it. If for example our speakers are not loud enough. What can we do with our team? Well we can see that we followed implementation guidelines and that actual hardware component is the correct one. So to fix the problem we first need to talk to speaker echo chamber vendor and see what they think they will tell the problem is with. That vendor will tell that it’s the speaker vendor problem in our case ACL, Then after providing samples to ACL (their officei is another city in China) we wait for them to analyze the root cause. Then it appears that it’s An issues with Realtek codec. Then Realtec starts fixing the problem through firmware update but during this process we discover that acoustic chambers are not properly aligned during assembly. Then we go to housing supplier with our mechanical engineers and start making changes to the housing. And then it goes on and on and on That’s why big companies oftentimes ship garbage products. Simply because it takes too much time and money to resolve small issues tat are crucial for good product experience.

And now the question comes, how can you estimate how much time a simple problem of speaker not producing good enough sound could be fixed? And what options do you have if you promised your customers certain delivery date.

I guess you have 2 options:

Stick to the timeline and ship the product with the issue hoping that during next project it wont happen again

Fix it but risk people not understanding delay and telling you are intentionally lying, etc.

We had issues like this all the time and they never come alone. There are multiple problems at the same time.

So my point with this long message is that we never want to delay our shipment for any reason but when it happens it means we made a decision to delay instead of shipping you a product that you could buy in any electronics store

April 22, 2017: Good news to start your weekend!

On another topic

Hi Guys!

Wanted to show you few cool things we were able to achieve with V now:

1. V now has lighting screen power on speed of 0.5 seconds

We know you didn’t like the fact that powering on screen took 4 seconds before. After some tweaking we were able to achieve this :

Eve V screen power on in 0.5 seconds - YouTube

2. V takes 6-7 seconds to boot!

No bloatware + well optimized system allows us to boot faster than Macs!

V boot new boot speed! - YouTube

3. Calibrating my V’s screen!

Yesterday we finally got the screen calibrator that will be used for each and evert device to tune it individually. Our default calibration had several visible calibration errors. Now my new calibration is nearly perfect sRGB. After reruning the test I was able to get to 100% sRGB .

Calibrating V's display! - YouTube

4. Shipping timeline

No update here Which is good as we are starting mini mass production run next week.

####Have an awesome weekend!

April 28, 2017: [28.04.17] Mini mass production results + Shipping schedule

On another topic

Hi Community!

This week has been a long one. We focused all our resources on mini mass production. (If you are hearing about mini mass production for the first time read more about it here).
To sum it up, the V prototypes have been earlier put together individually, manually by engineers, in the dozens. And now the V enters the final production lines, to be manufactured in the thousands. Scale gets bigger. This is what every product goes through in its development, and it is the important stage to get the high quality for the end product!

So I have good and not so good news.
(A.k.a why our rigorous attention to detail is a must.)

After we have assembled first units at the factory floor we have put them to the aging test.
We have noticed that after few hours of testing (that would equal few weeks of normal end user use) LCD screens started showing yellow stains and lines from time to time.
We have assembled more displays with touch panels (direct bonding them) and only 90 displays of 300 passed the test. =This batch of screens is not up to the task.

This is how the issue basically looked like. We will send more pictures as we get them from the factory.

So the good news is that thanks to mini mass production run we discovered now that if we would assemble and ship Vs to you, at first there would be no problems, but after few weeks of use you would get yellow stain appearing on your display. Many users suffer from this with other manufacturers, just google “yellow stripes on display”.

Next steps:

Because of such a huge screen defect rate we are sending screens back to the supplier.

Fortunately, our screen supplier has stock and they will send us new screens already next week. They ensured this would not happen again and it was a quality management issue on their end.
As a result it pushes production schedule 2-3 weeks forward from May 10th , as it takes a bit of time to get the components safely delivered and into production work. We have successfully adapted to the situation with Microsoft and Intel as well; they know the industry and our quality standards dictate this status.

We are very frustrated, and have no excuses to give you. We just can’t ship you some lower quality devices after you waited so long! We wove to transparency and sometimes it means that we have to deliver news like this, we take all the responsibility. And will continue to work for your benefit guys!

To us this issue also means that opening of further V sales is pushed later, as we will keep our promise of first delivering devices and only then opening sales up again.
To add, the V remains the same high quality, and the production phase continues with planned, prestated actions. This mini mass production result impacts only the timeline.

Some additional notes:

We investigated the matter and the issue is not caused by assembly method but rather the display quality.

You can find a lot of devices on the market with this problem. Some companies would ship to hit promised timeline. We can’t! Unthinkable

There might be possibility to get Limited birds (2nd batch) produced earlier as we have more time to prepare materials for the whole quantity.

The timeline for delivering had the mini mass production step in place for this very reason. After new screens arrive everything continues the same, and the V will be delivered ASAP (without compromising quality)

V’s will be shipping soon and now V sleeves and other accessories are in the warehouse too!

Prototype testing

We have shipped last units to prototype testers some time ago and we should see their impressions coming soon.

And a bit more good news, COMPUTEX:

Microsoft was so impressed with our device after testing it that we will be a featured device in Computex this May!
From what I am allowed to disclose is that Eve team will be at Computex and V will be in Microsoft booth as a flagship Windows device!

Are you coming to Computex?

90%No

9%I don’t know yet

1%Yes

354voters

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Should we make Computex meetup?

78%Yes but I can’t join (A least I get to see pictures:blush:)

13%No

7%Yes but I am not sure if I can join

2%Yes and I will join for sure!

306voters

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April 29, 2017: Community Management Trinity

On another topic

Hey everyone…

Over the past few weeks, some of you have noticed strange goings-on. Forum posts with strange colors, strangers in Insider chat and the like. Or if you’ve attended the Ulm community meet-up, you may have overheard more obvious things. Time to lift the veil!

Alongside ‘Original Community Manager’ @iKirin and ‘Community Manager 2.0’ @nawthor I will be helping to make sure that the Eve team knows what the community wants, and that the community knows what the Eve team is up to. They, and everyone at Eve, are incredibly passionate about what is being built here, and I couldn’t wish for better colleagues to share my enthusiasm with.

As you may have guessed from my V Prototype Testing Results thread, I like it when things are collected, sorted and presented in a more convenient way. Going forward, I will do my best to make the flow of information between the team and the community as smooth as possible.

If you need help, you only have to find a nice big cloud and fire up the community’s very own Bat-signal: @Team.

The V is amazing, and it’s only the beginning. I look forward to helping Eve and the community as we head onward to great things… together!