Kreyos Meteor smartwatch, the 3rd most successfully funded crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo platform ever, has announced another delay in shipping of their anticipated product. In a backer update targeting their over 11,000 backers, the company explained their dilemma:
Hi Everyone!
As you may already know, we recently made the difficult decision to push the shipping dates of the Meteor to April due to an “echoing” issue we identified in the late stages of hardware testing. Actually, as mentioned, it was both a difficult and easy decision at the same time–it was easy because we didn’t want to do you further disservice by shipping the watch with one of its key features not functioning optimally.
You can read all about it on our blog post here.
As promised, we are still 100% committed to launching a top-notch, category-defining product, we already identified a solution to this issue and all hands here at Kreyos are working round the clock to get this fix implemented across all Kreyos units and have them ready to ship as soon as possible.
Another thing we committed to is being more transparent to you in regards to all things related to development and making sure we update you as often as possible moving forward.
Today we wanted to share how we’re going to address the “echoing” problem we wrote about. The diagrams below describe the minor modifications we are making to the hardware which, aside from fixing the echoing issue, will further improve speaker quality.
Essentially, the issue is that the sound from the speaker is somehow picked up by the microphone from within the hardware.
We solved this by putting some shielding on part of the speaker that faces inward effectively suppressing any sound leak that may be picked up by the microphone from within the Meteor.
For good measure, we enclosed the microphone in a chamber that insulates it from picking up any sound that may leak from within the hardware.
Lastly, we repositioned the mic downward which would optimize its directional pick up.
Our early tests returned positive results so far and we’re confident that these enhancements will solve the echoing issue we encountered. We’re all very optimistic about being able to apply these changes to the Meteor and be able to ship them out to our backers in April.
As always, feel free to reach out to us at support@kreyos.com should you have any questions. We’ll provide more updates as they come along.
Thank you for your continued support in this project!
– The Kreyos Team
In an earlier update to backers, the Kreyos team apologized for the delays and committed to regular updates for the many supporters who committed to the project. It is widely known that crowdfunding campaigns that “go dark” on their backers is a bad sign for the project. Ongoing communication is a must for any crowdfunding campaign.
The fact that Kreyos has committed to shipping a quality product and must endure further delays to achieve this goal has not allayed concerns for all backers as some have requested refunds from the Indiegogo platform. It is well known that many crowdfunding campaigns ship rewards late as small companies encounter challenges which only become known during their production process. One of the best known crowdfunding campaigns of all time- another smartwatch, Pebble encountered shipping delays but finally delivered backer rewards at the beginning of 2013.
Kreyos recently demonstrated a working prototype of the Meteor at CES 2014.
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