B.X
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Posts posted by B.X
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3 minutes ago, silversolver said:
Agreeing with most of that in principle, except that serial 1009 has been reported in the wild. 🙂
There were prototypes which were given serial numbers. That accounts for a few. The remaining discrepancy may be a small failure rate and those defects having received serial numbers. There may have been other reasons for skipping serial numbers that I'm not aware of. I specifically said "as many as around 800" because we don't know the exact number of units shipped. We did see a picture of a pallet of boxes that could have had as many as 600 phones on it and we had between 100 and 200 units that we were pretty sure had been delivered before that pallet picture. If you want to assume there are 1009 units minus the prototypes with no skipped or failed units, that still doesn't come up to 1750 as the upper bound, 1000/0.70 is 1429 which is significantly below 1750. I do acknowledge that 1750 is an unlikely but possible upper bound based on the order number list that I have. The primary point was that 3000 was impossible because there simply are not that many order numbers in the system even if we assume a 100% payment rate on the first about 6 months of pre-orders before they started only taking orders with payment. Being more generous, 1000 sets of components in the initial bulk purchase with a 95% yield (really high) would be 950 units shipped, 100% assembled prior to CNY is again 950 units shipped, 70% completed is 950/0.70 or 1357 which is a pretty generous upper bound to me but would represent a massively non-standard cart conversion rate even more generous than the very high 33% rate I've been using in my estimates. I personally would be surprised if these components were anything other than grey market and 95% success on grey market modules would be really really good, but I don't know for a fact that these are grey market so we're deep into just my opinion there. Approaching this from all different directions yields numbers that are all surprisingly close together and the exact number doesn't really matter, if we say 1200 paid orders plus or minus 200, we're most likely right.
The implications of this sales volume are far more important than 20% here or there. Can a cell phone manufacturer survive on under a million dollars the first year of sales when development costs are as high as they are and probably had to be financed. This phone has about 5 radios with a cost of at least $15k per radio for certifications so $75k just to get that piece of paper and that's one of only many expensive things they had to pay for. Assuming 100% markup certification represents around 15% of their first year budget not counting any finance costs. I sure hope that this phone is actually based on another phone so that much of that 15% of budget might go away. If it is, I'd love to know what one because it could be a source for repair parts down the road and that could be a really big deal. I imagine that the slider took a hard month of engineering time, at $250 an hour (really cheap), that's $43k. Maybe Chen is a mechanical engineer and he did this personally, or maybe his partner is. It came out great but even if they did it themselves, I bet it was expensive and 10% of the budget isn't unlikely. Craig and mccreary convinced me that all but the CPU board are custom boards, that's a lot of electronic engineering time, 2 months of hours would be conservative, another $85K or 20%. That keyboard is really nice, 15%??? 25%??? of budget. The list goes on, we haven't looked at software or supply chain or distribution or even feeding Chen or getting him on flights. It all adds up fast and I sure hope the banker isn't standing at the door awaiting his million.
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On 1/23/2020 at 1:29 PM, EskeRahn said:
So summing up anywhere between 225/.13 and 274/.09 that is in an interval about 1750 to 3000.
I can confirm that there are significantly less than 3000 total orders, including all the early pre-orders that never got paid. Your lower bound is possible but would mean that an insanely high percentage of the pre-orders from back when you didn't have to pay to get an order number would have had to have been paid. I'd say that your lower bound is a bit high as an upper bound and the lower bound could be a little below 1000 but that would be a mighty pessimistic estimate. My honest expectation is that there are noticeably above 1000 paid orders at this point. Another data point is that the new paid order volume is currently hovering around two per day and only had a short bump upwards when the December deliveries started happening. The January deliveries don't seem to have had any impact on new order volume. I expect the next significant volume increase will be when the Pro1 is in stock for immediate shipping and that that bump will be huge, maybe even a hundred a day for a short time.
My hope is that with as many as around 800 Pro1 in the wild by the end of January, the recognition will increase and sales volumes will eventually stabilize at some volume high enough to support F(x)tec long term as a small niche maker of a specialty device. I don't think the $750 price point is sustainable even if it's over 100% markup on per unit manufacturing costs, so if you're on the fence it might be a good time to order now while the price is low and the delivery window is shorter than the chargeback window for normal credit cards.
If you have a device (or will soon) then get out and promote it, show it off, talk about it online, help F(x)tec get their volume up and be a viable business so that you can buy the Pro2 when you eventually want to replace your wonderful Pro1.
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19 minutes ago, david said:
Without getting into the actual numbers for the highest order number, how does 5400 relate to 150 if you are taking every 3rd order number? 5400/3 = 1800. Or, is there really a mapping from order number to number of orders placed, and you are saying that you'll take the highest order placed and divide that by 3 to guess at the total number of paid orders? In other words, then your 150th order placed might be the 50th paid order?
The API allows enumerating every single order number so to reach 150, I counted the 149 valid pre-order numbers before my order 5400.
The pre-order numbers don't follow any numerical pattern that I've been able to determine. Some are only a few apart, some are hundreds apart.
The divide by 3 is to determine an estimate of actual paid orders from pre-orders. It's well documented that ecommerce can normally expect 1 in 6 items placed in cart (even in single item storefronts) to result in a sale, but I'm assuming that this very special item did better than that. I don't know, the 3 is an intuitive guess and nothing more. So, yes I'm guessing my order is actually the 50th paid order.
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(reposting HERE in the production status thread intentionally)
Hi everyone!
Adding my info to the order statistics. I also received a "stock assigned" email this morning.
- #5400 (150th pre-order placed)
- Ordered: Febuary 28th 01:13:38 GMT
- Paid: July 31st 15:06:45 GMT
- Stock assigned January 20th 11:43:18 GMT
- County: US
- No IGG coupon
- QWERTY
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3 minutes ago, david said:
How do you know it was the 150th pre-order placed? Is that done by querying the API they are using in WordPress?
And if you can map order number to true pre-order count, would you be able to take the highest pre-order number and find out how many phones were ordered?
The API is from their WooCommerce WordPress plugin, so yes.
The current highest order number is 8441X (x is a single digit but belongs to a real person so I won't share the order number.) The number of paid orders isn't possible to determine precisely because they didn't delete the canceled unpaid orders but a good guess can be made because ecommerce cart conversions are reasonably predictable. (I've been using a conversion rate of 3 in my guesses instead of the industry standard 6 because this item is pretty special.)
FXtec has been asked for numbers but has not responded to those requests so I won't give out much more than to correct when people say stupid things like there are 48,000 orders because that's far from true. I've gone into specifics on my estimates in the much smaller IRC channel if you're interested in talking there and will promise not to share widely since that is pretty clearly not something FXtec wants.
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Hi everyone!
Adding my info to the order statistics. I also received a "stock assigned" email this morning.
- #5400 (150th pre-order placed)
- Ordered: Febuary 28th 01:13:38 GMT
- Paid: July 31st 15:06:45 GMT
- Stock assigned January 20th 11:43:18 GMT
- County: US
- No IGG coupon
- QWERTY
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5 hours ago, Hook said:
I would add the possibility of one other factor--
I propose an additional factor-- F(x)tec likely started with an Angel investor who got them to the point of being able to take pre-orders. The proven customer interest let them get a loan for development. That short term high interest loan started coming due in early August and F(x)tec has probably been making payments with the money collected from buyers. Development continued and expenses continued until everything was ready to go, but the money probably ran out. They scraped together a few more orders (the current rate is about 3 to 5 per day) and are using that money to pay the factory to trickle out a few phones but unless orders continue there will be no money to pay the factory to make the phones that customers already paid for.
So rather than complain about the delays, we need to help F(x)tec drum up business so that payments on new orders can go directly to building phones. Time is critical because they have to catch up before the next loan installment is due.
Each new order probably represents about TWO phones being shipped to already paid customers so we need to get the order count up there and let F(x)tec catch up!!
The product is finished, lets do our part to make it a success. Talk about it in your IRL social groups, post your excitement in phone sites and complain to editors if they don't have anything about the phone for you to up-vote. Tweet about it, IRC about it, Instagram about it, blog about it, if you must even say something on Facebook. Tell the world that there is a slider phone option that is done and starting to ship.
Another 500 paid orders can make all the difference so lets make that happen!
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18 hours ago, EskeRahn said:
We have seen people in here wanting it even huger before. As well as smaller.
You can count me in the group that would like it larger, not smaller. I also find that "Large" gloves don't fit most of the time so phones are not the only thing that could be bigger.
The 154mm total width would be pretty good as the width for just the letters and would be less than 10mm smaller than a standard keyboard for the letters. Unfortunately they put empty space on both sides plus 4 more keys in each row so the net size of the letters is just about half that of a standard keyboard. No matter what, this will be dramatically better than a screen keyboard, so I placed my $700 bet but larger keys would be an improvement and just another half inch larger screen could allow for true full size keys!
In reality, the curved screen is my largest complaint about the phone itself. When I pre-ordered, we were still being promised a flat screen. I had a curved screen for a few weeks and hated it, my only hope here is that the really thick body will make the curve less annoying. Fortunately I expect there will be quite the used market on ebay for awhile if the curve is just unusable.
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7 minutes ago, VaZso said:
Okay, but how / what have you counted?
F(x)tec uses a Wordpress site with a shopping cart add-on that has an API which I used. The API allows anyone in the public to check for valid or invalid order numbers and with the help of some others, I was able to determine that the valid order numbers included any time during the pre-order period where someone put a phone in cart. After the pre-order period, the system changed and now it only says new orders where the person at least tried to pay are valid. I posted about this a week or two ago.
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2 minutes ago, VaZso said:
Where did you get the number of 150?
I counted the 149 pre-orders in front of mine.
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27 minutes ago, magicafternoon said:
They definitely have over 20000 preorders. Mine is in that range.
They definitely have used order numbers that high, but the order numbers are not sequential. At the time of this posting, the lowest pre-order was just over 4700 and the highest actual order was just over 40900. The system used to allocate a number every time someone put a phone in cart and now will not allocate a number until you at least try to pay but allocated numbers are still not sequential. My personal order number is 5400 and it is the 150th pre-order placed in cart. If the e-commerce standard of about 6:1 carts to orders holds then my phone is approximately the 25th pre-order. We saw pictures of 6 boxes with 20 phones in the top layer. That might have been empty boxes received for packing, or may have been phones ready to go out. That may have been 1 layer tall or may have been 2 or even 3 layers tall. My hope is that the initial batch is at least 240 phones (2 layers tall), but I have only seen the same pictures everyone else has.
The order numbers have skipped widely variable amounts but with a few exceptions have been no more than about 50 apart with some are as close as 4 apart.
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The video format is less than ideal, but the unacceptable part was that they use a 3rd party mailing service which includes click trackers.
Two can play that game though, based on public information, the email tracking company is JFC Engineering https://www.jfcengineering.co.uk/. I wonder how much of the design was farmed out to them and if knowing they are involved will be useful in any way.
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FlyingAntero, It’s only numbers. I don’t know of a legitimate use for it beyond what I’ve released already but if you have one, I’ll listen here.
I just would like to know how many orders there are in total so that I could estimate the user base for a software project. Also, I am curious to know how many orders there are before me. I placed my pre order in early April right after I got my voucher from the Moto Mod Keyboard campaign and paid in August but still got 5 digits number.
FlyingAntero, for the first question the only thing I can reasonably say is that the numbers are small, unless your project is really low effort and something pretty much everyone with the device just has to have, there would be no way to justify development at the kinds of prices apps sell for. The kinds of apps that are "free" for the cost of privacy won't fly with this group and are even less justifiable. I've heard that the actual number is not something F(x)tec wants released, unless Erik or someone official-ish tells me otherwise, I'm going to respect that.
For the second question, the numbers I have are useless. Your order is automatically at the front of the queue because you used the MotoMod voucher. The numbers are small enough that every single MotoMod voucher should be fulfilled in the first batch but I can't differentiate between paid and unpaid orders nor differentiate MotoMod voucher orders, the API just isn't that specific.
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Could you share your list for my own use? Can’t wait to get the Pro1 on my hands. Send mail to {removed}@gmail.com if possible.
FlyingAntero, It's only numbers. I don't know of a legitimate use for it beyond what I've released already but if you have one, I'll listen here.
Michael Bosscha, I agree that people were just trying to stir a ruckus. Giving the facts and the basis behind them hopefully will end that effort.
I'm as unhappy as the next buyer that I was used to provide some free financing without being informed, but knowing the orders are limited means that we didn't actually do as much financing as people seem to think. The large majority of finance had to have been from elsewhere and our payments probably had minimal impact.
I'm also unhappy about the statement made that orders were shipping soon when these very smart people knew that hadn't even submitted the FCC approval and that even if they were successful at passing on the first round (they were) they would not be shipping when they said. I don't know as much about some of the other areas so can't say if there were other cases where they made promises that they knew were not possible.
All that said, I'm happy that we will be getting our phones soon!!
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What gave you the idea that it should be a wordpress number???
But of course not all pre-orders can be expected to have been paid, so being number #22001 does not mean that there are 22000 paid orders that needs to be handled first.
The orders site is a Wordpress site using the Woocommerce plugin. Woocommerce has an API which allows you to look at the order numbers, and I've looked. I have the exact list of submitted order numbers (as of about 20 minutes ago, ending with 39215) and they are not even close to sequential. There is a Woocommerce plugin plugin that allows sequential order numbers but it's not being used. I've also asked someone who didn't pay for their order number and confirmed that the unpaid order number is in my list, so I don't have the list of paid orders, only placed orders. I also checked the financials on the factory (self reported, so maybe not 100% accurate) and even if every one of these pre-orders suddenly got paid, the factory has enough capacity to make all the pre-ordered phones in well under a month.
Chen did a good job of choosing a factory that was big enough to handle us and not so big that we don't matter to them.
If you paid, or pay soon then you won't have that long to wait after the first regular production phone ships.
No information other than the order number is leaked, the person's name and other information remains confidential and secure.
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WebFX posted a video update where Adrian Li Mow Ching says they have some submissions that they've made to licensing and regulatory authorities and are waiting for their approval. He also says that they will start shipping on October 29th! No weasel words, nothing, a concrete statement with an exact date! The video is at https://vimeo.com/364339691 for you to watch yourselves.
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For those of us who don't like Discord, I've set up an unofficial IRC channel on FreeNode. #fxtec.
You can install an IRC client such as xChat, or use a webIRC such as https://webchat.freenode.net/#fxtec .
Unlike Discord, users who are not present when you send a message will not get the message. You can mask your IP from other users using something called a "cloak" (or TOR, or a VPN) but FreeNode still gets all messages and only their policy prevents them from logging.
The channel currently does not require users to be registered, but if there is another spam problem I may have to change that occasionally.
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If you have any further concerns, please contact us directly at https://www.fxtec.com/contact/ as we don’t provide support over the community forums.
The https://www.fxtec.com/contact/ form is only an mailto: link so it just bounces as undeliverable after 5 days. There doesn't seem to be any working way to get support outside of the forum as your mail server is unreachable. (Thank you for providing support via the forum.)
Thank you for the clarification that my card was billed no VAT, only state tax. I am seeing the pattern to the poorly written software including the phrase "Shipping: $10.63 (incl. VAT)" when that's simply the shipping and "VAT" is leftover from EU customers.
I have no issue with paying state tax to a US based distributor who is under US law. Collection of state tax is optional for most companies. It depends on an agreement with the states, or a state specific law such as the Minnesota law mentioned, but it has become common practice to assume that such an agreement or law exists even when it doesn't. These distributors correctly forward the payments appropriately, even though unnecessarily, so the issue of criminal collection of a tax without forwarding is a non-issue.
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I have a rather large issue with my order that I tried to resolve privately but the email was ignored.My phone order is being exported to the US, there is no need to charge VAT on the phone or on the shipping.
Unique issue. To resolve it, why not have it shipped direct to the US and pay the USD price+local tax that way? Or aren’t you headed back for a while…
This is not a unique issue, I assume it's being done to hundreds or thousands of US customers. I'm in the US and having it shipped to me here, this isn't the case of a US person being in the UK or anything odd like that. It's a straight forward US purchase from a UK store being mishandled. Potentially criminally if they don't pay my state the money they collect for state taxes.
Fxtec's software definitely is collecting state tax, it's listed on the invoice and everything. My credit card has already been billed not only for state tax, but for VAT, and they're billing state tax on the VAT, and the shipping and the VAT on the shipping. The last two never apply, you never bill tax on tax nor bill tax on shipping. I do admit that they are permitted by my state to voluntarily collect the state tax (on the goods only) and forward that money to my state but if they collect it and do not forward it, it's a felony.
The Supreme Court decision does not apply to international sales, only Interstate within the US. The Supreme Court ruling also doesn't require states to demand sales tax from remote sellers, it permits them to make that demand. Since the ruling is new, only a few states like SD have such laws.
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I have a rather large issue with my order that I tried to resolve privately but the email was ignored.
My phone order is being exported to the US, there is no need to charge VAT on the phone or on the shipping. See http://www.brighton-accountants.com/blog/vat-uk-usa/ , and consult Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs for specifics about zero rating exported items going to the US. I'd be fine paying a fair paperwork labor charge for the effort of documenting the export but I'm not fine with paying VAT.
I'm also being billed tax for my state, but my state has no reciprocal tax agreement with FxTec, so collecting this is not necessary. It is optional for an entity without an agreement and not in my state to collect this tax. If it is collected then the state must be paid, it's a felony to collect this tax and not pay it. It appears that the VAT and shipping were included in the amount taxed, other taxes and shipping costs should not be counted when calculating state tax (a paperwork labor charge is also not billed state tax.)
Given the Chinese content in the phone, I'm expecting there to be a rather hefty customs bill as well which will bring the combination of appropriate and inappropriate taxes collected to as much as 64% (depending on what customs charges) of the initial cost. my total tax rate should total 0% plus whatever customs charges. Customs to the US is potentially 25% of the Chinese content but if the total cost of the Chinese content was under 50% of the total retail it can be marked UK origin and will likely get 0% customs charge. Chinese content excludes things like the imported SOC and screen even if the device is assembled in China. If marked "made in China" customs is likely to charge 25% without looking any further so it would be nice to know if the phone will be marked "made in China", or "made in UK", or if it will have a percentage Chinese content marked on he paperwork.
This isn't a small discrepancy.
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Yes charging with 250mA is a joke – that was the point.. (hence the LOL). It might be academically optimal but not a usable method in real life.
I dunno about what you're using today but 250mA for 8 hours a day is plenty for my existing phone. No joke needed. I average about that because the connector on my old phone is bad and only works half of nights, if i miss one night because of the bad connection i just make sure to be careful the next night. if i miss the next night, i have to leave the phone on the 500mA (real, not rated) charger for a few hours during the day.
The aluminum or magnesium back is a big issue, but wireless charging could also be done through the screen. Efficiency is impacted by a lot of factors, but distance is a huge one, charging through the screen would add a lot of distance so you'd probably want a QI charger with active cooling. The impedance mismatch is at the transmitter, so the power loss is at the transmitter, so the heat is at the transmitter. Of course heat rises so the phone gets the heat unless the charger actively gets rid of it.
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Will the Pro1 have support for VoLTE (Voice over LTE) support?
Can anyone translate the supported radio bands into US carriers?
On the pre-production status
in General Discussion
Posted
The vast majority of devices were produced towards the end of this window, limited production while bugs are worked out is quite normal in a high tech product so an average of 6 phones a day is not exactly a fair description. What is fair is to say that they didn't have a manufactureable phone when they said "We are beginning the manufacturing in the next few weeks with estimated first shipping to pre-order customers during the 2nd week of September." in the request for payment email. They may have had a few mockups or pre designed-for-manufacture prototypes by then but nothing that was ready to be manufactured and regulator approved and licensed.
The 1000 is the most pessimistic number that I could possibly back with the evidence. 1200 orders to date is my best number. 1400 or even a few more with EskeRahn's correction on serial numbers is not unreasonable. EskeRahn's 1750 lower bound is even possible but seems quite unlikely based on what I've seen. 3000 is impossible unless they have some other order system that is hidden from the one where all the orders people here talk about are. I'm aware that 20 to 40 units were sold through a retailer and probably don't appear in the order numbers I have, they have minimal impact on totals.
My prior presentation of this as using new orders to produce old orders was simply saying that I think they are doing what many startups do, working near the edge. It's consistent with the Ponzi scheme but without the intent. I have every belief that Chen and Fxtec are trying to be successful. We all have no reason to believe that Chen or anyone else is running away with a ton of money, if that were the intent it would have made sense to do that on August 15th or so when they had a ton of our money and many of the expenses hadn't come due yet. They didn't run. I continue to be concerned about the post 1000 unit mark, but have no hard evidence, only speculation. These concerns will evaporate when they cross the 1200 shipped units threshold proving that they didn't get 1000 sets of components in an initial round with no way to get the next round of components.
The recent very large batch implies that either they resolved any financial issues or never had them in the first place. I've always presented my concerns as educated guesses and not fact. The facts I have are the order numbers visible to anyone who looks combined with the (possibly faked) comments many have made here, and other places online, and Fxtec concrete statements, and posted pictures. Just for fun, I ran a forensic analysis on the picture of what appeared to be a pallet of 600 phones and it comes up clean, no evidence of photo tampering, but it really is just a picture of some nice boxes. I can also add as a fact (to me at least, I could be a paid actor like Doktor Oswaldo for all you know) that there is a box from Fxtec sitting at my home that I'll be there to open on this Friday.