If you were hoping to wear your Myo gesture-control armband while clinking champagne glasses this New Year’s, you may want to rethink your wardrobe.
On Tuesday, Thalmic Labs delivered an update to their early adopters letting them know that they will have to wait a little bit longer for their pre-orders. In the email, Thalmic explains that the delay is due to “a need to better the industrial design and user experience”. The first batch of pre-orders will now start shipping in early 2014 and Thalmic explains “it will take us a few months to work our way through the long list of pre-orders from our early supporters”.
The wait may be worth it. Thalmic reported that they found a way to make the device thinner than the prototype shown in the video. And the extra time will help ensure that there are applications ready for the device when it gets on the arms of users straight out of the box.
If you are really anxious to get your Myo first, Thalmic Labs is offering the chance to switch your final device pre-order for a developer kit. Developer kits are early versions of the Myo intended for software developers. This version will ship only with support for a bare API and will not have any consumer applications. So if you aren’t too good at programming you may not want to make the swap. The developer kits are expected to ship before the first batch of final devices.
Thalmic has set the developer unit shipping date as early 2014. This suggests that when they say the first batch of final devices will ship in the first part of 2014, they really mean the end of this first part, so keep that in mind. All orders, regardless of the batch you are in, will ship on a first come, first served basis.
We reached out to Thalmic to better understand the difference between the developer kit and the final version. According to Thalmic, “the software and firmware on the final device will make for a seamless out-of-box experience, and we plan to have more applications available at that time. Since we don’t anticipate making changes to the core hardware, developers who select the Myo Developer Kit will be able to update the software and firmware to match the final consumer Myo once available”.
Even though the consumer release has been delayed, we will start to hear about Myos in the wild before the year is out. Thalmic Labs also announced this week that a select group of partners and developers will be receiving alpha versions of Myo in the next few weeks.
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