As far as the latest news are, I just got wind that the Air Integration will not be available in Central/East Europe before
July 2011.
I would not say I'm 100% sure, but from what I read/gathered, the patent issue relating to the technical specs seems to have stoped the
inital Air Integration that was already finished or close to being finished.
The patent licensing seems to have gone very wrong, and Mares was probably "blackmailed" to put it lightly. :rtfm: Mares probably calculated that the complete change of the technology + production of the completely new model will be less costly than the licensing of the originaly intended patent. I can't even begine to imagine how greedy someone was. :shocked2:
Of course, you can't put value on postponing a well touted flagship product, but I would like to beleive that Mares really had no choice.
Think about it. Had they had a choice the Air Integration would have been on the market more than a year ago. Now, they have to put into production a whole new product AND change it free of charge.
The late date that I heard of is also quite understandable. If the product is now being tested, as I read somewhere on this board, that would mean that it hasn't been released to manufacturing. Provided all the testing is finished successfully, it takes time to actually make thousands of the thing somewhere in China, and ship it worldwide, and organize the replacement process with all Mares handlers. Worldwide.
There's actually no reason to be angry or resentful with Mares. I'm sure they didn't have a board meeting one day and said: "Hey, let's annoy our customers, by releasing a good product, but leave something out that the competition has. Just for the fun of it. Than we can say it will be available later, but we'll postpone it a couple of times so Luigi in marketing pulls the rest of his hair out.
Mares, I'm with you. Maybe you can have someone in your legal department reread the non-disclosure agreement with your first intended air integration patent holder. Maybe there's a looop and you can scream out the name of the company for all the world to know...
Then again it might have just been a case of shabby production which rendered the Air integration useless. Who knows...
ZB