Electric Imp now available at Spark fun.
SparkFun plans on releasing impees over next few weeks.
Are there any impees available from SparkFun or is it just the imp itself? Is Electric Imp selling the impees directly?
EDIT: Watching the linked video it looks like they expect to have a few impees available by early October at SparkFun
As expected from reading the comments on the product page, there appears to be quite a bit of pushback from those in the “open-source” community as well as the conspiracy theorists. Perhaps a list of things it cannot / won’t do on ei’s website might be useful.
What can I say? You can’t please everyone! But, I’m a happy camper with it. I’m actually surprised it’s being sold right now during a “beta” stage and without the new online IDE out. Personally, I would have held off to making these publicly for sale until it was a bit more polished. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying it appears there are still some kinks to be worked out.
Our developer community is very important to us and though we understand some folks’ desire to host their own cloud service, we think it’s more feasible to provide an all-inclusive solution. As with any company in our situation, we need to make revenue a priority so we need to take into consideration the needs of our main target market - 2nd or 3rd tier manufacturers, companies, or individuals who will implement at least hundreds of imps into their products. We think that our all-inclusive solution would help them minimize their time-to-market and decrease on-going management once their products reach the market. As you mentioned, it is difficult to please everyone :(.
Though the imp is still in “beta,” it is stable enough for folks to start their product development with the imp since it will take some time for them to do this. We, of course, are working closely with these folks to ensure that the imp’s features are maximized to complement their products. Likewise with the beta IDE and its on-going development.
That being said, as evidenced on this forum, we are very open to feature requests and suggestions for improvements from our developer community since we believe that the ideas generated from their own personal development experiences with our product will only benefit all users of our product.