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Hello all,

I know, I know. People want to know, how much. All I've said so far is that it's not that far off the current Stream 2 price.

I've finally had my announcement meeting with the dealers today for North America, so I can announce the pricing for the US and Canada. EU/UK/AU pricing will be revealed at later dates, but I think this list being mostly US-Canada centric, it shouldn't be a problem.

So, here are a few details.

RETAIL PRICING

For retail pricing, for the US, it will be priced at $550 USD. For Canada, the retail price will be $595. This is about 10% more than the Stream 2, but with all the new features we're adding, I think it's more than worth it!

PREORDERS

As we haven't announced an official launch date yet (besides "February"), I can't talk to exactly when we'll take preorders. We want to make sure we're good and ready to launch (see next point), but preorders will be available 7 to 10 days before launch. We'll announce it when we're ready.

LAUNCH DATE

So, complete transparency here: we are still very much working hard on polishing stuff, fixing bug, and completing features. It's possible that at launch, a few bugs slipped between our fingers, but we're trying to get you a product that works as well as possible, and we'll patch things as they come up post-launch. As we stand, the build that I and many of our testers (our beta is done with our employees) have in our hands right now is already fairly good, definitely usable, but it's missing a few puzzle pieces that will soon be done.

One of the key things that's not finished yet is Daisy Online and localizations other than English. So, we are looking at a launch in two tiers.

What we're aiming for is a launch February (towards the middle of the month) for the US, late February if we have to. Then, 4 to 6 weeks later, a global launch (Canada/UK/EU/AU etc), since at that point, we should be able to deliver Daisy Online and more languages (French, Spanish, etc).

(Daisy Online is what pretty much the whole world uses for libraries, like CELA in Canada. The US mostly uses Bookshare, BARD and NFB, which are NOT Daisy Online services, and are ready to go now).

So as not to delay the launch in what's our biggest market, we're doing it in two stages.

One of the things that changed for example in the last week is that the surprise I talked about previously for Internet Radio will be postponed a bit, unfortunately, we hit a bit of a technical snag, but it's close and should come after the release (perhaps at the same time as the global launch, or shortly after). I'm not saying more but I know people will love it. But now I'm glad I kept it as a secret since it'll be delayed a bit ;)

So here we go. Bill, to answer in terms of hardware, whether you get a unit day 1 or day 100, it will be the same hardware. The only reason we'd change hardware is if a component became unavailable. So there's no risk on ordering day 1 or even preordering once it's available.

Thanks all for reading this wall of text, hopefully, I was able to answer a few things!

Mathieu Paquette
Product Manager
Humanware