> Why would someone get the phone at $695 when it could go down more?

Because everybody that paid more is being refunded. See the notes on each of the events. It won't go down anymore, but even if that happened, you'd not be screwed for supporting the campaign earlier.

> the scale of the goal and the precedent it could set for people doing very capital-intensive projects with crowdfunding was what motivated me to back it.

I'd also support it just on that basis alone, but I'm also looking forward to have a well supported and familiar Linux distribution on a phone.

Giving money back seems like a terrible idea from a fundraising perspective (though personally I'd be irked if I had paid over $700 and they didn't refund me). Either way, it's not a great position to be in.

edit: please don't let me be misunderstood.

That's how crowdfunding campaigns work, and without enough support to reach the $32M, there's simply no way to manufacture the phones that got funded at such a low price.

You misunderstand. I mean giving money back to people that paid more than $695 is a terrible idea from a fundraising perspective. It does makes sense however since the backlash could be severe.

> It does makes sense however since the backlash could be severe.

So then it does make sense from a fundraising perspective.

I agree strongly about #1. I can totally see where they were coming from (and frankly they are truly in uncharted waters with this funding campaign -- nobody has really ever attempted a crowd funding initiative quite like this one), but you're absolutely right. $600-800 is a lot of money for most people, and the constant fluctuation and uncertainty about pricing and the fundraising effort is definitely hurting their cause, I believe.

What they should have done, perhaps, was go to Bloomberg et al before going public with this. Starting out with $500k in the pot and strong corporate backing locking the price (or at least making the tiers predictable) would have gone a long way.

Please note that the support both from Bloomberg and the industry (in terms of the price drop) are based on hindsight of how supporters and the press have been covering the case.

It's also hard to predict what having an initial perk of $500 would have meant to the campaign. The very strong reaction in the first day is also a result of supporters observing that there was a gap of $230 for the next price level. It's not easy to really tell what an entirely different price structure would have meant.

Quite true. Were it not for that I would have been in the "wait and see" group as well, and I suspect I'm not alone. Those "wait and see"ers wouldn't have jumped in and the whole campaign wouldn't have had such a newsworthy boost right of the gate.

Either way, very interesting to watch it unfold.

> $600-800 is a lot of money for most people, and the constant fluctuation and uncertainty about pricing and the fundraising effort is definitely hurting their cause, I believe.

On the other hand, they've always refunded any extra money that people have paid. Ultimately, if the price subsequently goes up, you have a good deal, if the price subsequently goes down, you get the extra money back. The re-adjustment does no harm to the consumer.

You should have read the submission. They say that the price is now fixed until the end of the campaign and anyone who paid more than $695 will get a refund of the difference. So, if anything, this alleviates any uncertainties about the price and no one should feel hurt.

In regards to #1, it's abnormal because Kickstarter doesn't allow you to change or remove rewards once they are created, you can only add new ones. I've run into some campaigns that did some pretty creative things with their reward tiers on Kickstarter to be able to get around this issue.

True, I've never seen a campaign change rewards so much and so often but people have been very creative with rewards tiers - usually to their benefit.

I'd be surprised if even half of the people that pledged early on are able to keep up with all of the changes and updates.

Considering that IGG could be making 1M+$, they will do anything asked! Now I think they should allow to extend the campaign to 60 days in a week and a half... :)

> It's getting wishy-washy.

I find it a little disturbing they're claiming it will work on Verizon (my current carrier for the past 10 years) and Sprint for a few reasons:

1) It's unlikely Verizon will have VoLTE on day 1 that the phone comes out. Even if so, one has to hope they become more liberal with what they allow on their network. Since it does not have any CDMA radio, that could also be a problem as LTE is not universal yet on their network as well.

2) Sprint does not let users actually know they have sim cards. My friend's Sprint Galaxy Nexus has the sim card embedded directly in the device and cannot be seen/removed. If that continues to be true with newer Sprint Phones, it seems like it would be hard to get a sim card compatible with Sprint's network.

3) #2 Assumes that Sprint has VoLTE, let alone much of an LTE network. As far as I know, it's still in testing at best and not ready for mainstream use.

I can just predict a lot of angry Verizon and Sprint users come early next year when they try to pop in the sim card to their device or call their carrier and find out they cannot use the phone on their desired network. Canonical really should be more up front with their claims of the networks that it will (realistically) work on.

Every time I read stuff about mobile careers in the US, I instantly think how awesome we have it in Europe.

We have 3 major mobile careers in my country (Vodafone, Orange and Cosmote), and my unlocked Android can work on all of them, whether we are talking about GSM, Edge, 3G, LTE, doesn't matter. And oh, you should see the pre-pay offers that we get.

We can thank the European Commission for that. They made GSM 900/1800 a mandatory standard early on.

Technological standards are only half the battle. The rest a mix of regulatory differences and the history of how the market happened to unfold. No European carrier was ever faced with attempting to build (and thus finance) a network for a continent-sized country.

Yes they did. All the big carriers had to build out their networks right across the continent of Europe comprising of lots of different countries each (back in early days) with their own regulatory frameworks.

How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle, whilst Europe we managed to lock things down to a common set of standards right across the continent.

> How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle.

I'm guessing it had to do with Qualcomm being a US company and having the advantage for obtaining contracts and influence from politicians and other bureaucrats at the time CDMA and GSM were being standardized and developed. CDMA originated with Qualcomm and GSM was mostly developed by companies outside of the US (I think starting in Finland).

The only early network that was across "lots of different countries" was the NMT system and that was in the Scandinavian countries, which have always been their own special sort of group of countries.

I don't recall a company in Berlin building out networks in Greece, but that's the equivalent of what McCaw Cellular was doing in the late 80s/early 90s

Don't forget that anyone who payed higher at any given point will be refunded the difference to the next lowest price. :)