Excellent info. I'm filing this under the "scam" folder in my head.
And c'mon a $0 to $1 price estimate for each device when you order 500? This is not a happy meal toy being produced. The only bigger neon sign pointing to a scam would be if they said you have to send the money in advance and they'll pay you back with millions of dollars once their CEO (who happens to be a prince) is released from a Nigerian prison cell.
But it is still alarming if there is even one unit unaccounted for in the hands of someone like this.
Maybe they don't have the unit? Maybe someone took photos of one just before it went out so they could make their scam?
Alternatively, here's my analysis from what I see *pulls out magnifying glass*
We can narrow it down because the unit is either a prototype or one of the first 40. Here's why I say that: the shoulder buttons have black lettering, not blue, which indicates this is not an early prototype. However, the speaker grill is an actual metal grill, not mesh, which tells us it is not a "real" production SE. However, it might be one of the first 40 because on the IRC forum, jimclarson reported to me that he has a first 40 unit with a metal grill instead of mesh. Q informed the two of us in that conversation that this is because some Chinese PMP players use the same one that was used on the prototypes so it was an early QA mistake.
Here's another clue: the paint on the unit is defective. The black units are not using full black plastic. We know this because Articus told us he has a white scratch on his black prototype. If you look closely at the low-res photos of the unit, we can see that there are several consistent scratches that appear. One is in the upper right hand corner above the Y and A buttons. Another is on the left hand side above the wrist strap hole. The last is on the right, below the screen, above the micro-SD card slot.
Sooooo... let's do the math: 1) it has defective paint on it; 2) it has the early metal speaker grill that the production units shouldn't be using. Whomever has this unit did a really bad QA job on it. Now, why was the first QA guy fired? For doing his QA job badly!!!
Here's what I say happened: the early QA got fired and decided (for money or revenge) to take a defective unit home so he could create this scam or maybe he planned to do this before he was ever fired. If you trust the factory when they say they're not doing anything behind your back, then this makes perfect sense. It wouldn't be someone still involved because then why use an early unit with defective paint when you could just take a perfect one off the assembly line? The factory and the people still involved in the project are not to blame, it's the guy who had access to the early units and he left his own shoddy QA finger prints all over it!
I'm only working with photos, facts and inferences. Here's my conclusion: the old QA guy is behind all of this. Book 'em Danno! And he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for that meddling Pardue!
