I think they've decided to do the initial firmware development internally, which is a bit worrying but doesn't seem too unreasonable to me given that the signal-to-noise ratio for open sourcing this before it's done is probably pretty bad (while you may pick up a few contributors, responding to the "hax wen" crowd is almost certain to slow you down at first).
They asked the Kickstarter funders a month or so ago for their CC numbers for shipping cost, as well as shipping address, color preference, and any additional accessory&unit orders. But I don't know how soon the main production run will happen.
(I did find that a little funny: the idea of a bunch of customers of a "hacking" gadget, earnestly sending their credit card numbers and home addresses to a group of other hackers. :)
My CC has fraud protection, and I can always get a replacement. all those other things have 0 protection and are not easily changed, especially home address.
Seems like a reasonable point to start taking preorders to me.
Over a decade ago I backed the Bus Pirate early on and even though I got a unit shipped, it never worked. Defective code shipped on my batch and it wasn't until a few years ago that I figured out that's what was wrong. Even if I had figured that out early on I don't have access to an expensive Pic programmer then so I couldn't do anything to fix it then. The Flipper is Arduino compatible so updating the code shouldn't require a programmer unless something blows up the chips bootloader.
They are hiring, if you speak Russian that is: https://www.flipperdevices.com/jobs
> In the last two months, we have been actively working on hardware validation, covering all the use cases with tests, and now we are almost ready to lock the BOM and start Flipper's production in EVT (Engineering Validation Test) phase. Devices from the first batch will be sent to contributors who participated in the development.
That seems like they're pretty far along.
In fact the form factor is too sexy for its own good in that it made it so desirable it has slowed down development as they had to go backwards in development to include several kitchen sink features that should have been left behind. But hey I'll take an extra kitchen sink when it comes.