Hi Fonefixer,
Firstly thanks for being such a great to so many of our customers of the past few months. I know you haven't always been happy with us (I've read many of your posts) and you are one of the main reasons I wanted to do this.
Your first question is the one I have been most expecting! Quite simply, Google will not licence us for the offical marketplace. We've asked several times and as far as I know we don't get anything other than automated replies, with a clear "no". The only time they have ever spoken to us was at the CES show in January when my boss collared someone demo-ing Android 3. What we were told then was that Google were overwhelmed with requests from tablet manufacturers and simply had put a blanket stop on access being issued. Their reasoning is to do with app compatibility and who customers will approach for support - they desperately don't want it to be them...
We were told that Android 3 (specifically made for tablets as it is) would eventually be licensed more freely - but as yet we haven't even got an official Android 3 release to play with.
So the bottom line is, we are where we are with the market and we do our best to make as many apps as possible available through other methods. Not ideal, but we hope, on the whole we're still able to offer good value for money. I'd love to charge you another £20 a unit though
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As for the code I need to look into this. I know that the person who originally decided to release what we did is no longer with us (he's not dead, he left the company!) and it's feasible that his opinion on the matter was wrong - i.e. we should release the whole lot. With respect to him, he protected it for valid commercial reasons and having worked with him on a number of things it would surprise me if his decision was wrong - breaking a software licence would haunt him for the rest of his days. I can explore this further if you want me to - do you still want it?
Finally the true origin of the Scroll. They have all come from the same factory in China which I won't reveal here if you don't mind. We have the UK exclusive on the base hardware of all Scroll models, from this factory, but it would not surprise me if certain components were shared across several tablets (possibly the CherryPad included, but I can't say this is one I have heard of before) as our factory will buy and source components from other manufacturers. What I can say with some confidence is that the Scroll package (whichever one you have) is unique in a number of ways - miScroll has our moulding which we now licence back to the factory - we rearranged the components to make later versions of Scrolls more reliable - the software builds are uniquely ours etc. etc.
So a no, but it's more complicated than you may have realised!