“This is Alberto Armandi, founder of Enso, a startup specialized in high quality devices running opensource software such as Linux and Android.

First of all I want to personally apologize with our customers, especially those who placed orders before March 30 and still did not get their devices. There are many reasons behind what happened and wish to clarify them here.

In order of importance, the unrequested and sudden coverage from Engadget.com, one of the most influential technology blogs on the web nowadays with an average of 3 millions visitors daily.

As a first step, our website went down following their article about the Zenpad and its 155 USD price tag.

We were not ready to sustain that kind of traffic, and our infrastructure was near to collapse.

We took action, upgraded our server hardware, doubled bandwidth and deployed a caching system for every database operation. This took time and money but we finally succeded and our website was up and running again in a couple of hours.

Despite this outage, our Ebay store received literally hundred of orders.

This triggered a reaction from Ebay and Paypal, our payment processor, they both decided to block our accounts, since they are affiliated. All of this because we received too much money, in a very short time span.

We tried to explain them the reason behind the sales spike, but they instead asked us to provide a tracking number for every order received.

They did not listen to us when we said that we were only a small startup, and we needed the cash to cover manufacturing costs and start shipping. This represented a big problem for us as we were receiving tons of orders but had no real cash flow.

We were running completely on our limited financial abilites. So we took action and travelled back to Italy to seek investments and fill the order as soon as possible. A local bank just granted us a small loan that is enough to cover our travel expenses and fill the first order batch.

The funds will be available to us within the next few days. We never intended to scam anybody, blame Paypal and Ebay for this delay only, because they literally frozen our funds with no tangible reason.

We were not able to place an order within the expected timeframe because of this. Also, with a limited Paypal account there is no way to refund anybody, but Paypal keeps the transaction fees in the bank despite that money should go to our customers who requested it back. Note that this only applies to customers who paid prior March 30.

In the meantime we did complete the porting of Androind 2.1 “Eclair” for the Zenpad, so all the devices will be shipped with this version instead of the old Android 1.6 “Donut”. The firmware will be available on our website and all our customers will have access to their private area for downloading operating manuals and documentation.

We sincerely apologize for the long waiting time. Shippings will start within May 8, 2010.

Thanks for your immense patience.

Alberto Armandi”