The popSLATE 2 is a secondary screen for your iPhone and the company had raised almost $1.1 million dollars on Indiegogo to bring this device to market. It missed various shipping dates and the company has just announced it has gone bankrupt and will not refund their customers.
The secondary E Ink screen by popSLATE had its own battery and would connect up to your iPhone via Bluetooth and give you an additional nine hours of talktime. It would also display widgets where users can create to-do list or grocery lists, display images from your photo gallery, store your boarding passes or even read e-books.
The main problem with the popSLATE was that the two co-founders did not have any experience running a business and they made a number of critical mistakes. When the iPhone 7 came out they had to retool the design so that their product would not only work with the latest generation smartphone, but also the iPhone 6. When they thought their product was ready to ship in January, they discovered that its prototypes failed Apple’s certification testing, because it diminished the phone’s ability to send and receive RF transmissions, forcing it to figure out the cause and suspended refunds while the issue was sorted out.
The reason why this product failed Apple’s testing was that the case is made of plastic and glass fibers, which messed with the phone’s ability to pick up signals. As a result, the company would have to “spend additional cycles to tune a new blend with required modifications to the tooling,” requiring money that it didn’t have. Despite its efforts, Popslate hasn’t been able to raise money to fix the issues or fulfill its backers orders and decided to dissolve the company.
Since this news broke yesterday, users are thinking of filing a class action lawsuit to get their money back but if popSLATE is completely out of funds, it remains to be seen if anything will come of this.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
