at least they just released a picture https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109349.0

I'd only look at the network Hashrate and compare it to the number of btc that are produced (number of bitcoins created and difficulty are strongly correlated) . Other factors should not be relevant, it will be easier to get bitcoins, but only for those with the hardware, I think the transation will be smooth.

Let's take a look at the numbers
we have a speed of 21293.57 Gigahashes/s which produces 7950 btc a day
7950/(21293.57) = 0.3733521433935221
each Gigahash produces more than 0.37 btc a day

if we add the 300 mining SC from butterflylabs with 40 GHashes/s (somewhere I read that they had 300 in the first batch)
7950/(21293.57 + 40*300) = 0.23878484644332224
each GHash now produces less than 0.23 btc a day

which is a drop of 37% in revenue for classic miners when the first batch of 300 SCs are deployed.

 (other form the Lack of Pictures of Stuff like packaging, cases, assembly lines or anything that is involved in the process of making this thing ... oh wait there is picture of a wafer that is shown on at least 6 other websites
https://www.google.com/search?q=semiconductor+wafer&tbm=isch&tbs=simg:CAQSYxphCxCo1NgEGgAMCxCwjKcIGjwKOggBEhTMBskG9gXeA_1QF8gXrA6EDlwPHAxogmY5_1V4e1Z TfidXWnqqj2p5uXwVkKOJhV2FiKyK-VR9cMCxCOrv4IGgoKCAgBEgQvH-IjDA&ei=--xRUJBNid_hBKedgcgO&ved=0CCgQwg4&biw=1440&bih=657

What bugs me the most is the "buy-back" thing.

It just does not make sense and there is no explanation to why. How can a company afford that? When you sell something for 599$ and then later buy back the same thing for the same price which nobody wants to buy any more because there is also the other thing (jalapeno) that's way faster and way cheaper than the original ... you are not going to sell it again.

It sounds a lot like the "establishing trust" in a Ponzi scheme. let's take the numbers to see which magnitude we have here
with the old system (599$/832MHashes) i would get less than 1.4 MHashes per Dollar
with the new system (1299$/40GHashes) i would get more than 20.7 MHashes per Dollar
that's an increase of 1478%
with the upgrade (699$/39168MHases) i'd even get 56 MHashes per Dollar
that's an increase of 4002%

man, even the newest ponzi scheme https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108832.40 has only a 100% interest

oh wait, let's see what a mining calculator says to this

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php
Hardware break even: 8 days
Net profit first time frame: 3687.60 USD

the upgrade will generate 165$ a day extra

btw, jalapeno

Hardware break even: 11 days
Net profit first time frame: 287.44 USD


i will have a lot of fun watching this thing!

same here

and i just posted this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109175.msg1187524#msg1187524
which should show that i know one or two things about bitcoins

what is going to go wrong:

the mesh network
it is not going to work out, neither in speed, power consumption or protocol.
Mesh networks are very hard to handle.

other technologies
they will be way more successful e.g. Bitinstants Debit Card, they only have to combine it with NFC and maybe some ATM support

costs
you will be eventually better off with a cheap (80Euro) Android phone that offers access to all web services or BitcoinApps than with a ~40 Euro Bitcoin Card (price is just an estimate for display + processor + wireless module + battery + case + assembly + shipping)

bitcoin network
this point might actually work out ... or not. depends on how good the programmers actually are. Problems are the speed of the network (400mb of transactions per month), just calculating/checking one transaction takes about 3sec on such a device. At the time of posting there are 25820 transactions per day ... that will take the device 21 hours to just check them. as soon as you stop checking them for yourself, the device needs a trusted third party to do the checking etc

you would just accept the transaction as soon as you see it in the P2P network (meaning instantly), or wait until a trusted party has accepted the transaction. you wouldn't wait for confirmations in the blockchain for transactions that are lower then the reward for a block.

Conclusion:
I will definitely buy that device if they ever manage to produce it