It’s been three months since we publicly announced the Teledong and quite a bit has happened since then. Originally we had hoped to have the product officially released by now, but that turned out to be a little bit premature.
We have been making available beta versions of the device and software to interested parties. The user “Underwater Love” from the Handy Control Discord group has provided invaluable feedback on the state of the product. Thanks to this testing, we now have a good idea of what there is left to do before the official launch. Much is already finished, but there are a few kinks that still need to be ironed out.
The main problem right now concerns transmitting the motion to a stroker over the internet. The motion can be smooth and accurate when everything is connected locally using a technology like Bluetooth, or when recording a script in advance, but strokers on the market right now are not really designed to receive high-resolution motion from far away in real-time. The jitter is too high and the bandwidth too low, resulting in very jagged, erratic movements instead of the smooth, natural movement of the Teledong user.
The good news is that we are in contact with the manufacturer of a popular stroker, and they are committed to drastically improving this sort of functionality with an upcoming software update. In theory, this should solve all the remaining major issues we’ve been experiencing with the Teledong. We will leave this company to announce the update themselves, however, so we cannot reveal more about it yet. It shouldn’t be very long. But we’ve decided that until this update is released, it doesn’t make sense to release the Teledong. Users would get a less-than-ideal first impression, even if it would all get resolved eventually.
On the other fronts, things are progressing as planned. The hardware is already complete. Our prototype has been performing adequately, so we have started manufacturing what will be the final product in bulk. All ready to go once things smoothen out on the connectivity side.
For fun, here is a photo of some of the hardware prototypes we’ve built throughout the year:
