Put it this way - they can only get faster.
My order was put into the RS website as soon as was technically possible (their website basically folded before the release time even arrived). I have *just* got a note from the Post Office that my order (number 4401 from RS's "half") of the release minute (I would say release day, but really if you didn't order in the first few minutes, you were stuffed) has finally arrived.
The release date was February 29th, by the way. March, April, May. So they just about delivered those orders from the first few minutes of release in 2 and a bit months after "release" (which is really a pre-order that I got suckered into because they kept telling us it was a "release").
The forums are pretty quiet on actual content - everything is either a two-line port from Debian archives, or some Hello World knocked up in Python. Sure, you can run Quake on it, but I didn't expect anything less given the specs. The troubleshooting forums describe myriad power problems which, yes, technically people should read the specs on but that's only going to get worse on public release. There's a couple of broken units (bad solder joints on things like the Ethernet port that had to ALL be redone because of a manufacturing cockup, broken SD card readers, HDMI compatibility problems, etc.) but there's no way to gauge how many are actually in the wild and being used at the moment (already people are just selling them on unopened). And the amount of people who say "I want it to do X" - media centre PC, emulators, etc. - and the answer is basically "It won't" show that it's being regarded as some general purpose device instead of a small embedded unit that's not suitable for most things a smartphone can manage.
So they still have a LLOOONNNGGG way to go to get to their goal of having these things just thrown into random schools. Sure there are Scout groups and schools posting about using them, but those are the geek-teachers anyway who do infinitely more interesting things than I ever did at school. But I think it's going to be way past this September, and maybe even the next, before they actually get them near to schools in general except as a fad item. Give it a couple of years and maybe some real educational company will pick them up and package them into something more useful but at the moment they are nothing more interesting or special than, say, a GP2X (and the GP2X was designed and used educationally in Korea, and has a successor already, and could do everything I've so far seen thrown at the Pi).
I'll be unpacking mine tonight to give it a run-through but, if I'm honest, the only thing I can see them used for is my own projects whereas I originally ordered on the hopes my school might be able to find some use for them (I was expecting there to be educational software, cases, etc. available on general sale by now but it's still just a bare ARM board at the moment).
Being on BBC News, all the tech sites, etc. and becoming a new buzzword is actually just annoying because hardly anybody's done with them what they were originally intended for, and hardly anybody's even been able to get one yet. It's not a release day, if people can't buy and get it sent out for delivery that same week. It's going to be a while before they're able to do that and even then, three-four months late, there's not much in terms of their original plan that you can use them for. Sure, you can boot Linux and play around in Scratch, but you can do that on any PC anyway like schools have in droves in their ICT suites.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
