Frank Acland of e-catworld.com wrote yesterday that he’s received a tracking number from Steorn for his OCube shipment. He asked Steorn by e-mail about his OCube’s shipping status and was given a tracking number; when this number was entered into the courier’s tracking form, the sending and destination addresses were shown — meaning that the shipment information had been registered with the courier — but no current location was given, which could mean that the package had yet to be picked up.

Likewise I e-mailed Steorn asking about my OCube’s shipping status and any tracking information, and was told the following:

[A]pologies, there’s been a mountain of paperwork, logistics, packaging etc to work through and we’re still refining the process which is unfortunately taking longer than we’d anticipated but we should be getting orders out the door soon so please bear with us a little longer.

In my case, I was not even given a tracking number.

So, it appears that if Steorn has begun shipping OCubes, it is a slow and halting process.

In other news, model Rachel Wallace (“#ogirl”) showed up in a new video on Steorn’s Facebook page on January 31st, excited to announce that she had just received her brand new OPhone. She plans on posting weekly updates to Steorn’s page as well as her own, on how the phone is doing. Oddly, this isn’t the first time Wallace announced that she’d received an OPhone; back on November 19th she posted:

LOVING my ophone!! Hasn’t been charged once!!! And have charged my normal phone 3 times – UGHMAZING #ophone #steorn happy little ogirl

Of course, Wallace is being paid to market Steorn’s products, so any user testimonial she provides about the OPhone will need to be taken with a grain of salt. Another potential problem with Wallace’s reports is that the power consumption of the OPhone’s electronics is unknown, as is the amount of time that Wallace spends actively using the phone. So, given that the OPhone is an old-style “non-smart” phone, and that its bulky shape would be large enough to accommodate plenty of conventional battery storage, #ogirl could potentially make regular use of her OPhone for many months before it would exhaust the energy that it could store by conventional means, and start demonstrating exceptional storage capacity (or else the ability to generate its own electricity, as Steorn claims). Before then (at least according to the expectations Steorn has set), OCubes will have been delivered, which can be tested by many independent parties under much better controlled conditions.