Or have I already missed it?
In the last newsletter you mentioned that skritter users can get writing tablets cheaper.
I'm quite interested (although I guess I'll have to see what the pricing adds up to togehther with shipping costs...).

Actually, we're going to be talking this over this evening. Unfortunately it looks like we missed our first newsletter-declared deadline since the Wacoms aren't up yet! However, the new payment system should up soon, which means wacoms aren't too far away. In the mean time, I'd recommend Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Bamboo-Small-Pen-Tablet-Only/dp/B000V9T2JA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1266268578&sr=8-1

We will probably be able to offer a small discount, but not a very large one due to the reseller prices.

thanks for the link. I had been checking a little bit about the different wacom tablets and hadn't really been clear about which ones would be good enough (and I'm mightily relieved to find out that I don't have to aim for the most expensive ones:).
I just checked though in my national amazon (to save on import taxes and shipping costs) and they don't offer that particular bamboo.
Are there other cheap ones that work just fine for writing characters?

I have this one and it works great with skritter:

http://www.amazon.com/Wacom-CTL460-Bamboo-Pen-Tablet/dp/B002OOWC3I/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1266314186

so I know that you guys don't want to divulge everything, but will the Wacoms offered through Skritter have special configurations? I remember George or Nick mentionning working with someone at Wacom to make it optimize it with Skritter(?).
I was really hoping the Skritter Wacoms would be ready by the time I get back to the states, but I guess I'll be getting George's recommendations to avoid paying hefty intl shipping afterwards. It sounds like there won't be too much differences in price or user experience in the end...

Thanks for the update anyway.

If you live in China you can find the tablet skritterjohan linked to on Taobao for around 400rmb. I bought mine and had it delivered (for 20rmb) to me the next day.

We've been talking to Wacom about getting our hands on their browser plugins, which would allow pressure sensitivity in Skritter. At first, it would just make your writing look cooler before each stroke was submitted. This would only apply to Wacom tablets, not other manufacturers. So it wouldn't be a special configuration on the tablet itself, just a plugin that you'd download with your tablet.

But we haven't heard from them for a while, so I'm not sure if they're still moving ahead on that project. At one point in September our contact said "next week". Ah, well.