This issue that needs to be discussed however is that although we would all love such a device (myself included!) it's straight from a fairytale. Anyone in the electronics industry can tell you that the e-ink screen, radio transmitter/receiver and other functions of the device cannot be run by such a small solar panel, in fact, it would need a battery the size of the whole card just to run an hour more than likely.
Come on, Matt; you know that's bullshit. I have an android phone that has an 800mhz processor and a battery the size of this card, and it can standby for three days. This card has something on the order of an 8 or 16 mhz processor, I'd wager. E-ink doesn't take much. My Kindle 3 has an ARM processor of around 650 Mhz and 256 meg or ram (an order of magnitude greater than this card requires for primary functions) and it makes three weeks on standby. Six months on a charge is, of course, an unrealistic claim. But one hour? Seriously?
Also, the network they present does in fact require infrastructure that doesn't exist but could also be controlled by a repressive regime (they can detect signals quite easily and locate them wherever they may be if they really wanted to).
This is a fair critique. However, the creators didn't make any claims that it could be used against repressive regimes.
I don't think in 2012 the question is "do we want something decentralized?". The answer to that question is an obvious "Yes". The real question is, "Who actually believes this technology actually works and this isn't just a fishing expedition for investors into a technology that doesn't do what it claims to do yet?".
I realize we're waiting on Charlie, Erik and others to return with more information, but any professional in the electronics field will tell you that the technology they claim doesn't exist yet and won't for another 20 years perhaps. If it were so easy, why wouldn't your iphone just have a solar panel on the back of it? Why would anyone be using GSM/CDMA in the first place?
Ask the correct questions people. A few photos of a shell doth a new technology maketh not.
Whether this device actually exists or not, or does what it claims or not, it certainly is presently possible for devices to mesh network quite effectively right now. The Serval Project attempts to do exactly that with existing wifi hardware on smartphones, although wifi sucks for this purpose. If smartphones started being made with a 'sensor' style network transceiver, such as Zigbee (good) or Dash7 (better) than we would see all kinds of apps that took advantage of local peerage connections. An app similar to 'NearMe' would likely become available
immediately and p2p texting would become a high-schoolers' main method of communication during school hours. One reason that manufacturers don't include such network hardware is that carriers see such capabilities as a threat to their business model, particularly their texting and data business model, and rightly so. There is no way that mesh networking is ever going to be able to handle voice or major data traffic, due to contraints of physics, but small bits of data (such as those apps that are regularly 'checking in' or even a twitter watching app) or apps that trade larger chunks of data but between people in a physical area (like bitcoin) are ideal for sensor networks. Another reason that cell manufacturers don't make these now is because consumers don't really demand them. Like yourself, there aren't many that understand their value if one has to have a data plan anyway, which one most certainly would for many years at least. Not necessarily for bitcoin or local texting, but taken as a whole whatever reductions that moving each of these functions, even completely, off of the dataplan would be a relatively insignificant reduction on the data usage.
It was indeed a non-disclosure agreement that we signed. We are basically allowed to talk about functionality, appearance, pricing etc, but not about some of the technical specs of the internal components (many of which were developed in house by their team). Since I can't understand tech specs anyway (beyond my expertise) I wouldn't be able to divulge that info regardless 
