(This news update was first emailed on May 8th, 2025 to fans who had registered an interest in finding out more about our Tricorder.)
Captain’s Log, star date 0508.25
“We are currently holding our orbit about planet Fans Tricorderous. The situation is critical. A subspace tariff anomaly is keeping us from beaming down essential supplies to the waiting inhabitants. Our best engineers are probing this seemingly impenetrable anomaly to better understand its makeup, and whether or not any of our systems can penetrate it. Our loading bay is on standby as the crew becomes more and more restless by the hour.”
As we orbit, a subspace tariff anomaly prevents us for beaming down essential supplies
Back on planet Earth
We are a small team and we are doing our best to work through this fluid and evolving situation.
Here are some answers to some of the most-asked questions; please read this carefully before emailing us. We are a very small team and we would like to concentrate our efforts on solving the problem.
Can you tell me my place in the queue?
No, but we will work our way through it using our database of the registrations in date order by the date of each person’s registration of interest (or first registration in the case of someone who has registered multiple times).
Why haven’t you sent me an invite email yet?
We have only sent out the first 200 “invitation to purchase” emails so far. One thousand, nine hundred and eighty people registered their interest on the first day that we announced the product (July 20th, 2020). As mentioned above, we will be working through the list in order, so please be patient with us.
When will you send out your next invite email?
We don’t know. Last week we said we were waiting for the stock to build up. Our intention was to send out that email this week. However, in the last few days Amazon has paused shipping our products to the US. We believe that this is while they work out the impact of the de minimis zero tariff retraction, in terms of cost and/or tariff implementation.
Will scalpers buy up all the Tricorders before I get a chance to buy one from you?
No they will not. We are making plenty of Tricorders. Please do not buy overpriced Tricorders from overpriced third party sellers. There is no need to buy them from anyone selling at grossly inflated prices as there will be enough to go around.
I don’t live in the UK – how will I get one?
Amazon UK ships at very reasonable prices all over the world. At the moment they have paused shipments to the US while they work out the impact of the de minimis tariff exemption ending.
I live in the US – why is Amazon UK not letting me purchase a Tricorder?
At the moment they have paused shipments to the US while they work out the impact of the de minimis zero tariff arrangement ending. Once they have worked things out, we hope that they will start shipping to the US as they have always done in the past.
What do the tariffs mean?
The current tariffs for importing our products in bulk to the USA are between 145% and 187.6%, depending on the specific product. Although the Tricorder was developed and designed by the Wand Company in the UK, it was manufactured in China and thus if we ship it in bulk to the United States, a tariff of 145% will be levied on it as it arrives in the US.
This has a big impact on you and of course on us. How the tariffs are applied is highly complicated, ambiguous and fluid – what appears to be the situation this week might be completely different next week. As it takes at least a week or two to move stock around the world, even by air, we don’t have the confidence to export the Tricorder to the US if the costs and thus the final price are not properly understood and as a result are impossible to plan for.
For individual shipments valued under $800 (including the shipping cost), the situation now is that you may be charged zero tariff, 120%, 145% or $100, depending on factors outside our control.
But I heard that electronics are exempt from the tariffs?
This exemption is only from some of the tariffs, and only applies to certain categories of electronics, such as smartphones, computers and peripherals.
What are the Wand Company doing about this situation?
In some respects it is totally out of our hands. Lots of companies and organisations that have been affected by the tariff uncertainty are lobbying the US administration for clarity and changes. However, while this continues we are investigating every option for bringing the Tricorder in the most cost effective way to our very important US fans.
Why doesn’t the Wand Company sell the Tricorder on Amazon US?
We are considering doing just that, but right now we can’t because of the tariffs on bulk imports mentioned above. The uncertainty over the tariffs and a potential agreement between the US and China to reduce them, is making it impossible to make short term decisions.
Why doesn’t the Wand Company ship the Tricorders themselves?
This is what we wanted to do all along. We designed and set up a shop, but we underestimated how complicated things are with US state sales taxes, and the tariffs were the final straw. Until now, Amazon has always been able to show customers all costs (including import duty/tariffs) at the time of purchase, but doing this would have been impossible for us, for the sale of a single product line as we are not set up to be a retailer.
How long will the tariff situation last?
For you it must seem as though the whole of the Tricorder project has been a waiting game. Just when you thought the wait was over, the tariffs have caused another pause. However, there are positive noises about the possibility that the situation is inching towards deescalation… So, in a tone that I am sure you are all getting tired of, a bit more patience is required, and hopefully we will be able to ship our/your Tricorders soon.
What can I do while I wait?
You can start by checking out our new Captain’s Log archive.
Eventually, when you do get your Tricorder, you will be able to listen to every single one of the Original Series’ Captain’s Logs. The audio files have been taken from the original recordings before special effects and music were added, thus providing an authentic experience of listening to the logs as Captain Kirk (and occasionally the crew) would have recorded them.
The 77 Original Series episodes spawned 233 logs, and finding your way through them on the Tricorder can be a bit of a lengthy process. To help you in this epic task, we have transcribed and catalogued each log and provided them for you in a new, specially created, searchable archive, for desktop and mobile phone use from the link.
Please interrogate and enjoy the archive, with zero tariff.
LLAP
Chris
Fans who register with us will be the first to read our news and the progress of this exciting Tricorder development and, later, where and when to purchase it. You can catch up with the story so far here on this blog, but if you haven’t already done so, why not register your interest in the Tricorder – you’ll then receive a personalised registration certificate and early access to these updates (before we publish them on our website).
I was very excited to receive my invitation to purchase, then very disappointed to find that there was no stock to buy, when clicking on the link.
More stock is coming soon. We have stock already being shipped in and it just takes some time for it to become available again
Howdy;
Just got my tricorder off Amazon (USA), and it’s fantastic. I see it already has a atmospheric pressure sensor built in. On the next software release, can you add an altitude readout? that would go great with the compass feature, and make it a practical device to take on a hike, measuring all that EMI from high voltage power lines !!! Also… I know this is a hardware change.. but what do you think about adding a Gamma ray detector? It would be awesome to pull this out to measure radiation for real… (and the parts price has become cheaper)
I am not sure about that, adding more hardware would be very difficult and for a project that has already eaten up so much development time, I think an ionising radiation detector would be a very costly an impossibly large thing to include in the tricorder which would have very little real world use. Hopefully, unless you are the epicentre of a nuclear event, there is very little ionising radiation present in the normal environment, so it would also (HOPEFULLY) be a very boring bit of equipment. If it was sensitive enough to measure the radiation coming from a brazil nut or a banana, it would be very expensive. BTW, Did you know that a Brazil nut contains natural radioactivity, in fact the radiation from 100g of Brazil nuts is comparable to that of a chest X-ray! there you go, now you don’t need a gamma ray detector, just strike brazil nuts off your shopping list… oh and don’t live in Alaska, which I believe is radon ground zero in the US.
Same here. Registered twice and been waiting for years. Received 1 invitation to purchase end of June and they were already gone by the time I got the email 3 hours later. As of 8/26/25 I have received no further information/invitations to purchase this. The scalpers here in the U.S. on Ebay don’t seem to be experiencing this same problem.
Sorry, but checking my records, we sent you a total of five invites to purchase. I can see that although they were delivered to you you kept opening the same one sent Jun 26, 2025 4:08, delivered, 4:18 PM (UK time). One of those five I sent you was the email sent to you on Jul 17, 2025 at 5:50 PM (delivered 5:50) PM (UK time) and although it was not opened by you, it invited you to purchase a tricorder either from Star Trek Shop or the IGN Store, with links to both sales pages. While the Star Trek Shop sold through in 15 minutes, the tricorder remained on sale and in stock for more than 14 hours after the email was delivered to you. I mentioned here that the email was going out to warn fans that it was coming so they could be ready to purchase it and made sure that the emails all went out at about the same time, on the days when they went out. I suggest that the handful of “scaplers” who have managed to buy tricorders (and it is only a handful of people) were a bit more reactive when the emails dropped, and thus were able to buy one or two extra tricorders in the time it took for the IGN stock to sell through.
Are there going to be more for sale eventually? Last invite for one was back in July, and nothing since. Dearly want to get a Tricorder, but my problem is that the last few times i got the buy e-mail i was at work, and i can’t get online there and can’t use the phone on the production floor. By the time i got home a few hours later it was out of stock. (Happened every time i got the e-mail to buy)
Thanks for any info though.
I know this is on all of our minds in the US.
You said in this update that you will be shipping direct to the US and also that the shipping demand from China to the US is very high right now due to demand.
This makes perfect sense, and thank you for shipping directly to the US!
Given the high demand, do you have an estimate on how long you expect it to take to get the first few batches airfreighted to the US?
I know the situation is very dynamic at this time, but would you guess it will be days or weeks?
Also thank you for incurring the airfreight costs! That has to be a significant burden.
Thanks
Mark
Expect at least a couple of weeks may be a bit longer. We have some stock rolling off the production lines right now that we will be shipping to the US.
Thanks.
Chris, buddy, come on. I realize you and those at Wand must be frustrated and just plain tired of this journey too. But, aside from the multiple schedule changes that have occurred since like around 2021ish and going forward up to now (not to mention the weird “registration” idea that sort of is a registration but not really since it offers no real guarantee the registerer will exclusively get one beyond those who are not registered) that this has truly been a comedy of errors in many ways. I don’t harbor resentment but Wand really should have ponied up the extra bucks and opened their own online store (or partnered with a more suitable online retailer which could provide the selective service that Amazon knowingly could not) to get the registration, which was and should have been a big successful part) synced up with customers. Things could have still been drop shipped if Wand didn’t want to set that logistic upon themselves which, again, could have been done with minimal staffing as any shipping company will do business with small biz with little effort. I guess it’s easy to armchair quarterback but it’s also been pretty apparent for many years now that Wand was kind of getting in its own way with questionable choices. Again, I realize the globe had some events that threw curve balls but it really was also too many wrong roads traveled by Wand in this endeavor. That being said, I’m quite certain the product itself is very respectable as are the other products in the Wand line of offerings. And, aside from the venting, congratulations on not giving up…..bobo
My cold calculating Vulcan heart goes out to all that have not yet gotten this absolutely fantastic prop replica. It pains me to no end that my country, the US, is being so terrible. My advice is as such, when you see that invite to purchase… go immediately! Don’t pay scalper prices. Chris and the team will get the job done. But, you gotta be johnny on the spot when they become available again. They will sell quick!
Hopefully some of this absurd nonsense with tariffs will be resolved or fade away soon. It’s not fair to get mad at The Wand Company over this shenanigans. It’s not their fault.
I know it’s sort of parroting what Chris has already said, but keep patient and be ready to jump on the prize when it pops up again. You’ll be happy with what you purchased, you can trust me on that.
-Gabriel
I also registered and am interested in buying. I don’t recall seeing an invitation but it well could’ve ended up in junk and then auto-deleted later. If it helps, I live both in the US and in Italy and could receive at either location (if shipping to the US due to tariffs is an issue).
Hi, yes you did receive five email invitations, the last one you opened. I am sorry but the Tricorder has now sold out.