Sent them another email...
I have to believe they'd want to have it ready soon - spring is the biggest sales period in the fishing industry and I don't think they'd want to miss out on it with their new products. But times are tough and I don't know anything about the company's financial situation, so we'll have to wait and see.
For the sake of fairness...
I just want to add a couple other observations to give a more balanced perspective on the sideimaging units.
1. On most installations, it's only useful at low speeds - idling or using the trolling motor. The SI transducers are large and cost about $250 to replace, so most people mount them above the hull bottom where they're protected from underwater obstacles and are completely out of the water when the boat is on plane. Like most fiberglass bass and walleye boat owners, I mounted the transducer for my 997c over the transom step, and it's about 6 inches above the hull bottom. It works up to about 4-5 mph, then I have to switch to a 2D view with a through-hull transducer for high speed operation. Best detail with SI is obtained at speeds in the 1-3 mph range, and traveling in a straight line.
2. Unlike many units, you really will get results right out of the box on the automatic settings that are as good as and often better than the photos they show in the ads. It will show you every detail of the lake bottom and teach you things in one pass that you wouldn't figure out in a lifetime of fishing without it. But it's only useful for navigation if you have the time to explore an area at slow speed and use it in concert with the GPS to mark the items of interest. So if you're looking for a way to get around a large unfamiliar lake without running into the bottom and find general structural features like points, bars and inside turns on contours, a GPS with a good digital map card is probably more valuable.
Now that I have a garage, I'm really looking forward to bringing my boat home to the Twin Cities occasionally and trying the SI on some other lakes and rivers, especially ones that have clean sand bottoms and deeper weed edges. In many areas of the TFF, it's hard to tell whether that elongated object you're seeing on the screen is a fish or a sunken log. I'm really eager to see whether I can use it to locate schools of white bass, walleyes or big catfish on the St. Croix and Mississippi, or big schools of prespawn crappies on some of the lakes I fish in early spring.
Unrelated - added a few TFF wildlife photos to the online album today
Good reference site for help
Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sideimaging/ and you'll find a very active discussion board that's monitored regularly by a couple guys from Humminbird. If any questions or problems arise, that's the place to find an answer. If you look in the photos section, there's a whole album called "Installation: Transducer Photo" where you can see how other people did theirs on various types of boats. Mine is mounted directly to the hull a couple inches to the right of the jackplate and above the transom notch so it's about 4 inches above the actual hull bottom and not likely to get hit if I happen to slide over a stump or something.
Mine worked great right off the bat, I just followed the installation instructions and all I had to do was tweak the transducer angle once I got it in the water. I did have pretty severe interference when my TM was running at less than full speed, and also when I trimmed the big motor. Humminbird sent me a free RF choke that plugs in between the unit and the power cable - the TM interference went away. I still get some interference from the power trim, but I don't change the trim much when I'm idling, so that really doesn't bother me.