I spent quite some time last night looking for reviews. There was a partial one on cloudy nights, but it lacked alot of technical details.
Certainly the Yanks seems to be saying you sold it to us (and still do on six of the largest scope sites in the USA) as having a carrying capacity of 50 lbs - so if it's really only 33lbs welcome to a class action suit.
All say it looks beautiful, its mostly silent and its gotos are very good.
There is no technical assessment of the load carrying, although there are hints - like one guy saying I loaded it right up but there was no sign of strain or drop in performance. So the question remains does it match the carrying capacity of an EQ 6 (with 3 times better PE - untrained) or is it between an EQ 6 and HEQ 5?
Too I could find no technical assessment of the PE, the sentiment seemed to be it felt the same as the earlier version (about 8 arc secs vs 20 for a EQ6 and 15 for some HEQ5s - the EQ 5 and 6 PE from
http://demeautis.christophe.free.fr/ep/pe.htm ).
Everyone was asking if the PEC was remembered between sessions - annoying if its not. I found no data on how good was the tracking once the
PE has been trained.
Lastly I haven't yet found anyone controlling the scope via running a simple network (10 base T) LAN cable into a PC and using the ASCOM drivers to run say Cartes Du Ciel and control everything from there - but I'd be confident its capable.
What I do hear about the starbook is it keeps getting better (it's up to software release version 35 now), but even with a dimmer function the display is too bright - some astro sites in the US sell it with a slab of red perspex to go over the display!
I'll be very interested to see how this develops. I'm guessing the load will be 15kgs - which isn't bad for its load carrying, pointing, tracking capabilities at the recommended price point, but at 22kgs it would have been fantastic!