The Commonwealth Bank's slow grind towards rolling out its much vaunted mobile point-of-sale solution, known as Albert, continues. It is now more than 18 months since the bank announced three mobile developments: Pi, its payments platform; Leo, which turns an iPhone 4 into a mobile payments device; and Albert, an Android tablet intended to be a fully functioning mobile point-of-sale device. Albert is being developed in association with Wincor Nixdorf and Ideo.Progress has been slow. Today, for example, there are only around 500 Leos installed across Australia, including trial systems in use at Officeworks, Liquorland and Strandbags. And while Pi was promoted as being the jewel in the crown for CBA - the foundation for a payments ecosystem, with developers being invited to write applications for the platform - it hasn't been adopted by all its early users. Strandbags, for example, hasn't used Pi. Instead, it trialled the Leo technology over Christmas, to turn iPods into mobile terminals connected to its POS network, but using home-grown software.At present, the only version of Pi available in Apple's Appstore is version 1.1.1, which hasn't been updated since December 2012, and there is as yet no facility to use an iPhone 5 with Leo.And there has been no progress on Albert. Announced in July 2012, the device has yet to materialise.In April last year, BRW magazine reported that the bank was just a couple of months away from launching the device, but nothing appeared. According to industry sources, the roll out of Albert has been repeatedly delayed because of the complexity of the project. An integrated device with a touchscreen, a secure EMV interface (to accept chip and PIN cards), a receipt printer, and 3G and WiFi connectivity, Albert has an innovative and relatively complex design.Quoted in the most recent edition of Wincor Nixdorf's customer newsletter, the company's chief technology officer, Reinhard Rabenstein, acknowledged that when Wincor was selected as the CBA's technology partner the company had no experience of building such a device.The project has also endured a change of leadership during its lengthy gestation. The two senior executives who led the program at the time of its launch (chief marketing officer, Andy Lark, and executive general manager of corporate banking solutions, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin) have either left the bank (in Lark's case) or taken on a new CBA role.Although Commonwealth Bank declined to provide Banking Day with an update on Albert, Pi and Leo, there are finally some signs that the Albert is almost ready for its debut.At the Wincor World trade fair and conference, held in Europe in January, Wincor Nixdorf announced its Aevi applications marketplace, which, it said, was intended to support Albert. Rabenstein was photographed with what appeared to be a working device.Finalising Albert is only part one of CBA's mobile POS challenge, however. It will have to market the device successfully, price it competitively and differentiate Leo, Pi and Albert from the raft of mobile POS solutions that have filtered on to the market in the intervening months, including