Very impressed with this - it certainly takes a lot of effort out of making up pastes etc. I was a bit wary of other users comments on this site but if you're careful to only use the grinder for 5 second bursts and allow 5 seconds to rest between bursts (as recommended by Revel) then I'm sure the grinder will last the distance.
To test, I filled the bowl with cashew nuts and with 5 seconds of grinding they were almost entirely reduced to powder. Although there were still a few chunks left, another quick blitz and they were gone. This would have taken several minutes hard labour even with my massive granite mortar and pestel.
The next test was a bit more severe. I had dry fried about 100g of desicated coconut, 12 garlic cloves, cinnamon bark, cloves, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, 4 dried thai chilies and a whole chopped onion. All together, this lot practically filled a 12" frying pan.
The grinder bowl is on the small side so grinding the above mixture had to be done in many batches. It took 3-4 5 second bursts to grind each batch down to a fairly fine paste. Between bursts, I found that lifting the bowl and hood off the unit and giving it a good shake was required as the mixture of dry and wet ingredients stuck to the sides of the bowl. Maybe grinding wet and dry ingredients seperately would be better. I did consider adding a bit of water to each batch, but didn't want to make my paste too wet.
The end result was quite a fine paste which when used in a curry was still a little bit "bitty" but on the whole a lot smoother than previous attempts.
If I was designing version 2 of this product, I'd make the bowl a good inch wider and higher to accomodate more ingredients in one go.