Notion Ink's Adam Android Tablet Said To Ship This Week

junaidslife86 writes with news that the Notion Ink Android tablet has gotten the regulatory go-ahead from US authorities, and should soon be shipping. From the article: "That's right, after several delays the tiny startup will finally condense its occassionally vapory molecules into a solid slab of shipping tablet starting 'around Wednesday' after the hardware receives its FCC tattoo. A tablet good enough to earn a Best of CES 2011 honorable mention at an event absolutely flooded with tablets from a who's who of consumer electronics companies. While our first impressions of the production unit were positive, we're holding off on making a final judgement until we've had the chance to perform a full review." The Notion Ink feature that grabs the most attention seems to be the optional Pixel Qi screen; Brad Linder of Liliputing has a hands-on video with the device from CES which (despite the bad lighting conditions) shows that screen in action.

Comments

Ok, beta testers, start your fingers!

[ColdWetDog]

Cool - we go from vaporware to beta testing. Keep us posted, guys.

I was really excited about the adam

[Hungus]

Till they started with the massive customization of the UI (named eve). So much so that it now seems kludgy. Now I am waiting on a Mirasol product instead.

Re:I was really excited about the adam

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'll be interested to see how much, if any, Tivoization they attempted, and how much hackery and/or bodging of proprietary driver blobs is required to get one's own firmware working.

Assuming they didn't pull any bullshit tricks to keep you on their firmware, a device with that flavor of screen is a compelling thing(it was already good on the XO-1, and is said to be improved since then). If, for some perverse reason, they've decided that you will take, and like, whatever dubious decisions they make on the firmware front, then the hell with it...

Re:Confusing summary

[WrongSizeGlass]

Is this thing made by from new process from vapor molecules?

The tablet is real, as was the pun ... the laughs, however, were vaporware.

stop messing with the Android UI

[t2t10]

I have yet to see anybody who didn't screw up badly while messing with the Android UI. Furthermore, those "enhancements" mean support, update, and documentation headaches.

The specific changes on that device looked questionable, and their claims that you can't interact with widgets are out of date. In effect, they have duplicated work on the main branch of Android and come up with an incompatible solution.

No wonder that they are shipping late; they should have shipped a minimal adaptation of Android earlier and taken any spare time fixing bugs in their drivers and hardware.

I won't buy a heavily customized Android device, and I recommend against it. Android gives manufacturers the freedom to do this, but as customers, we don't have to buy the stuff.

Re:stop messing with the Android UI

[afidel]

Yeah my biggest worry is that they will take forever to port their customizations to Honeycomb which will be a much better tablet OS then their hacked up version of 2. They claim its coming but personally I'd wait till it's actually available for download =)

Re:stop messing with the Android UI

[shutdown -p now]

I notice this with phones. I have had a Nexus One for about a year, and recently switched to iPhone 4. The difference isn't immediately apparent when you just pick the latter up to play, but after using it for a while, it pains me to pick up the other phone and tries to use it - small but constant stutter while scrolling things becomes so annoying when you're used to butter smooth scrolling on iOS devices.

In some cases this is actually a matter of different design. E.g. Android browser, when scrolling, will only let you scroll as fast as it can render. The result is that it might not occasionally respond at all to the scrolling gesture. On iOS, flicking the finger will always scroll; if the browser cannot catch up, you will see a checkered pattern representing unrendered part of the page until it catches up. But, on the other hand, this always maintains consistent mapping between the amount your finger moves, and the amount the page scrolls. Overall I found iOS behavior more usable.

But it's not all like that. In many cases - e.g. scrolling app icons, or the Market app - Android version simply feels slower than iOS with no obvious reason as to why.

Bootloader locked or not?

[comm2k]

The only thing I'm interested in is: will the bootloader only accept signed images? If yes I'll pass.
For a device to ship with such heavy customization I doubt anyone will care (or even have to resources) to keep it updated. Even the big names don't do it - since they rather you buy a new device next year. I also doubt people will line up to make extra versions of their apps for just this (Android) tablet (sorry but you do not have the Apple RDF).

Re:US Regulatory Approval Required - WTF?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

FCC: Pretty much all high-frequency digital logic has a nontrivial chance of interfering with licenced blocks of spectrum, unless correctly designed and/or shielded.

Devices with wifi, bluetooth, and/or one of the various flavors of cellular are, of course, explicitly designed to emit RF, and also present potential interference issues.

Level of enforcement varies; but you'll find that virtually all jurisdictions have some sort of RF-spectrum allocation, and some sort of procedure for keeping interference with reserved bands to a minimum.

Re:Honeycomb

[PopeRatzo]

it looked like a bad time to buy anything, with most next-gen tablets available in March-April at earliest.

"Next-gen" tablets will always be three months away.

Re:No portrait mode?

[shutdown -p now]

Actually, portrait is the mode in which it's intended to be used most often. Notice that rounded side, with speakers and swivel camera? It doubles for convenient holding, and it houses the batteries, so that overall weight of the tablet is shifted towards that side (and therefore closer to your fingers, rather than hanging off far from them).

Re:Honeycomb

[Miseph]

Next-Gen *anything* is always 3 months away... but with something like tablets where they are really just coming into their own as a viable, meaningful product, the next-gen is going to be a far more substantial improvement over the last than, say, with a desktop video card.

If my mobo blows tomorrow, I'll just get whatever is current and call, it a day, because frankly I don't care what minuscule incremental improvements they'll have for the next generation... I'd rather have a working computer now than one which is only hypothetically better in a few months. If waiting a few months brought about an exponential improvement, however, I'd at least have to consider holding out a bit longer and maybe visiting the library or whatever in the mean time.