Submitted by As promised, a write-up about Notion Ink’s Adam. Yes, it’s yet another tablet, and yes, there’s only so many ways you can build a tablet, but this one is special: it has a much-vaunted Pixel Qi display, a type of display that is supposed to herald the coming of the Unicorn of Plenty. All hype aside, this is a pretty cool piece of technology.
So, let’s get the specifications out of the way first. We’re looking at a tablet using NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, so that means a dual core ARM Cortex A9 which can deliver 1080p video, which obviously makes the most sense when the device is hooked up to an HDTV via its HDMI port. It has a 3.2 megapixel swivel video camera, the usual wireless stuff, accelerometer, aGPS, ambient light sensor, USB 2.0 ports, MicroSD slot, audio jacks, and so on.
The Adam (I’m playing Bioshock 2 at the moment, so the name sounds a bit… Off) has two very distinct features. The first of these two distinct features is a trackpad located on the back of the tablet. So, when you’re holding the devices, you can use the trackpad to use the mouse pointer if you’re using an operating system that wasn’t designed with touch in mind. A pretty obvious solution, but whether or not it works in real life remains to be seen.
The second distinct feature is the Adam’s display. You can opt to have your Adam equipped with a 10.1″ 1024×600 display by Pixel Qi, which, simply put, combines the best of e-ink with the best of regular LCD. In other words, you can have a full colour, normal LCD, or a black and white e-ink-like display at the flick of a switch.
Everybody’s still a little sketchy on battery life, and claims go from spectacular to downright bizarre, so I wouldn’t dwell on any battery life claims too much until the device reaches the hands of testers (Notion Ink is aiming for a Q3 2010 release). So far, it’s only been demonstrated – there are no actual hands-on reviews that I know of.
Software-wise, it can run whatever runs on ARM, so that’d be Android, Ubuntu, or whatever you can think of.
It’s an interesting piece of kit, but I’d be careful about going all starry-eyed over this one. It’s still a long way off, and coming from such an unknown and small company, you always have to be careful. We’ll have to wait and see.
Pixel Qi + Tegra2 = awesome
Not nice .. awesome!
Multitasking, flash, camera, reading in bright sunlight, very long battery life, different OSes, wide screen, touchpad.
What more can you ask for? This will be my PDF reader of choice .. I just hope it won’t take until the end of 2010 for it to arrive in stinky cold Europe.
Thom, I never heard about the Unicorn of Plenty
(the Dutch “Hoorn des Overvloeds” is known to the Anglosaxon world in its Latin incarnation ‘Cornucopia’, or simply as ‘Horn of Plenty’)
“Hoorn des Overvloeds”
That would make a great porn name.
correctly, back in the 80’s there was a computer called the Adam. So be prepared for more lawsuits.
That was the Coleco Adam, and if I remember right, is came with some type of tape drive
A tape drive that wiped the tape in the deck when you flicked the power switch.
Ooh, I wanted the Adam so badly. I pored over the specs and the promotional materials in rabid anticipation. Lucklily, I never got one, partly because I had been paying close enough attention to know that it didn’t live up to its promise, and partly because my parents never would have spent the money anyway. But this was my first exposure to vaporware’s unwelcome cousin: hypeware.
I’m surprised Thom didn’t refer to it as “Vaporwar”e. He used it to describe the iPad, which clearly is not Vaporware (people have had it in their hands).
I don’t see how anyone could refer to either the iPad or the Adam as vaporware, since something has to have been announced and then repeatedly delayed or announced with no release date and subsequently a long period with no new news to be “vaporware.”
The iPad was semi-vaporware in the sense that it was long-rumored, but once Apple announced it and gave us a release date, they’re on a temporary reprieve from the label unless they delay shipment for quite some time.
To call a just-announced product like the Adam vaporware is just inaccurate. Give them a chance to release it, for goodness sakes!
No, here’s the reality with the iPad: before Apple officially (or even unofficially announced it that was trackable to an employee in the know) the iPad was “rumorware” which means… the company can’t be held to blame in the least about anything rumored.
Now, you want to talk about vaporware, or even just balloonware? Look at all the neat things Microsoft floats out there for the public’s reaction, such as WinFS, or the latest hardware (Courier? The book-like thing) and then see how long between the time they show something about it and it happens, if ever. Microsoft has come up with a lot of good stuff over the years, but they’ve also released a lot smaller percentage of what they’ve ballyhooed than has Apple: Apple has better managed real and potential customers’ expectations (for the realists, not the rumormongers) than has Microsoft, but then, Microsoft seems more likely to have that be not nearly as vital, simply because for the common case, people still have to go to Microsoft for the software that powers the systems they use to use other software, due to lock-in.
My first computer was the ADAM.
My Parents bought it along with a 13″ TV (our house had been without TV up to that point) because it came with a built in word processor and daisy wheel printer.
We had a bunch of games on tape, that we got from the ADAM in my area (all bootlegged I guess, but coleco had already cut the cord and it was just about impossible to find them legit)
More importantly I received The LOGO language (on a cassette tape, of course) that Christmas. There is a picture of me holding this fat Plastic binder and grinning from ear to ear. I think I was 8 or 9.
Until I can buy it, it’s vaporware for me.
Most of the battery draw in tablets comes from the screen, so the claimed battery performance increase is pretty much all from the Pixel Qi screen. If you have it set to e-reader mode, then its gonna last a very long time. If its on lcd mode with no back light then its still gonna to have fairly decent battery life, if you watching 1080p movies in a dark room with the back light on at full power, then it probably will be about even with other tablets. So your battery life will be related to how you use to it.
On paper this thing looks awesome, but I will need some hands on reviews before committing to anything.
If you are going to use it to watch 1080p movies, battery life is not so much of a concern. You have to use the HDMI port to connect it to something capable of 1080p, like a modern tv. So you can just as well leave the power brick in and not run the Adam of batteries.
If you are going to watch on the device, there is no reason to bother with 1080p content. After all, the Adam has only something like 1/3 of the pixels needed for 1080p. In that regard you are right, back-light, decoding of 1080p and rescaling will suck battery.
That’s the most disappointing with it, the lousy screen. A resolution like 1024 x 600 is not good, netbooks shows that too.
How is this resolution lousy? I use a netbook all the time and this resolution works just fine. So you can only have one application running per desktop, but is that such a big deal?
… but 1024×600 screen resolution is a bit low for me. Why boast of full HD playback if the screen isn’t even show HD-ready (1280×720) resolution? Yes, you can connect an external full-HD screen, but that would not be the main use of a tablet PC.
That said, I would still love to have one.
the low resolution is the only reason i wouldn’t buy a adam. 1280×720 or higher would be much much better. sony vaio p-series has 1600×768 on an 8″ display, that’s a resolution for reading text.
AFAIK, the Pixel Qi screen in e-paper mode has many times the resolution that the same screen has in colour mode. In other words, it is fine for reading text (in epaper mode).
1080p resolution would therefore only be useful for/applicable to the HDMI output.
Edited 2010-02-18 12:01 UTC
Ok .. but .. that doesn’t negate torbenm’s point. Why boast HD when you can’t deliver full HD. 99.99% of consumers would see “HD” and think “sweet, full HD videos on this tablet. Umm … wait a minute.”
Kind of bait-and-switch.
Edited 2010-02-18 15:10 UTC
Not really … you can see the small size of the screen, they aren’t hiding that in any way. It is a standard 10 inch netbook-type screen (with a neat extra hi-res epaper mode that netbooks lack).
However, the Adam tablet also has an HDMI output, and it has the ability to decode 1080p video and deliver it to that output. The iPad, for example, has neither of those things.
So, in marketing terms, what exactly do you boast about when you do have a HDMI output that can deliver 1080p quality video? What term do you use?
Put it this way … take a BlueRay disc player. Walk into a HiFi store and have a look at one marketed on the display shelf. It would boast full HD, 1080p HDMI output etc and it doesn’t even have any screen at all, of any resolution.
Edited 2010-02-18 22:17 UTC
You’re joking, right? The sony pixel size and resolution is totally unusable. I know someone who has one of those sonys. He also has a 1024×600 netbook. Guess which one gets used? (not the sony).
Put Maemo/MeeGo on there and i am sold, i’ll buy one.
I wouldn’t purchase a tablet to make my alternate home theater option. If I’m going to watch movies on it, I’d probably do so on an airplane, and not care that the screen resolution isn’t 1080p HD.
I do love the idea of the dual mode screen! I’m very excited about this product, I just want to know when they figure out what software they are using, what ebook formats it will support. Any ideas?
Slashgear has had some nice coverage of the thing in the last weeks.
http://www.slashgear.com/tags/notion-ink/
For example, there will also be an LCD-only alternative that is supposed to be thinnner and a little cheaper. Battery time is supposed to be 16hours while playing HD video, so it appears they got that right as well. I never received a reply if it can retain display content while in s2ram. Some months ago, PixelQi said this is reserved for later versions of their screen. 1024x is indeed a bit low, but still sufficient for 10″. My Kindle DX also has no more than 1200x, so in B/W mode the PixelQi display will allow comfortable reading. PDFs will also show better than on Kindle&Co due to stronger CPU+RAM: Kindle’s display of small antialiased fonts does not look optimal and “browsing” a pdf or unexpectingly going a few pages back is really slow. They also can’t do progressive rendering of a pdf since eInk is to slow.