Frustration among Notion Ink Adam pre-order customers, as one of the most anticipated display features – the matte finish, scratch-resistant display – turns out to be not entirely as is seems. According to Notion Ink’s “Design” page, the Adam tablet’s screen is “made of pure matte glass”; however, according to company emails to pre-order customers, in actual fact the display itself is glossy and non-scratch-resistant, and uses an adhesive screen protector in order to meet the promises on the spec sheet.
Update: Notion Ink comment added after the cut
“A super-strong skeleton inside the matte, scratch-resistant skin –the Adam is great to have, and even better to hold. At Notion Ink, we hate fingerprints on our devices and love all things light, durable and useable. And so, all the Adam’s screen surfaces are made of pure matte glass that softens reflections under the brightest of lights, and prevents fingerprints.” Notion Ink “Design” description
It’s unclear whether the screen protector is pre-applied by Notion Ink before the 10.1-inch Adam is shipped, or whether it will merely be bundled in with the rest of the included accessories. If the latter, it will be up to users to fit, which could result in frustrations given the adhesive panels can be tricky even on smaller, smartphone-scale displays.
The news is seemingly at odds with previous information from Notion Ink, where the company suggested it had experimented with different types of matte-finish glass to find an alternative to the usual glossy panels seen on tablets like the iPad. We’re seeking clarification from the company now, and will update as soon as we know more.
Update: Notion Ink CEO Rohan Shravran has told us the following:
“Adam comes with 2 layers of Matte Surfaces, one on the PQ LCD screen, other through the Matte Screen protector on the outside Glass. Inside layer cuts the gloss on the LCD layer and colors are not washed out. For the outside glass we are using specially designed matte covers which users at their end can decide to use or not. It is finger stain resistant (oil component) and has same matte properties as on the LCD. The glass in itself is further scratch resistant.”
Update 2: We’ve been talking with Rohan about the nature of the glass, Pixel Qi and LCD panels, and have some clarification. Both the Pixel Qi and LCD panels apparently have a matte finish, and the glass layer atop them “is already low in gloss, and when you add matte, it’s pure matte.” Rohan says the glass is both “scratch resistant” and “smooth so you can use a protective screens, so you can instead of using matte cover, use any other cover which you want.”
Notion Ink has confirmed that its Adam slate has finally passed through the FCC, which means full clearance for the Android tablet and that the company can print the mandatory labels. That’s expected to begin on Monday, with Adam shipping out from Wednesday; delays in the FCC granting the appropriate codes had held up finalizing the production models.
Adam will have a product code of NI3421A01 (while the FCC guarantee code and FNR are Y2G and 0020356499 respectively). That’s apparently named after consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci series, each iteration – and there have been nine, including the shipping batch – marking a significant event (good or bad) in Notion Ink’s progress to market. A01, meanwhile, stands for the first in the Adam series; the company isn’t being shy about having plans beyond this initial model.
As for the second round of pre-orders, due to the issues surrounding the first batch, Notion Ink has perhaps wisely held off until it can come up with a more inclusive solution. The company is apparently “a few days away” from deliveries in the US and Europe.
Notion Ink has confirmed that its Adam slate has finally passed through the FCC, which means full clearance for the Android tablet and that the company can print the mandatory labels. That’s expected to begin on Monday, with Adam shipping out from Wednesday; delays in the FCC granting the appropriate codes had held up finalizing the production models.
Adam will have a product code of NI3421A01 (while the FCC guarantee code and FNR are Y2G and 0020356499 respectively). That’s apparently named after consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci series, each iteration – and there have been nine, including the shipping batch – marking a significant event (good or bad) in Notion Ink’s progress to market. A01, meanwhile, stands for the first in the Adam series; the company isn’t being shy about having plans beyond this initial model.
As for the second round of pre-orders, due to the issues surrounding the first batch, Notion Ink has perhaps wisely held off until it can come up with a more inclusive solution. The company is apparently “a few days away” from deliveries in the US and Europe.
The first Notion Ink Adam tablet pre-order deliveries have apparently been delayed, with the company still waiting on final FCC and CE numbers before they can ship the slates out. SlashGear was forwarded a Notion Ink email from a pre-order customer, which claims that “the Holiday season in December pushed the administrative work and it will be cleared within this week.”
Notion Ink had previously said that FCC clearance was the final hoop before pre-order units could ship, and it seems the holidays have delayed the final silkscreen printing of the necessary approval codes onto the back of the Adam slates. It’s worth repeating that this isn’t an FCC approval delay, but just the final labeling required to make sure the hardware complies with regulations.
We’re waiting on an official statement from Notion Ink regarding the delay, but for now it seems there are just a few more days to wait before Adam wings its way out to customers. For more on Adam, check out our hands-on report from CES 2011 last week complete with video of the innovative Eden UI and multitasking system.
Have you received a delay email from Notion Ink? Let us know in the comments.
Dear xxxxx,
Greetings from the Notion Ink Support Team!
This e-mail is to inform you that your shipment is ready, but we are
awaiting final FCC and CE numbers which are to be printed on the
device before we can ship them to you. The Holiday season in December
pushed the administrative work and it will be cleared within this
week.
We request your kind patience and cooperation till we inform you of
your shipment.
As you may already know, the Notion Ink Adam was recently demonstrated
to a lot of people at CES 2011, and the Adam was appreciated greatly
and loved by everyone.
We really appreciate your continued support and effort that you have
infused into creating the Notion Ink Community.
Every CES has its unofficial theme – we’ve seen netbooks and ereaders flood the booths in previous years – and 2011 was the turn of tablets. As predicted before the show, the rise of the iPad, the imminent release of Android 3.0 Honeycomb and the promise of a new, lucrative segment has worked like catnip to manufacturers large and small. Check out the SlashGear CES 2011 tablet roundup after the cut.
We’ve been tracking Notion Ink since late 2009, and this year had the chance to see what’s so exciting about the company’s Adam tablet. The one Android-based slate on show that didn’t have to apologize for running something earlier than Honeycomb, Adam’s key strength is its awesome Eden UI and multitasking system. Our hands-on videos show it best, but considering this tiny start-up has managed to do what has pretty much escaped Microsoft for the past decade, it’s very promising.
Motorola’s XOOM is another slate with great promise, and its debut on Verizon this quarter – along with a 4G model in Q2 – is already getting people excited. Like Adam, the XOOM runs NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chipset – you can find more about what that means in our Super Phone hub – and while it will be one of the first tablets to give us an official glimpse of Honeycomb, it also packs a few copy-worthy features. For instance, Motorola has designed the XOOM’s modem as modular, so that the 3G version it will launch with can be easily upgraded to a 3G/4G version later on; that will hopefully make international 3G/4G launches more straightforward as well.
T-Mobile has a 4G tablet of its own, in the shape of the HSPA+ capable G-Slate by LG. The most mysterious of the carrier-provided options, there’s not much known about the G-Slate beyond its Android 3.0 OS and 10-inch display. T-Mobile preferred to spend its time talking about the new Dell Streak 7, the long-rumored 7-inch sibling to the original Streak. Unfortunately it won’t be able to take advantage of the full speeds on offer as T-Mobile doubles its HSPA+ network to support up to 42Mbps, being limited to 21Mbps instead, but with Dell’s heft behind it we wouldn’t count it out.
Perhaps our biggest surprise of the show was how strong an option RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook is shaping up to be. A step away from the Android crowds, the PlayBook’s QNX-based OS and dual-core TI OMAP4430 chipset single it out as a very capable contender, with a UI that bridges the larger screen size and the traditional BlackBerry interface well, and lashings of processing grunt on tap. It too will have a 4G option, courtesy of a launch on Sprint’s WiMAX network. Perhaps it was RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis’ enthusiasm rubbing off as he personally demo’d the slate to us, but the PlayBook looks like it could end up part of the iPad’s strongest competition.
RIM BlackBerry PlayBook demo:
While the slate form-factor has been the most common, ASUS and Samsung took a risk and opted for sliders in their tablet ranges. The ASUS Eee Pad Slider and Samsung Sliding PC 7 don’t show much imagination in their names but have enough to differentiate themselves in their hardware, each packing a full QWERTY keyboard for those who want the finger-friendliness of a touchscreen but also want to do some serious text entry. Beyond that similarity, though, the prospects are very different. Samsung opted for an Intel Oak Trail processor and Windows 7, promising full desktop functionality for those who care about it, but running the risk of underwhelming mobile battery life and having to reskin the OS with its own Touch Launcher UI. ASUS, meanwhile, opted for Android 3.0 Honeycomb running on Tegra 2, a far more mobility-friendly decision but potentially lacking the “grown up” software flexibility of the Samsung.
Though hardware has been brimming over with Tegra 2 and other dual-core chipsets, the software side of things has suffered. We asked for intelligent ecosystems, tablets that fit into a more comprehensive system of media, hardware and connectivity, and few delivered. Vizio’s VIA Tablet and Phone look to have come the closest, coupling integration with the company’s smart TVs and cross-device access to things like streaming media and OnLive gaming, but it’s something the big names have failed to deliver on. That’s going to make positioning their devices in the market all the more difficult; Apple gets a lot of criticism for its relatively closed-garden approach, but it also does a very good job at putting the iPad into context with the rest of the iTunes ecosystem. Rivals are going to have to learn to do more than produce lengthy spec sheets if they want mainstream buyers to slot another mobile device into their lives.
There have been a few notable absences at this year’s show, too. HTC continues to get name-checked in the Honeycomb tablet rumors, but failed to show anything more than smartphones at CES 2011. Worse still, the company was overshadowed by Motorola’s ATRIX 4G, with its clever laptop-style docking station. We’ll be looking to MWC 2011 in February to see if HTC can redeem itself there.
Motorola ATRIX 4G demo:
HP and the promised webOS slate was also conspicuous by its absence, and the surprise reveal we’d half-hoped for in the run up to CES failed to materialize. We’re yet to see an attention-grabber like Palm’s Pre debut a few years back, and interest in the company’s smartphone line-up continues to wane. Hopefully something suitably groundbreaking will show up at the HP webOS event on February 9. Microsoft, too, was tipped to be putting greater software emphasis on touch computing, but instead gave the Windows-faithful – both among users and manufacturers – little to smile about. The rumoured Windows 8 preview never transpired, and Windows-on-ARM got more keynote attention by CEO Steve Ballmer. That might have seemed the ideal opportunity to talk UI, but Microsoft didn’t cash in.
The absent spectre looming over all the tablets at CES 2011 was the second-gen iPad. Rivals have had a year to ready their alternatives, but Apple hasn’t been standing still in the meantime; the iPad 2 is rumored to be unveiled as early as this month, and while it may not have the all-singing, all-dancing tech specs of some hardware we’ve seen in the past week, it will have a solid user-base, well-stocked App Store and gobfuls of brand appeal to build upon. Factor in that many of the big-name slates are waiting on Honeycomb, against Apple’s ability to announce a new device and then ship very soon after, and the iPad 2 could well be repeating its predecessor’s sales success imminently. 2011 is most definitely the year of the tablet, but that’s the only certainty in what’s turning out to be a volatile segment.
As you’ve seen from our first hands-on, Notion Ink’s Adam tablet is a pretty smooth operator, but we wanted to see just how smooth. The company allowed us to load up an Android benchmarking app to see how the slate performs, but there are a few caveats to bear in mind.
Video after the cut
We ran Quadrant Advanced on the Adam, and the Tegra 2 powered slate scored 1,836. Now, before you panic, you have to remember that Froyo hasn’t been optimized to take advantage of multithreading, so the number isn’t going to be fully representative of real-world performance. It’s an issue we’re going to see increasingly with dual-core devices like the Motorola ATRIX 4G and LG Optimus 2X.
On top of that is Notion Ink’s own Eden multitasking system, which doesn’t use parallel processing – instead, it only kickstarts the second core when the first core is full loaded. That helps battery life, by minimizing power consumption when two running cores aren’t essential, but it doesn’t do Adam any favors when it comes to on-paper benchmark results. The short of it is, though, that this is one slick, fast-moving tablet, and Notion Ink has done its homework getting the customizations working well.
We’ve been tracking the Notion Ink story since before CES 2010, and a year later we’ve sat down with CEO Rohan Shravran and the final product. Despite skepticism at what the start-up could achieve, the end result is a mightily impressive interpretation of an Android slate. Check out our hands-in impressions after the cut.
While Adam’s hardware pushed the envelope 12 months ago, by now there are plenty of other Tegra 2 slates hovering around the market. What keeps the tablet looking special is Notion Ink’s custom software. Eden, the multitasking UI, splits the screen into three panes, and intelligently uses the dual-core NVIDIA processor to balance power and battery life. For instance, the CPU shows up as a single core in the Android “About” page; Eden won’t activate the second core if there’s still capacity in the first core.
The way individual apps are handled does its part to minimize Tegra 2 exertion too. In the mail client, for instance, when you’re only reading emails it doesn’t load the send-mail library. That reduces load times and shrinks the amount of memory and power required. Other apps work in a similar way, only loading the libraries that are necessary for the functions you’re actively using. Background apps are frozen to free up their resources.
Now, when we tried loading twenty apps, there was an understandable slow-down; that’s unavoidable. Still, it’s the smoothest implementation we’ve seen on an Android tablet yet. The Tegra 2 chip isn’t short on power either, capable of playing silky-smooth 1080p Full HD video. Notion Ink has put together its own custom FFMPEG pack, and that results in zero buffering delay when shuttling video around; there’s no lag at all, it’s like watching it on a dedicated Blu-ray player.
Don’t forget, Adam has an HDMI output as well, for hooking the slate up to your HDTV. Audio on mobile devices is usually underpar, but Notion Ink’s side-mounted speaker layout and 3D audio actually works. There’s a noticeable change in the audio as objects move around on-screen.
Elsewhere, there are plenty of examples of Notion Ink going the extra mile, like global copy & paste support. The company wants Adam to be used for content creation as well as consumption, so you can copy & paste numbers, text and graphics, as well as take screenshots direct to the clipboard.
In all, it’s one impressive tablet, and we’re particularly impressed by how NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and Eden work together. More in our hands-on videos!
More videos and images are being processed. They will be up soon.
Notion Ink’s Adam tablet is still a hot ticket, with people all over the world waiting to get their hands on their very own Android-powered tablet device. The story of the Adam is a roller coaster in of itself, but the company has made huge leaps forward when it comes to showing off the device. Perhaps hearing people call out for actual video of the device, along with its User Interface (UI) and functionality actually sank in (it did). We’ve seen plenty of videos of the Adam in the past, and now Notion Ink’s Rohan Shravan is ready to show off something else: Eden VIII.
In this video, we see what happens when applications don’t have “Leaves,” (you can see the Leaves here), along with plenty of other features. You’ll get to see third-party application installation, how auto-realignment works in the Browser when you zoom in or out, and portrait mode. You’ll also get to see how the Adam launches applications you choose, and pinch-to-zoom in the Browser.
Another video showing the Adam’s potential is a welcomed gift before the end of 2010, and as Shravan puts it, this may be the last one before the new year, and before CES 2011. Notion Ink will be on hand at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and we’ll be sure to grab some time with them and the Adam, so stay tuned.
Tonight comes the newest installment in the EDEN system of demos, this one VII and the first one to be done direct from the screen via the HDMI out to a computer at Notion Ink. This means a much better looking quality video, but still without sound. Improving ever so steadily! This video features a look at the Leaves system of working with the tablet and a tiny glance at the desktop. Leaves take each of your apps (apps that are ready to work with Leaves, of course) and turns them into sort of big widgets. They say that since things like feeds, Tweeting, Facebooking, and changing a song aren’t full-fledged apps in themselves, they shouldn’t need a full app open! Enter Leaves – or panels, if that’s what you’d like to call them. Check it out!
Each Leaf is an app instance (or widget, if you will,) that does basic tasks. Each of these Leaves sits aside the rest in a big row. You can cycle through these leaves with a swipe of your finger. They stop with three leaves to a screen each time you let go, the closest combination to be sticking. Browser in Leaf mode is considered a mini app running “mobile optimized” sites for quick access to the web. This whole situation keeps a close eye on your bandwidth and Data.
All the way on your left is your Alpha Leaf or Home Leaf. Here you can see all of the leaves currently open, as well as offering you quick access to all of your current activities (basically showing you every app that’s currently open, the same way your dock works on your desktop, to out understanding here.) They say they’ve retained Android’s basic way of handling apps, but with more free RAM.
Each leaf can be launched into its full app mode. Once you’re done with an app, your Home key of course brings you back to your row of Leaves. For things like calculator, the most basic functions are in the Leaf, while the expanded app shows more scientific functions.
Sniffer Leaf is a special Leaf that allows you to browse folders, preview, and open files. Funtions like delete, copy, and more are available in the expanded app. They note that while database functions tend to work slower, Sniffer runs fast!
They speak shortly about the keyboard showing secondary keys above each letter and characters, noting the lack of lines between keys as your brain doesn’t need them to type. They say switching between Leaves is quick and fun, and that they’ve worked with Mentor Graphics to use Tegra’s GPUs to the core.
Up in the left hand corner, very tiny, you’ll note a button that turns red and blinks whenever you’ve got a notification. This button expands to your full notifications bar whenever you click it!
The Dual Cores are handled in the following way: Eden keeps the CPU hot plugged, meaning that whenever required, one of the Dual Cores can be shut down. The cores work to this rule: anything less than 250MHz of processing power needed you’ve got one core working, as soon as the requirement hits 500MHz, the second one switches on (what about in between? We guess that the 1 to 2 switchover actually happens around 250MHz.)
Finally, to access the desktop, all you’ve got to do is two-finger-swipe down, to get back to Leaves, just two-finger-swipe back up. The desktop is very similar to your home screen on Android devices now, holding a big bunch of icons with multiple screens for more available. Take a peek at the full video now!
We’ve been waiting to see the fruits of Notion Ink’s EAP (early access program) with third-party developers, and the Adam tablet’s mapping app – developed by Merio – is a good place to start. Rather than simply blow up Google Maps to the 10.1-inch display, Adam has its own custom app supporting POIs, turn-by-turn directions and 3D.
Video demo after the cut
Unfortunately there are no technical details beyond what you see demonstrated in the video below, and we can’t find much information on developers Merio either. It’s also not clear whether the mapping data is locally stored, cached, or accessed over what would have to be a very fast wireless connection.
Meanwhile, Notion Ink has revealed that 3G-enabled Adam tablets will be able to receive remote commands via SMS message, though it’s unclear if the functionality will be utilized when the slate is first released. The company recently demonstrated the Adam browser and HDMI connectivity.
