Notion Ink Adam : Death of a Tablet part 3: this is not the Droid you have been looking for ...move along

I have awarded Thegameveda 2010 coveted plastic Dodo award to the Notion Ink  and its Adam. 

CES 2011 is online/over  , and an army of around 100 Tablets is about to derezz the Notion Ink Adam even before the first one lands in the hands of its few purchasers... who has I predicted in a previous treatise entitled  Notion Ink Adam Death of a Tablet part 2  and prior to that in a discourse entitled The Notion Ink Adam Dead and Buried before Arrival  , are not going to receive their Adams on time .... it is not even funny any more...


Notion Inkers , the family , the few ..the happy few , have been spoon fed videos of leaves , hdmi out displays, and wonder of wonder videos of screen rotation!  to the un-enchanted the over complex and overstretched software layer  has managed to make the hardware look like its dressed for oblivion wearing a giant Albatross around its neck ... Enough I cannee take no more Captain...too many ornithological riffs .

As I write there are still no preorders available , and there still has been no live demo of the fabled pixelqi screen. There is an official on site video but this does not manage to actually show actual use of the tablet , they went for a Wetab simulated concept demo . Isn't that nice ? . But all of that is irrelevant , for alas poor Adam ,is dead , we did not know him well , a tablet of infinite jest it seems... not...

As I write  the new tablet army is ending the year long tease that the Notion Ink Adam launch has become ,satiating the hunger and expectations of millions of tablet fans.  Frankly outside of a few 1000 punters who through the power of the Notion Ink Blog Grooming scheme have talked and talked and talked themselves into buying the thing ,  believing falsely that the Adam would arrive in 2010 , be available to preorder , and be revolutionary compared to its competition , able to run Honeycomb with the rest of the big boys , well you know none of that has happened.


A favourable review  sorry preview  , sorry hands on in some dark corner of CES , by usually Apple centric blogs,one  by the same journalist who was so wowed by it 1 year ago.... represent a few patronising pats on the back for young Rohan from the big blogs perhaps , to make up for the universal vitriol poured on Fusion Garage on their sites.... and the realisation that the day will come when one of these Asian genii will dethrone Jobs and Master Gates ,  it won't be Notion Ink or Fusion Garage though!


lets see what Rohans up against : or why the Adam died....


Design choice faults were obvious in the Adam from Creation or inception as folks like to say these days  ......where to begin , too much talking and too little action , most importantly settling on a suboptimal res of 1024 by 600 when the Tegra 2 tablets are all running beyond this and the ref for tablets to use Honeycomb is 1280*720 .Wasting time designing a leaf based UI , remember the leaf based Linux UI of the Joojoo? and vapour launching the tablet before Honeycomb 3  . The tech is dated , rushed , software clunky , complex and futitle when you think every tablet and your toaster will be running Honeycomb 

The Adam like the doomed Tegra 2 based Folio will fail because of its impatience to release before the only UI layer designed for tablets ,Honeycomb,that can take on iOS is released. Oh you few 1000 users may be able to hack some version of Honeycomb , but it wont be the bells and whistles , tablet OS that every other cheaper faster , larger and more widely available Tegra 2 tablet will be running .

1.We have the 4 Musketeers from Asus who have not one but 4 tablets out , including they claim the most powerful tablet ever :


2.Having defeated the Asus Musketeers the Notion Ink Adam will have to take on  The Motorola Xoom  which is the greatest thing to come out of CES , for many , and has been awarded that title officially.

3. Then the more   powerful full OS Windows 7  tablets from Motion Computing   , futuristic dual screen  tablets in the form of the Acer Iconia .. as well as too many to mention competitors  including an i5 powered Windows 7 tablet the Eee Slate EP121, which has a 12.1-inch  screen up to 4GB of memory and  Bluetooth 3.0 , and then how about some  Honeycomb running variants from 7 to 10 inches . The Eee Slate works with a Wacom Digitizer pen and also comes with a bluetooth keyboard . And then there are all the others with Toshiba , LG , Motorola, and Blackberry to name but a few that all showed their wares .

4. And of course in the last weeks of January the tech world is readying itself for the annual vegan (I am sure) Cupertino luau where Steve Jobs  will roast the competition in an underground banana leaf oven with the announcement of iPad 2 


Then if by some miracle Notion Ink get the Adam past that lot , we have around 74+ other tablets too numerous to go into here , but you get the picture , Adam is over.


5. the Adam isn't fighting against hundreds , it is fighting against millions:Say the Adam  hardware Cyrano like manages to win its moonlit  duel with 100 odd tablets , what about the Software ? Well major players like Google , Blackberry , Apple and even Microsoft with Windows 7 tablets have millions of developers collectively working for them.  The Adam cannot scale this software wall , unless of course it was designed to leverage Android or Windows , but after   CES we know that their is no official Android app store for it , Honeycombs native res for tablets is too much for the Adam , and there is no way you will be installing Windows 7 without ripping it open adding RAM and an ssd ,much simpler ,cheaper and wiser to go for an i5 powered   Asus Ep121 for instance.... Although you won't be convincing many Notion Ink sheep who would probably be happy with an empty box with Adam written on it , the way they worship the thing. But consider they have wasted a year of their lives blogging for some tech that was outdated the day it was announced , and is outperformed in price and power by much more viable alternatives from name manufacturers and I do not mean Apple alone people!


So Notion Inks Adam is a dead , a deceased parrot of a semi-vapour tablet , even its official video does not show the tablet ! yeah you noticed that too did you?


Lessons in how to not design a tablet or any other product for that matter:


1. And most importantly ,too much design bs - there is a years worth of how not to design a tablet blog nonsense for students of how not to design tablets on the official blog. Not entirely different from the mistakes Fusion Garage made although they did not tease their prospective customers so much...


2.Every tablet turning heads at CES eg the Xoom is reliant on the might of the big players creating the OS . Fusion Garage had hardware that could have run Windows but went nuts over a cloud tablet , possibly 10 years before we get used to cloud computing , how do I know it could run Windows 7 ? because I am typing this on it . Notion Ink similarly , for all their talk designed themselves out of a market , that will be controlled by simple hardware design , giving the customers what they want does not mean ignoring what is best for them . Honeycomb is ready to shine on the 100 odd new Tegra 2 tablets , all of whom are going to be more easily available ,cheaper , and useful than the Adam with Eden , its leaves and its suboptimal res. Windows 7 tablets will cater for the power hungry or anyone who wants to be free from App slavery. There is no place for Adam in this very busy  arena.


3. Again , the screen resolution is totally wrong , you have powerful hardware , but Notion Ink pair it with a screen that does not even run at the minimum resolution that is required by Honeycomb to function on tablets. And of course every other Tegra 2 tablet is running at that optimal res. 

With the tablet competition hotting up , even Steve Jobs will have to work some wicked voodoo with iPad 2.0 , Rohan and Notion Ink do not stand a chance , another Adam chased out of Eden by the bite of an Apple .....

4. Adam is ugly the bezzels are astonishingly large , giving it a certain early Shenzen  Apad chic ... I do not want a bezel I can replace , I do not want a bezel at all 


So people do not waste your hard earned cash , no one who preordered will get theirs on time , or before the tsunami of above tablets arrives , its the wrong res for Honeycomb , Eden is  another useless over complex UI that will not compete with Honeycomb ,  or full OS tablets ,  there are around 100 alternatives weeks away , all with better hardware and pricing , in reality this year long tease has been a tablet version of the Emperors New Clothes .
  
Is there a single promise that has been kept by this company and are you going to  walk around with obsolete tech and software when the latest whizzbang tablets are raining down all around you?


Notion Ink Adam? ...more like Notion Sink Adam.....too much conversation and too little action as the King used to sing...and ... thank you very much ..huh..huh...right I am off for my refried banana snack is ready ...

I just hope it does not go through a resurrection , as I am running out of bird similes......

check out some of the Adam competition below : 

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