Sadly - I have decided to cross the Notion Ink adam off my list of tablets.
I had sooooooo much hope and excitement for this tablet. Its innovative look. The promise of an awesome screen that would give me full color LCD inside and reading like an eInk outside. All the amazing spec's. this thing had it all. Everything except one key thing - truth.
OK - saying truth may be over stating it a bit - but I feel like this thing is a lie and that we have been lied to again and again.
While I commend Rohan for communicating with the community - really much of what he says is a lot of nothing - or he says things that do not play out later. Delay after delay after delay are killing this company.
He also stated at one point that other than US and EURO - many people were getting their adam's. No one any where came out of the woodwork to share they got one of these. No one. Where the pre-order 1 group were all avid fans - most of these people should have been followers of the blog and should have been posting about their adam. A week later he announced it was shipping for the first time. So many other posts of his have been misleading or just outright wrong. Things like FCC approval, how much memory it had, what status it was in at various times. the whole secret sensor game was a joke. Also, they were caught photoshopping the size of their bezel to make it look smaller. I know the bezel is large. Its huge really. But we knew that. Don't try to be sneaky though.
Rohan's business plan is at best childish - at worst - moronic. Zero advertising. Zero marketing. Zero retail presence. One world price fits all. One world shipping cost fits all. Extremely amateurish web site. The requirment of the customer to be charged in full for their purchase that will not ship for months. A return policy that is difficult at best, likely impossible to most. And the best part - buy now, pay in full - without ever having touched or seen one. For a while I was willing to ignore all this and give it a go - but its all starting to pile up like the snow in my front yard. After a while it just gets too heavy to deal with.
Some things on the hardware side are frustrating too.
The screen is not matte. Its high gloss. If you install a screen protector I guess it becomes matte - but so many users I have read had an extremely difficult time installing this thing, and many screwed it up or just gave up. Others took it off after because it impacted the color so much.
Also on the screen - I have now read comments from many users about the screens and the screens are low quality at best - many are clearly defective but NI says they are working as expected. Really? The ultimate NI fans will say the screens are not as good as they hoped but they think they are good enough. The non NI fanatic's are shouting about horrible screens. The pixel qi screens have poor color and there is apparently issues with the screen where one side is darker (expected apparently). I've read a handful of comments that the plain LCD screen (non pixel qi) works ok - but the color is no where near as good as anyone expected.
Memory of 8 gig (5 for the user) is so lame in todays time its shameful. Seriously? 8 gig? A serious tablet today should have 32 gig at a minimum. I know NI says you can expand - and they even said you can expand up to 128 gig. All this would have been fine if it was expandable using a Micro SD card or something inserted like a card. But 32 gig card is the max. To get to 128 gig you have to stick a flash drive in it. I think this is lame. I don't want flash drives sticking out of my tablet on a regular basis.
Another thing that came to light was that the adam only charges through a full power cord - no USB charging. Maybe this makes sense on some level but I think that sucks. One of the great things about other smart devices is that you can have a charging cord at your office and home hooked up to your computers. Now - I would either have to lug that large bulky cable around or buy spares.
The software - which quite honestly was a huge attraction - suddenly is not show shiny. Out of the box much of the software did not work or was very buggy. Thankfully - there was a sw update right away but users who downloaded it bricked the adam and needed special instruction to fix it. Even after the new update - users report that while better - there are many many bugs and a long way to go until its as good as we dreamed of.
Really - there is much more I could bitch about the adam. To be honest - many of the things can be considered small or minor. But together it all adds up to a tablet with a ton of problems and a company that has no plan and what may be historys worst business implementation.
So - Adam 1 is not for me. Conceptually the adam has a ton of promise and if NI survives and truly learns from their start up pains - could be a huge future success. But I have seen many many companies with better business plans and better implementation fail. I'll be surprised if there is an Adam 2. But if there is - I'll give them another look to see if they have matured.
Now - its off to see what else is out there. HTC is rumored to be coming out with 3 tablets by June. The Xoom looks ok but over priced. ASUS could be interesting. Last - I may even fall back on the iPad 2. I hope not as Android has so much more potential than Apple. But in the end - I want a very good quality tablet - not some piece of crap which most of the android tablet makers seem to think is good enough.
I had sooooooo much hope and excitement for this tablet. Its innovative look. The promise of an awesome screen that would give me full color LCD inside and reading like an eInk outside. All the amazing spec's. this thing had it all. Everything except one key thing - truth.
OK - saying truth may be over stating it a bit - but I feel like this thing is a lie and that we have been lied to again and again.
While I commend Rohan for communicating with the community - really much of what he says is a lot of nothing - or he says things that do not play out later. Delay after delay after delay are killing this company.
He also stated at one point that other than US and EURO - many people were getting their adam's. No one any where came out of the woodwork to share they got one of these. No one. Where the pre-order 1 group were all avid fans - most of these people should have been followers of the blog and should have been posting about their adam. A week later he announced it was shipping for the first time. So many other posts of his have been misleading or just outright wrong. Things like FCC approval, how much memory it had, what status it was in at various times. the whole secret sensor game was a joke. Also, they were caught photoshopping the size of their bezel to make it look smaller. I know the bezel is large. Its huge really. But we knew that. Don't try to be sneaky though.
Rohan's business plan is at best childish - at worst - moronic. Zero advertising. Zero marketing. Zero retail presence. One world price fits all. One world shipping cost fits all. Extremely amateurish web site. The requirment of the customer to be charged in full for their purchase that will not ship for months. A return policy that is difficult at best, likely impossible to most. And the best part - buy now, pay in full - without ever having touched or seen one. For a while I was willing to ignore all this and give it a go - but its all starting to pile up like the snow in my front yard. After a while it just gets too heavy to deal with.
Some things on the hardware side are frustrating too.
The screen is not matte. Its high gloss. If you install a screen protector I guess it becomes matte - but so many users I have read had an extremely difficult time installing this thing, and many screwed it up or just gave up. Others took it off after because it impacted the color so much.
Also on the screen - I have now read comments from many users about the screens and the screens are low quality at best - many are clearly defective but NI says they are working as expected. Really? The ultimate NI fans will say the screens are not as good as they hoped but they think they are good enough. The non NI fanatic's are shouting about horrible screens. The pixel qi screens have poor color and there is apparently issues with the screen where one side is darker (expected apparently). I've read a handful of comments that the plain LCD screen (non pixel qi) works ok - but the color is no where near as good as anyone expected.
Memory of 8 gig (5 for the user) is so lame in todays time its shameful. Seriously? 8 gig? A serious tablet today should have 32 gig at a minimum. I know NI says you can expand - and they even said you can expand up to 128 gig. All this would have been fine if it was expandable using a Micro SD card or something inserted like a card. But 32 gig card is the max. To get to 128 gig you have to stick a flash drive in it. I think this is lame. I don't want flash drives sticking out of my tablet on a regular basis.
Another thing that came to light was that the adam only charges through a full power cord - no USB charging. Maybe this makes sense on some level but I think that sucks. One of the great things about other smart devices is that you can have a charging cord at your office and home hooked up to your computers. Now - I would either have to lug that large bulky cable around or buy spares.
The software - which quite honestly was a huge attraction - suddenly is not show shiny. Out of the box much of the software did not work or was very buggy. Thankfully - there was a sw update right away but users who downloaded it bricked the adam and needed special instruction to fix it. Even after the new update - users report that while better - there are many many bugs and a long way to go until its as good as we dreamed of.
Really - there is much more I could bitch about the adam. To be honest - many of the things can be considered small or minor. But together it all adds up to a tablet with a ton of problems and a company that has no plan and what may be historys worst business implementation.
So - Adam 1 is not for me. Conceptually the adam has a ton of promise and if NI survives and truly learns from their start up pains - could be a huge future success. But I have seen many many companies with better business plans and better implementation fail. I'll be surprised if there is an Adam 2. But if there is - I'll give them another look to see if they have matured.
Now - its off to see what else is out there. HTC is rumored to be coming out with 3 tablets by June. The Xoom looks ok but over priced. ASUS could be interesting. Last - I may even fall back on the iPad 2. I hope not as Android has so much more potential than Apple. But in the end - I want a very good quality tablet - not some piece of crap which most of the android tablet makers seem to think is good enough.
and then backward again :-( and that happened more then once.
