10.1 inch Notion Ink Tablet - $375 | Hacker News Reader

10.1 inch Notion Ink Tablet - $375

notionink.wordpress.com

98 pointstomeast50 comments

One of the commenters there raises valid points.

Are you people seriously going to buy this thing with:

  1) No video of the device
  2) No video of the UI
  3) No estimate on shipping
  4) Mystery Devices
  5) No details on Support*

It looks like they are intentionally trying to fuck the marketing part up. (Quite typical of companies run by engineers with no marketing background.) If the product isn't ready to be shown to the public, it isn't ready to be sold.

It's strange: On one hand, Notion Ink's marketing---consisting of Rohan's blog posts and leaks to slashgear.com---has seemed unprofessional and odd. On the other hand, he's come across as genuine and enthusiastic and has managed to spread that enthusiasm to a growing group of rabid potential customers. If the Adam succeeds, I'll be extremely impressed with Notion Ink's marketing strategy.
Nonetheless, I agree that, when you ask users to pony up $500 to pre-order your product, buzz-generating is not enough: It's time to put up or shut up. I think they need to provide all the information that the quoted commenter has requested.

not after WakeMate (YC S09) fiasco.

Did those ever ship?

not. yet.

Even though Notion Ink is not anywhere close to Apple, I would like to point out that the points 1-4 applies to every Apple product until it's announced officially. But people trust Apple. And some people trust Notion Ink too.
Edit: Missed the pre-order part. I thought they are announcing the price only. I agree with the parent.

Can you think of one Apple device, though, where those points applied at the time you could pre-order it?

I completely agree. I missed the pre-order part of the blog post. I assumed they are only announcing the price now. Classic tl;dr case.

Apple has actually shipped working products that perform as promised.

Looks like they made a good showing at CES 2010, which may explain how/why folks know more about this than what's in that release.
http://www.slashgear.com/notion-ink-adam-hands-on-0969281/

Here are some videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxgRBC47SAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T5lLlNTvkQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMBaHgfEGG4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPowc1yM0NQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVQAi73ypPA

I think people want video of the actual device that will ship into the hands of people. Not a nearly year old prototype that may bear little recognition to what they ship.

Official response http://notionink.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/introspection/

Yet despite all that they appear to have sold out their pre-order run of the PixelQi version.

I'll be getting the Pixel Qi version, if the reviews hold up. I'm slightly skeptical that the device will meet expectations, but I've already put money back to buy the device as soon as it's available. The Pixel Qi screen alone places it above an iPad.

Likewise; I think that this will get a huge amount of preorders from people that have just been waiting for any Pixel Qi tablet at all. I can't imagine how they could screw this device up badly enough to warrant me not paying $500 for it. (And they may not screw it up at all; it sounds pretty open, with good specs.)
I'm really happy to see that this is evidently not vaporware.

So I hadn't hear about the Pixel Qi screen. Wikipedia just says
>The company [Pixel Qi] designs liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that can be manufactured using the same fabrication machinery as conventional LCDs. However the Pixel Qi displays are also able to turn off the backlight to save energy, and switch to a low-power black and white reflective mode which can function in ambient light.
Is it correct to describe these as LCD's with a Kindle-style e-ink screen sandwiched on top? Am I wrong in assuming that it has two distinct modes: back-lit color (which is hard to read in bright light) and e-ink B&W (which only works in good light)?
Sounds pretty great.

Yes. The Pixel Qi screen was developed for the OLPC and it works really well. It's also got fast screen redrawing in "e-ink" mode, albeit grayscale.

I have to OLPC XOs. The resolution of that Pixel Qi is impressive, but . . . it looks funny. Like the fine quartz sand on Pensacola Beach.

From what I understand that is exactly what the Notion Ink is aiming for - standard LCD with an Electronic Paper view mode.
I will wait until it's been vetted by my peers before laying out money on it, but I do have high hopes for this one.

FYI: You can actually purchase those screens already from PixelQi
http://www.pixelqi.com/where_to_buy
Not sure if anyone has written up a review on the quality of the screen though. I've seen a few videos of the screen and it seems acceptable.
http://www.display-solution.com/en/products/tft_displays/pix... (video there)

Actually, it can just turn the backlight off. The B&W mode isn't e-ink at all, it's still basically an LCD screen that can be illuminated by external light. So the effect should be the same, but this is the reason I want to wait for reviews to come out before I purchase it. It seems like a perfect compromise to me between e-ink and LCD screens. Sometimes, I want a backlight. If I'm reading, though, I probably don't want it activated.

It doesn't have the same energy-saving properties as e-ink (no power to display, only on page changes). E-Ink also looks different at the pixel level:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/pictures-kindle-and-i...

>Actually, it can just turn the backlight off.
There has to be more to it than that, right? It would be trivial to allow LCD screens to turn off the back light.
Their blog (pixelqi.com) suggests that it has to do with some sort of reflective properties of their special LCD. I still don't get it.

Perhaps there is a partially-reflective film on the back of the LCD, but in front of the backlight diffusor, that lets the backlight through (with some attentuation).

The screen is described on the OLPC site: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display
As I understand it, it is a standard(?) trans-reflective (like half silvered mirror - it reflects front lighting, but also can be back-lit) black & white LCD.
In color (backlight) mode, the backlight shines strips of color, so the pixels gate the colored light rather than having a white backlight and color filters on the pixels.
In B/W mode, the backlight is turned off (saving quite a bit of power) and the LCD uses the reflective qualities of the LCD to reflect the front light for the lighting source.
The interesting thing is that front lighting will overwhelm and wash out the color from the backlighting as the front lighting gets stronger.
I have an OLPC, which is the predecessor display, and it works quite well. My opinion of the display is that the compromise was visible but not bad: the color definitely isn't as vibrant as a traditional color LCD or OLED, but the daylight view-ability was very good vs. a traditional backlit LCD that becomes poor or unreadable in bright sunlight.
There are some pictures on the Groklaw article, although I was focusing on size rather than the display when I took the pictures. In retrospect, I should have focused on the display more than the size. :-/ http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080128171935946

> Is it correct to describe these as LCD's with a Kindle-style e-ink screen sandwiched on top?
Not quite. E-ink is a different technology[0]; this really is a form of LCD [1], albeit one that has somewhat different reflective properties. That said, I've got an OLPC laptop and was stunned at how legible they were in full sunlight---very impressively different from your typical laptop screen. (E-ink is still better; it has much more of a "writing on paper" feel. But it's slower.)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi, although it's clear that the parent already saw this

Wow, thanks, this is the answer I was looking for. So do the colors still look mostly the same in bright sunlight, or does the screen become more B&W?

I have one of the OLPC XO-1 units in my hands. When the backlight is on, it's still readable under very bright light such as sunlight and will look like the kindle's black & white.
When you turn the backlight to zero, it switches to ultra-lowpower hi-res black & white sunlight readable mode.
It's pretty neat and something I hope to see in all future devices.

Not to discourage Notion Ink guys. They have done a fabulous job. But its not a well written post. None of what he wants to say is clearly stated. He is revealing his rates. Compare that with the simple rates table Steve Jobs showed in his iPad announcement.
I am guessing IST means Indian Standard Time. How will a normal consumer know this? Why not state this clearly?
I think this post would have been much better if a sales/marketing guy had written it.

Agreed. However, I bet Indian Standard Time will become a lot more of a common term over the next decade.

re:IST -- .
.
I think some of it is the Indian-ness of the product. They're not trying to blend in, they're trying to be themselves. If that makes it different, and if it costs them customers, that's ok too! It's the price of a personality. Unlike companies that try to hide their non-US image by using stock pictures and VOIP contact numbers, NotionInk's message (to me, at least) seems quite clear: "We're a small but ambitious company in India. This is what we're building!"
.
And I like that.

I was surely not pointing at their pride or natural tendency to use the timezone they live in. I was talking from the point of view of target customers as it's pitched at a larger audience. The same reason why they used USD for the price.

"It’s great day, possibly deserving an entry into the history books about how we all came together and started a revolution. Adam, as we love to call it, is not a tablet, it’s a dream come true for many of us. We have pushed the limits of current technology and raised the expectations from other devices as well, especially the fact that it’s not just hardware or software, but it’s both. Android on Adam is no longer a phone OS; it’s Eden, a new play ground for big touch screen devices."
Wow, that's some word play..

Adam?
http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html

This line was ominous:
"By the time they got the Adam fixed and were shipping again, people believed that it was an unreliable system, and shyed away from it."
Hoping that NotionInk does not make the mistake Coleco did. One thing that stands apart though is that the blog posts have been made by an engineer and not a marketing guy. Having witnessed first hand how marketing guys can spit-shine a product, I must say there is some hope but only time will tell.

That blog post is super schitzophrenic. What's with the parenthetical comments that are a different color weight? I thought they were links at first, but not so much. And the "Is Oprah Gay?" ranking, a micro-rant on currency markets...mostly I'm confused.

They were just showing that their blog post was the second most popular on WordPress and it so happened that the Oprah post was number 1.

So it's running a customized version of Android? How's that going to work with standard Android apps?
Because if I can't use stock Android apps then I'm not interested - I'd like an app ecosystem that already exists, rather than relying on developers to produce versions specifically for this device.

looks more like a substantial HTC Sense-like UI overlaid on top of stock Android

You can actually customize Android quite a lot without interfering with apps on the App Market. The phone companies are really getting into swing with that.
Luckily, Android is designed to enable that and still keep compatibility.

Yes, but no Android market.
I've been waiting for this for a while, but without the market place I'm not sure if I'll jump on it. They screwed up getting me a reasonable expectation of when it'd ship long enough. I made the plunge. I bought an iPad. And, you know what, I like it.
I really wanted Android, Pixel Qi, etc. But Notion has been (possibly for reasons out of their control) doing a horrible job setting expectations.
http://androidandme.com/2010/11/news/notion-ink-adam-sets-a-...

After seeing the Honeycomb sneak peek from Rubin the other day, I am pretty well convinced that Android has legs as a tablet platform. But seriously, who is buying these things without even a decent "hands on" report from the technorati?

Huh, an Adam computer---aren't they going to run into trademark issues there?[0] Who owns the Coleco properties these days?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Computer

The preordering is now live on the site http://notionink.com/
The site says the product ships in 6 to 8 weeks and there is a flat $50 shipping fee!(Irrespective of location i guess)
Also, if you are curious to know about the warranty/service/return terms hit proceed to buy on the order form. Don't care to fill it, there is no validation in place!

I don't understand the big price difference between LCD WiFi and Pixel Qi WiFi. Pixel Qi trumpeted the fact their screens can use existing fabs without retooling. Such a big price difference is no way to entice a mass market into buying. I've also wondered why others haven't adopted Pixel Qi's screen in the meantime. [typo edit]

I've been holding off on a tablet because of this but can their blog post be more confusing? How do I pre-order?

Did anyone find the dimensions/weight?

Size+Weight: Thickness: ~14 mm Width: 191 mm Length: 269 mm Weight: ~1.6 pounds
http://www.notionink.com/techspecs.php

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