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Comment by shrikant | Hacker News Reader

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*

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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.

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.

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.

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.

not after WakeMate (YC S09) fiasco.

Did those ever ship?

not. yet.

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