Tablet Hands-On Roundup
by Vivek Gowri on January 27, 2011 10:25 AM EST
I’ll start off with one of my favorite tablets from the show, the Notion Ink Adam. Out of India, the Adam has been highly anticipated ever since Notion Ink’s coming out party during last year’s CES. I met with Notion Ink this year, and I got a chance to play with one of the first production Adams, this one being Rohan Shravan’s personal unit. Rohan is Notion Ink’s founder and CEO, and I was lucky to have him on hand to walk me through the ins and outs of the Adam. It’s a 10” Tegra 2-based tablet running Froyo, but it has a number of innovative touches, like the transreflective Pixel Qi display, the 185-degree rotating 3.2MP camera, the 1 watt speaker at each end, USB flash drive support, and a full-size HDMI port.
But the part I’m most excited about in all of this is Eden, Notion Ink’s very thorough reskinning of Android 2.2. It’s by far the most interesting Android skin I’ve used to date, in that it completely changes the way Android feels and behaves. The home screen is made up of a number of “panels”, which are independent on-screen windows of various applications, so you can have a view of your inbox, your calendar, an RSS feed, and more opened on the home screen. Overall, the UI is very vibrant and colourful, with smartly designed applications for email, calendar, weather, media playback, and other basic functions. The application launcher, which opens as a red ribbon across the screen, is a nice touch, as is the included scientific calculator. The two highlights, though, have to be the reworked browser and the excellent on-screen keyboard. The browser is built for multi-tab browsing, and switching between different tabs is quicker here than on any mobile device in recent memory. I didn’t get a chance to take any UI pictures because we were outdoors, so I’m going to post some of the screenshots from the Notion Ink blog.
In hand, the Adam is surprisingly good. The chassis is made of plastic and never lets you forget that, so it doesn’t have the premium feel that the iPad does, but there isn’t a lot of flex, and for a first design effort, it’s pretty exemplary. The rubber grip on the right side combined with a cylindrical edge makes the device very comfortable to grip, and Notion Ink has evenly distributed the weight to make it easier to hold. I do have to commend the fact that it’s all matte - the body, the display, everything. In this age of overglossing every surface you can (Samsung, Dell, I’m referring to you guys), it’s really refreshing to see someone have the guts to make a matte device. Less glare, less fingerprints, how could you disagree with that? The other great thing is that transreflective display. It’s monochromatic, but it’s absolutely great in the sun and makes for an awesome e-reader. In practice the UI is quick and pretty sleek, it’s one of the better Android tablet experiences on the market currently and probably will be until Honeycomb releases in a few months.
Notion Ink has started shipping out the first batch of Adams last week, after getting the final FCC approval. There’s only two options - the transreflective Pixel Qi display and the 3G modem, so there are four distinct models at launch. I’m hoping to get a review unit from Notion Ink in the next couple of weeks, but our first impressions show that they’ve definitely got one of the more innovative and promising new tablets on the market.
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kenyee - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I'm curious how well it does at displaying photos. From the specs, it looks like it only has 256K colors when the backlight is on and I think this will be a significantly worse display compared to an IPS display like the iPad's and even the Color Nook which also uses an IPS screen...ibex333 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
All these tablets are irrelevant. They have already lost to the iPad before they even started selling. Why? SEVEN INCH SCREEN. Which means - sucks for reading PDFs.So people will keep buying iPads specifically because of the large screen, and Apple WILL NOT lower prices, because technically they are still king of the tablet market.
Is it really so damned hard to start making 10" tablets and NOT 7" tablets?
JMC2000 - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
That's what I wonder also, does Apple own the iPad's screen manufacturer? The is almost like the iPhone vs. the World issue, everyone claims to have an iPad killer, but they lose mainly on one aspect, screen size.Seriously, it is like everyone is handing Apple the market... FFS!
Penti - Friday, February 4, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure that like nobody else wants to pay 200-300 dollars for LG's "iPad" screen. Many stick to simple TN-panels. There are some other good panels out there though, but 7" is totally fine. A tablet is also not a e-reader. There's separate devices for that.Ylurien - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
I stopped reading this article after I looked up the specs on the Adam because that tablet only has 1024x600 resolution and I assume all the rest have pretty much the same or worse since Adam is the biggest tablet.In the day of HD video, why are manufacturers making tablets that can't even play 720p video at its native size? And where's the 64 ~ 128GB of disk space to allow all that video to fit on there?
Why build something that's obsolete before it even goes on the market?
Malih - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
i suppose you should wait for Windows 7 tablet from Acer, utilizing AMD C-50 which presumably will have acceleration for H.264 playbackVinny DePaul - Friday, February 4, 2011 - link
I planned to buy an Android tablet and was going to buy Notion Ink. However, after reading countless complaints, I have changed my mind and going to buy Xoom instead. Notion Ink is good if it is hand delivered to you. The ordering process is tedious, the returning process is a horrendous, and too many defective units. I may consider Notion Ink if the quality control, ordering and return processes are improved. For a new company, they are not bad. However, I want a good tablet, not just a "not bad" tablet.Since I live in US, I prefer to purchase in US and be able to return products easily. The protection for international purchase is almost zero for most people.
alexkinsella - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - link
Hi Vivek,It’s Alex from RIM’s Social Media team, here. I’m glad you were impressed with the BlackBerry PlayBook at CES. The crowd reaction was amazing. At just under a pound, it’s easy to take anywhere. I can confirm that you’re correct: the PlayBook has a combination of the QNX based BlackBerry Tablet OS, and a TI OMAP 4430 dual-core 1GHz Cortex A9. One point of clarification: There will be a 4G/WiMax version of PlayBook available on the Sprint network this summer (this was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January). Please stay tuned to the Inside BlackBerry blog for the latest updates on BlackBerry PlayBook!
Thanks!
tina2010 - Sunday, July 17, 2011 - link
The touchsquid universal tv remote control tablet has a built in IR transmitter which opens up a whole world of remote control possiblities. It is a tidier solution compared to using dongles. See http://www.touchsquid.com