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Notion Ink Adam - From Eden to UI Hell

By Aloysius Low - 3 Mar 2011

From Eden to UI Hell

From Eden to UI Hell

The Notion Ink Adam was announced to much fanfare, and on the heels of the Apple iPad, much hope was placed in the device thanks to its unique Pixel Qi screen and NVIDIA Tegra 2 hardware. Sadly, our brief time with the unit has all but shown us that despite the great hardware inside, the software was a complete letdown that made the Adam tablet experience less than satisfactory.

We'll talk about this more in the subsequent pages, but for those not in the know, here's a quick recap. Ever since the Adam tablet was announced, great hopes were placed on its Pixel Qi screen, a trans-reflective screen that made the screen usable even under bright sunlight. The power saving features of the screen allowed you to turn off the backlight to save power and was a compromise between the Kindle's E-ink display and the iPad's IPS LCD screen.

Much has been said about Android's lack of a tablet capable interface before Honeycomb (Android 3.0) was announced, and Notion Ink's customized Eden UI was to have been an interesting solution to the problem. Unfortunately, it would seem that the constant delays in actually delivering a retail unit has hurt them with the introduction of Honeycomb. However, Notion Ink has indicated that they are currently working on a Honeycomb update for current units.

Design wise, Notion Ink has done a great job. The design and build is solid, and the swiveling 3.2-Megapixel camera is a stroke of genius. There are also adequate ports including 2 USB 2.0s, a mini-USB port and a HDMI port to output the display of the Adam to the big screen. The unit also comes with about 6GB of onboard storage, and you can mount a 32GB microSD card for even more storage space. There's a 3G SIM card slot too, allowing you to surf any where without the need for a WiFi connection.

The Notion Ink Adam tablet looks nice on the outside, but the inside however, is another story altogether.

The volume controls together with the touch buttons are on the left side. From top to bottom, the touch buttons control the Pixel Qi backlighting, the Panel home button, the Menu button and the back button. There's also a USB and mini USB port on this side of the tablet.

On the front lies the SIM card and MicroSD slots.

The right side houses the power adapter, audio jack, a dedicated back button, another USB port, a HDMI port and a sliding on/off switch.

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