Finally, here is some bad news coming from Computex when its actually some ‘good news’ that we were looking forward to. At least that’s what we were led to believe will come our way by Notion Ink co-founder Rohan Shravan. This had left everybody wildly speculating the Adam would at last make it to the market, or that its just round the corner, though a specific launch date and one that’s not too far away would have been the juiciest part of it all.
But smashing all the hopes and aspirations comes the bad news that the Adam won’t make it to the retailers before fall 2010. This was revealed in an e-mail sent by Shravan to a fan of the product wherein it was stressed that Notion Ink has concluded the final round of investment and while this should have brought cheers to everybody, the thing that dampened the mood is that investors are only keen for a release closer to the holiday season. The investors did bring with them the money and experience. “But they also bought the step by step procedures and experience on how we should launch,” is what Shravan had to say in his e-mail.
“I am sad to say that I have to fight every day with them to launch by July end, but they want us to hit markets only near Thanksgiving,” further added Shravan.
This also is a clear indication that all development work with the Adam is over so that it could well have been ready for a formal launch in July. But the new investors have other ideas it seems as they would like the Adam to swamp the market and bring further cheers during Thanksgiving. What’s worse is that the project had already been dogged with time overruns when it was disclosed NVIDIA was finding it difficult shipping their Tegra 2 processors to the developer’s end though NVIDIA had dismissed these as just rumors. The real reason for the delay was however attributed to the Adam tablet’s inability to match up with Flash that was slowing it down considerably. But all of these seems to be a thing of the past and there seems to be no valid reason to the latest round of delay, except that its just time greed induced.
It would be interesting to note that the Adam was revealed in the CES held earlier in the year and had created a splash with its cool features and sleek looks. It created a fan following of its own and its not without reason. To begin with, it comes with all that is missing in the iPad – like a 3 mega pixel camera, USB, and perhaps the most important of it all, its capability to play flash files. Out of the box, it will feature Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth and will also have on offer HDMI and three USB ports along with GPS and a digital compass. It will sport a 10-inch Transreflective LCD PixelQi screen supporting 1024×600 pixels and is able to multitask. The Adam also triumphs the iPad on the battery department, as sources claim its going to last 16 hours against the iPad’s 10+ on a full charge. Adam will also be capable of displaying 1080p video playback. Also, the Adam is powered by the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs bearing Nvidia Tegra 2 System-on-a-Chip.
But right now, the one thing that’s superceding all the good things that the Adam promises is the delay of a few more months. And the question now is all those who have been eagerly awaiting the launch of the Adam, will they be prepared to sit out till fall 2010. Also, the other all important factor is that Adam might be a well engineered and designed product, but its not the only one out there. The recent Computex is ample proof of that. Dell, Neofonie, HP along with many more have a tablet up their sleeves in the 10 inch category. The delay will also allow Apple to stretch the lead further. A whooping 2 million iPads are already sold and analysts predicts it could close the year with sales of 10 million iPads after a full scale international launch. So there’s definitely the risk of something that’s too little, too late with the Notion Ink Adam
Update – June 6 2010
According to our friends at Notion Ink Rocks on Facebook, we are told that in Q3 of this year the Adam will be released in selected countries. What countries they are, is unknown.
Keep watching for further developments on this along with all the latest e-reader news.
Also, its time to pick up a fresh issue of the Good E-Reader Magazine. The June issue has been launched and it costs just $3.99!
[cincopa 10627562]
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.
