Notion Ink's Adam on Pre-Order!

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Sonist

I am not sure why anyone is excited about this.

Exactly. I got swept up in the excitement 9 months ago, when the story was Adam's David vs iPad's Goliath. You could read it in sunlight! A relatively open system! Would they deliver?

But the answer is, well, no. They didn't deliver.

They might yet deliver... something. But the market's moved on. 2011 is going to be full of tablet releases. Most of them will have expandable storage, USB ports, webcams, accelerometers, GPS, etc. And many will have HDMI, good processors and graphics chips.

What has the Adam got to stand out?

The PixelQi screen? Well, that's still a maybe. There will be people who want to read their machines regularly outdoors, yes. But at the expense of a poorer display indoors? And 1024x600 is suited for widescreen movies (outdoors?), but it's not great for pdfs, and 1024x768 is also better for browsing books and the web. If 2010 has done anything, it's made me realised that I want a 4x3 form factor in a tablet rather than widescreen.

Long battery life? Yes, but again at the expense of a bright screen display indoors, and still not in the same league as eInk for the readers among us. We've not seen consumers shy away from the Galaxy Tab's 6 hour battery life compared to the iPad's 10 hour one. It seems that once it gets over 6 hours for an active display battery life drops down the priority list.

A swivelling camera? Useful perhaps, but not likely to be the unique selling point.

I really do wish the Adam well, but I can't shake the feeling that they've missed the boat.

Graham

[RoboRay]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Hm, my impression is that in reflective mode Pixel Qi is a bit better than a regular LCD, but not nearly as good as eInk.

Well, my experience is that reflective mode is far more than "a bit" better than a regular LCD. If you consider the difference between "perfectly readable" on the PQ and "completely unreadable" on the LCD with both in direct sunlight to be "a bit" of an improvement, I'll respect your opinion but I won't agree with it.

And eInk is better than PQ, so long as you don't also need color capability (when not in reflective mode) and a reasonable refresh rate for video or animations. If you only want the device to be a reader, eInk is the way to go. But then, dedicated readers with eInk are better choices for just reading than multipurpose tablets that are only being used as readers.

[Mastiff]

Graham, I think I will prefer to use a widescreen and hold it in portrait mode. That gives you 600x1024, and that should fit most pdf's pretty well, I think.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Mastiff

Graham, I think I will prefer to use a widescreen and hold it in portrait mode. That gives you 600x1024, and that should fit most pdf's pretty well, I think.

I hope it works for you, Mastiff, but for me that makes the text of the PDFs I read too small. It's exactly equivalent to turning my netbook sideways. The PDF doesn't fill the screen in that mode, if you want a full page. You get about an inch of black space at the top and bottom. Cropping to the margins helps a little, but not enough.

If I do use my 10.1" 1024x600 netbook to read PDFs I use landscape mode, which gives a reasonable text size. but I only get about a third of the page on the screen. The PDFs I read tend to have at least two columns, with images inset, and that leads to a lot of scrolling around the page on the netbook. Admittedly that would be slightly easier with a touchscreen, but those extra 168 pixels make quite a difference, held either as portrait or landscape.

Graham

[mgmueller]

Maybe it's my iMac?
I only see "buy" buttons for the 2 LCD models.
But not for the Pixel Qi, which is the interesting one of course...

EDIT: Just saw it myself: Pixel Qi = sold out

[RoboRay]

Originally Posted by Graham

I hope it works for you, Mastiff, but for me that makes the text of the PDFs I read too small. It's exactly equivalent to turning my netbook sideways. The PDF doesn't fill the screen in that mode, if you want a full page. You get about an inch of black space at the top and bottom. Cropping to the margins helps a little, but not enough.

If I do use my 10.1" 1024x600 netbook to read PDFs I use landscape mode, which gives a reasonable text size. but I only get about a third of the page on the screen. The PDFs I read tend to have at least two columns, with images inset, and that leads to a lot of scrolling around the page on the netbook. Admittedly that would be slightly easier with a touchscreen, but those extra 168 pixels make quite a difference, held either as portrait or landscape.

Graham

If you are going to be using an Android device, check out ezPDF. It supports tap-to-zoom into a single column of multi-column pages. Another tap will take you from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. If there are images spanning multiple columns, that still may be result in some manual panning around, however.

Not an ideal solution, but ezPDF does make PDF viewing comfortable for me on a small screen.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by RoboRay

Not an ideal solution, but ezPDF does make PDF viewing comfortable for me on a small screen.

Thanks, just installed it on my phone. The PDF reader in Think Free Office has quite good text reflow, but ezPDF renders the columns correctly with tables intact which is great. You're right; it could be very helpful reading PDFs with columns on an android held portrait at 600x1024.

Graham

[trocchietto]

ezpdf is amazing on my htc, let alone on a ten inches pixar pity I can't edit table contents and highlight. I repeat the problem is the lack of sw for readung in comparison with ipad. but I won t wait april to have mayberetina

[toronado]

Originally Posted by Graham

But at the expense of a poorer display indoors?

Poorer than what? My understanding is that the Qi with the backlight on is as good as an IPS. Wrong?

[Graham]

Originally Posted by toronado

Poorer than what? My understanding is that the Qi with the backlight on is as good as an IPS. Wrong?

I may have got that wrong, but my impression from the year's various reports was that with the backlight on it was OK, but not as good as the better LCD displays. Not such a good viewing angle, not as much black in the contrast, poorer colour accuracy, etc. I can't find any link that suggests it's as good as an IPS display indoors.

Here's one link though from a user of the display in which the transmissive mode is compared with the original screen on his Samsung netbook.

http://forums.makezine.com/comments....cussionID=6659

The picture quality indoors is clearly worse than with my original screen. ... And by picture quality I particularly meant contrast ratio, and I was referring to transmissive mode only. The black of my original display was a lot darker than the black the transmissive mode of the Pixel Qi screen offers.

I have the same netbook, and the original Samsung screen is OK but not great.

I'm looking forward to some in depth reviews of the Adam once we get to see the production model, of course, and I'll be as pleased as anyone if the screens do hold up indoors as well as out.

Graham

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by Graham

I may have got that wrong, but my impression from the year's various reports was that with the backlight on it was OK, but not as good as the better LCD displays. Not such a good viewing angle, not as much black in the contrast, poorer colour accuracy, etc. I can't find any link that suggests it's as good as an IPS display indoors....

Yep, that's exactly what I've been reading as well.

So, this is a display which when backlit is not as good as a regular cheap LCD, and when in reflective mode is not as good as the old generation eInk.

And it has a 1024x600 screen, which is great for movies, but it generally sucks for PDFs and websites, compared to the wider ratio of the iPad. And it costs about the same as the iPad....

May be I am wrong, but I would wait and see one in person, before I make a buying decision.

[Graham]

It really boils down to the PixelQi screen being ideal for people who need a multi-purpose device and spend more or their time outdoors (or on trains) than indoors. The big question, and one that's going to be interesting to watch answered, is how big that market actually is. Hopefully it will be big enough to keep Notion Ink in business and help PixelQi continue development of the screens.

Graham

[RoboRay]

Originally Posted by toronado

Poorer than what? My understanding is that the Qi with the backlight on is as good as an IPS. Wrong?

My experience is with the OLPC Pixel Qi display, of which the new commercial Pixel Qi display is an improveed development.

In my experience, the old OLPC PQ display is about 95% as good as a standard color LCD indoors, due to the way the colors are rendered by cooperation of adjacent pixels that are individually limited to a single RGB color.

However, my understanding of the new Pixel Qi displays is that they do not suffer this color limitation and each pixel is fully RGB-capable independently of the surrounding pixels. I have not actually used the new PQ displays, so my information on them could be in error.

In any case, even if the new ones are no better than the old ones, the tiny loss in color LCD "quality" is far more than offset by the gains offered by the transflective mode.

You should see the looks I get using the OLPC out on the beach with the sun beating down on the screen.

EDIT: Just saw the contrast comments in the later posts. Contrast on my OLPC in transflective mode isn't as good as eInk. I've never compared the contrast in the backlit color mode to a standard LCD, but I've also never noticed anything to complain about contrast-wise, either.

I've never noticed any viewing angle issues, either, at least on the old version I have.

[RoboRay]

Originally Posted by Sonist

So, this is a display which when backlit is not as good as a regular cheap LCD, and when in reflective mode is not as good as the old generation eInk.

Yes. But, and it's a big but, it uniquely offers both of those capabilities in a single display.

If you don't need a device capable of both usage requirements, then Pixel Qi is not your best choice. If you do, it's really the only choice.

[cgk]

I'm not sure this is a scam but I don't think people are going to be getting what they think they are getting, I certainly wouldn't put any cash down until a legitimate tech site has one in their hands to review.

He brings for me one of the prototypes with a Customs seal on the back. With Android software loaded, it looks like one of the recently released tablet computers in the market. It does not have the right user interface, he says apologetically, and I infer that he would like me to believe that the real product will be significantly better. We need to wait a month for it.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/...1350030100.htm

So this is going to shift in six to eight weeks and they don't have any units running their custom interface? Really?