The Notion Ink Adam II is an Android tablet with a 10 inch screen and a second black and white LCD screen on the spine of the book-shaped tablet, letting you view notifications at a glance even when the device is lying on a table and the screen is off.
It’s the second tablet from Indian company Notion Ink, and just like the original Adam tablet, the new model shows a little outside-the-box thinking.
While the official price and launch date haven’t yet been announced, a series of photos showing the packaging and accessories for the tablet hit the web this week, along with images of a new smartphone concept called the EVE.
Notion Ink made a bit of a name for itself when the company unveiled the original Adam tablet in 2010. While it took about a year to actually ship, it was one of the first tablets announced to feature an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and it was one of the only commercially available tablets ever to ship with a Pixel Qi low-power, sunlight readable display.
Unfortunately the tablet wasn’t very well received.
The new Adam II plays things a little safer. Judging from pre-release photos, it’ll ship with a pretty standard version of Google Android 4.2 instead of a version with a custom user interface. It’ll have a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel IPS display, a 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth and HDMI.
In other words, aside from that STN display for notifications, the spec sheet makes it look like a lot of other inexpensive tablets already on the market.
But as the new images show, Notion Ink is putting a lot of thought into the design of the tablet, as well as its accessories.
The pictures showed up at Behance, but have since been removed. SlashGear saved most of the pictures thanks to a Google cache copy of the website.
There’s a low-profile docking station that functions as a tablet stand, and which adds a few USB ports, a full-sized HDMI port, and other goodies. You can fold the dock in half when you’re not using it and slide the whole thing into your pocket.
Notion Ink also seems to have a stylus for the tablet. It seems to be a capacitive stylus rather than a pressure-sensitive digital pen, but the stylus does have a few nice touches including a rubber grip.
The EVE smartphone concept is designed to be a companion to the Adam II tablet. It has the same boxy design with flat sides and slightly rounded corners. In other words, it’s designed to look like a small book.
It’s not clear if Notion Ink is actually working on a phone, or just imagining what one would look like. But the concept images show a device with a very thin screen bezel, a power button and headset jack at the top, volume buttons on the side, and what appears to be Android Jelly Bean software.
“Unfortunately the tablet wasn’t very well received.”
Maybe, just maybe its the clumsy design?