A little known company called Notion Ink started showing off an Android powered tablet prototype at CES in January. It was one of the hits of the CES show — even though Notion Ink didn’t have a finished product or a very large presence at CES, just a little space for meeting with reporters by appointment only.

There were two big reasons people got so excited about the Adam tablet. First, it was one of the first devices most of us had ever seen that was built to use a Pixel Qi low power display. And second, it was one of the first tablets using NVIDIA’s new low power Tegra 2 chipset with support for 3D graphics and HD video playback.

Oh yeah, I suppose there were a few other reasons. Back in January the iPad hadn’t shipped yet, Google Android was (and still is) full of possibility, and while Notion Ink’s demo unit was carved out of wood it appeared to work very, very well.

But it’s August. And you still can’t buy the thing yet. So what happened?

SlashGear has the long and sordid story, and it involves skittish investors, disagreements with OEMs, and a whole lot of behind-the-scenes retooling. Notion Ink still plans to bring one of the most innovative Android tablets to market soon. And you’ll be able to get a version with a Pixel Qi display and Tegra 2 chipset. But it’s taking a lot longer than expected to bring the device to market.

If you’ve been wondering what’s behind the delays, you should definitely check out the SlashGear article. And keep in mind… it’s part one of a two-part series. Next up, SlashGear is promising to give us more details inclusion an actual launch date for the Adam tablet.

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8 replies on “Why you can’t buy a Notion Ink Adam Tablet… yet”

  1. The Adam tablet is a great idea; the combination of PixelQI, Tegra2, and Android is bound to be a success provided it can access the Android market place (unlike Archos devices), and make use of e-book vendor apps from the likes of amazon and Kobo.

  2. As anyone with direct experience in startup tech companies know, this is hardly unusual. Even in the Internet Bubble of the 90s, finding capital is hard. Undercapitalization is one of the major causes of small business failure.

    I do wonder why they decided to shift operations to India, that has got to have caused significant disruption at a critical time.

    1. What? I think the company was founded in India by Indians. Not exactly what I would call outsourcing.

  3. Wonder if a Redmond company again, because of the Android OS, was being disruptive. And changing to an Intel chip says something of this, as MS is not in the ARM game at all. Of course, in the future, doing both an ARM chip and tne new Intel Moorestown (shutting off the CPU with both using LINUX and having a battery that ran 18 hours with the complete OLPC/Pixel Qi battery saving mixture. … that would be really cool (either ARM or Moorsetown).

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