Hands On With Notion Ink's Pixel-Qi Equipped Adam Tablet

Jax7 writes with this snippet from Technoholik, which dispatched a team with a video camera to get some early footage of the upcoming Android Tablet from Notion Ink, with Android and a Pixel-Qi transflective screen. Also interesting is the back-mounted touchpad. "We flew down to Hyderabad and caught up with the Notion Ink team just before they left for Barcelona to showcase the Android-based tablet tomorrow at the Mobile World Congress. Note that this product was 'one engineering day short' but we aren't complaining since we literally badgered them into giving us this sneak peak. The top panel over the screen was still a bit loose, so they took it off before booting the system."

Re:Nice, but Android?

[LukeWebber]

Java has the advantage of running in sandbox, and security is serious issue for something as connected and pervasive as a smartphone. I also means that Google only need to provide a single API, hence fast turnaround of new releases.

And it must be said that coding in Java beats the hell out of writing Objective C on a Mac, which is the only supported environment for the iPhone.

Re:Nice, but Android?

[cduffy]

Android has a NDK [android.com] (Native Development Kit); it's possible to write Android apps for the Market in languages other than Java.

Re:Sigh,

[obarthelemy]

Since that thing has integrated USB ports, you can put it pretty much on any stand you like to keep it propped up while you eat. It will also work with a range of USB and Bluetooth keyboards/mice, making conversion to a netbook easy. The CPU should be quite good, and the screen looks like a winner. I'm a bit worried about price though.

Re:Like the LCD

[hitmark]

the one problem i have had with browsing when using a touch screen, is the need for "mouse over" various elements.

Re:Nice, but Android?

[EdZ]

Since it's clearly able to run Linux, just provide a standard Ubuntu installation. That'd be much better.

The spec page [technoholik.com] lists "Android, Ubuntu, Chromium" under OS. I'm guessing that just means they're leaving it open for you to install whatever you want on it rather than shipping multiple version with different OSes, but I could be wrong.

Re:Like the LCD

[TeknoHog]

The LCD does look pretty impressive, it seems like it would totally address all of the concerns of those who claim you can't read books on an LCD. They forget that no LCD is emissive, they are all reflective at heart... it's just a matter of what the light source is.

Actually, LCDs are transmissive by nature. Put a mirror behind it, and it becomes reflective. This is how digital watches and calculators have worked for ages, though the "mirror" is not a smooth, shiny reflector for practical reasons. Today you can have a transreflective display with both a backlight and a mirror, thanks to improved light transmission through the LCD.

Re:Nice, but Android?

[slim]

Android is fine, no touchscreen but a trackpad in back?? EPIC FAIL. this junk will never sell.

It has BOTH. The rear trackpad for when you're holding the device in your hand. Touchscreen for when it's on a desk or your lap.

Re:Nice, but Android?

[Per Wigren]

The screen is colour, but it "looks" black'n'white when the backlight is turned off, aka "e-reader mode". Probably you'll see some colours without the backlight if you have a very bright light source (the sun). It will come with Android but it's not locked down so you'll be able to run any Linux distribution on it as long as it supports the Tegra 2 platform.

Personally I want to have one already! *drool*

Pixel Qi displays

[naz404]

I've had the pleasure of getting my hands on a One Laptop Per Child XO-1 laptop (which uses a Pixel Qi display).

I'm relatively sure they were shooting it in color backlit mode in that footage. When you put a Pixel Qi display in sunlight/under bright lights, it'll look like classic black and white LCD even when the backlight is on. When you move it back into the shade/low-light, you'll see the backlit pixels in color again. The nice thing about it is that even if you don't turn off the backlight, it'll still be sunlight readable.

Even nicer is that if you turn off the backlight, the display will look like those old black & white Nintendo Game & Watch or Gameboy LCDs and it consumes so little power, extending battery life tons.

Re:Nice, but Android?

[Jimmy_B]

You aren't forced to write in Java, you're forced to write for the JVM. There are other languages [wikipedia.org] that target the JVM, including versions of Ruby, Python, LISP, and my personal favorite, Scala. Using the JVM means that Android isn't locked in to using any one particular CPU instruction set (which was what destroyed the original PalmOS), and that all Android programs and libraries are API-compatible with each other without the need for setting up special bindings.