walking the walk

After several months, of owning a tablet, I think I have walked the walk and established a pretty good view of what others can expect. My number one comment about tablets for a person like me….a tablet doesn’t replace anything.. that is if you already have a gadget. You’re not going to get rid of the laptop or the phone. You’re not going to stop using the other devices and sources.   Wait, let me take that back. I think the tablet can replace book and newspaper media as the go-to reader. But it won’t replace another device I don’t see.  If you have an ebook reader, you’ll take that with you still. If you have a phone, you’ll still take that with you.

So what have been the exciting parts of a tablet? None. It’s pretty nice to have but nothing is all that exciting because I am surrounded with other devices. I did finally finish a book, my first full length ebook accomplished on a tablet. I read “The Shining” Surprisingly it went by fast. It’s a decent length book.

I own the Notion Ink Adam which has a dual mode screen which just to keep it simple has a normal color screen and an ebook mode. I read the shining using the Aldiko reader app, with the text in reverse color, that is white text on black. I didn’t read it in the ereader mode, but I found that I had a pleasant reading experience.

I’ve had a little trouble with apps since the Android Market is a bit finicky on there.  Because my OS is sort of a hybrid, it’s not picking up all the apps in the market it could.  What matters here is that for some people the apps mean the difference between a useful device and a dusty mistake.

I like a few of the tablets out there. Once Honeycomb is available en masse for all these android tablets, then we’ll see some great things in the apps department.  The ASUS transformer, the Nook Color, and a few others are definitely worth a look.  I’m happy with what I have but it’s not an every day thing for me.  I use my phone for quick looks at emails and messages and my work computers are for when I’m kind of hunkered down into looking up or internet surfing. So the tablet has been kind of a mood device. When I’m in the mood, I’ll use it but I don’t need it.

Does that affect your purchasing decisions?

A second video on Notion Ink Adam – a few additions

After the 1st video made the rounds today on the Notion Ink Adam, the Eden interface, a 2nd video was released to the Notion Ink Blog, which we’ve embedded below. Today’s blog posts discusses that though they had hoped to keep it under wrap, it was something they had to release early.

Rohan has been managing 60 developers doing long hours to get the software where it needs to be. Though it might not appear dead to perfection in the demo, it’s definitely great and we know incremental updates will smooth things out. A unique software design such as this isn’t going to appeal to everyone. People have their habits and expectations, BUT many of us are excited about the change of pace and the multi-panel view is something new and may end up being more productive. Time and comparison testing will tell. I’m happy it went this direction.

We’ve also been informed that we can expect a new video every day until CES. That’s on January 6-9. So almost 20 videos before then! If that doesn’t satisfy people like me who have been begging for a view of the real deal, nothing else will. We’ve now seen the on-screen keyboard in this new video and the view of the tablet in Reflexive (no backlight) mode in the Pixel Qi screen. This is essentially the epaper view, though remember that this screen is always a much better refresh rate, it just has the advantage of a sharp epaper mode. That’s the magic of the Pixel Qi screen that people have been so interested in it for. Because it spans the tablet / ereader technology.

What’s left? Well we still want to see some pretty photo browsing, maybe some video chatting, and playing a video. I suggested to Rohan in the blog to grab some demo videos from the Blender Sintel, Big Buck Bunny, or Elephant’s Dream project as they are free to use videos for just this occasion. No reason to risk copyright infringement by playing something from Hollywood. I’d like to see a few documents being opened like Word, Excel, ODF, slideshows, and some flash, maybe an Adobe Air app such as Tweetdeck!