Notion Ink’s Adam was one of the first 10.1-inch Android tablets to be announced when it was unveiled back at the Consumer Electronics Show in Jan. 2010. After wowing journalists and analysts, the tablet was delayed until a year later, due in part to delays in the Pixel Qi display technology. By that time, other tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab had already shipped, and major players such as Motorola were drawing all the media attention with announcements of 10.1-inch tablets running Android 3.0 Honeycomb.
India-based Notion Ink is now trying again with an Adam II tablet and has decided to switch from Nvidia’s Tegra chip used in the original Adam, to the Texas Instruments T1 OMAP solution, more specifically the OMAP 4470 chip. The OMAP 4470 is powered by two ARM Cortex A9 processors, and is considered by many to be faster, even than the widely used Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. The new 8.9 inch Kindle Fire HD tablet is also based on the same OMAP 4470 chip.
The OMAP 4470 can knock off 12 billion floating point operations per second while Tegra 3 can do only 8 billion, Moreover, OMAP 4470 has 7.5GB/s memory bandwidth which works out to almost 40 percent more than the 5.3GB/s that NVidia’s Tegra 3 packs.
The Notion Ink Adam 2 would also come with a 10.1 inch display with a resolution of 1280 x 800, 16:10 aspect ratio, and a 800:1 contrast ratio, which powered by the OMAP 4470, will deliver crisp and clear HD visuals.
It would be interesting to see how the Adam 2 will hold up against some of the upcoming tablets like the iPad mini and the new Nexus 10 expected to come out in 2013. Specific release dates or pricing has not been announced yet, and we will keep you updated as soon as we hear more.
Notion Ink was the first Indian start-up, as mentioned in your article, to come up with a tablet. Also, the first product company to receive rave reviews in CES 2010. As Indians, let’s hope they will succeed and compete with the best in the latest version of adam. Best wishes to them.