Should you buy the Notion Ink Adam?

How is Notion Ink doing in terms of sales after the third preorders? Since they're not obliged to share any numbers, nor respond to our solicitations of a review unit, we've been been rather mum lately about a firm that held so much promise a year ago. Engadget's review may have teargassed potential buyers, brave souls with disposable income can refer to our last post on Adam pricing in India. But before you decide to throw in your allegiance with Adam, here are a few facts that we gleaned from the Notion Ink blog and third parties.

Rohan Shravan explains why Android UI lags so much
In recent news, Zinio, an app for reading magazines on a tablet released a new version that uses the GPU acceleration capabilites of the Tegra SoC. That NVIDIA has to directly involve itself with app developers to reach an acceptable framerate for the UI says a lot about Android's deficiencies. 

Here's what NVIDIA had to say in their blog:
"This new version of Zinio for Android uses the power of Tegra’s GPU to leverage OpenGL ES acceleration, making complex magazine pages easy to navigate and pan around with a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, and other Tegra-powered Honeycomb tablets. Unlike other magazine readers that only serve up magazine pages as slow, lower-resolution JPEG images, Zinio displays high resolution, zoom-able layouts and dynamically re-scalable text."

 

Rohan Shravan compares Android tablets to the iPad:
"If you compare any Android tablet out there (doesn’t matter quad-core or even hexa-core if it exists) with the rival iPad, specially when you move stuff on the home screen (icons on iPad and widgets on HC), you will always find HC lagging. As the number of elements increase, or if you come back to the home screen after running even moderately memory intensive applications, you can see the shutters/lags in the movement. We have tried to delve deeper to understand why this happens, and it looks like as long as Garbage Collectors exists, this is going to be an issue (not touching the controversial topic of using the GPU for the UI). Garbage Collector’s can take anywhere between 7-500ms to do its work. We are expecting at-least 20 frames per second which means, you can loose upto 10 frames when we move things. This was one of the reason you could see the lag in the Eden UI Panels.
Today I hate Android (for its conflicting free nature) as much as I love it (again for its conflicting free nature)."

Hacked version of Honeycomb from TabletRoms
Looks like the gods at Google haven't favored the troubled company yet, if you do want to run Honeycomb on the Adam, there is a hacked ROM based on the Asus Tranformer's Honeycomb build. This particular build does not support GPS and camera functions. Tabletroms.com has issued a $1200 bounty for hackers to deliver a stable ROM within 60 days. Contest link

Tabletroms.com and various donators from the Notion Ink Community have issued a bounty for Honeycomb on the Notion Ink Adam. Since we have a semi-working rom, we have decided to update the rules. Once the current base rom is semi-stable, we will update the post and notify the community, from that point on developers get 60 days to develop, test, and stabilize a fully working Honeycomb port for the Notion Ink Adam.
If a developer creates a bootable Honeycomb ROM for the Adam before Notion Ink, based off of a port I will issue $100.00 via paypal for that user as a community thank you. (MRGUY has claimed the $100.00) This ROM with permission of the creator will hopefully be used as a base to build a working rom before starting the contest.

Preorder 3 sales are not so impressive
There was a time when the Notion Ink Blog was the second only to Oprah Winfrey in terms of traffic on Wordpress. A recent poll posted on Conclave.notionink shows a response from only 19 users for the third round of preorders.

Poor after sales support
We received a mail from Damian Lang, who is one pissed off customer. He runs notioninkscam.com.
My story starts in February when I purchased the Adam tabled expecting great things. first it took over a month to arrive. When I did get it, It broke he next day (wont turn on). 4 months later notion ink is still stalling. They wont honor the warranty and provide me with a refund. Among other things like having promised features. After all we buy a product for what it can do, not what it may do in the future. Shipping a product without the promised features is simply false advertising.

 

Unhappy customers planning to take legal action against Notion Ink

So should you buy an Adam tablet among all the other choices available today? In closing, we have to agree with Jksaur's reccomendation.
If you are a hardcore techie with lots of time in your basement to tinker, ROM, root, flash, wipe, tweak, mod and what not, then do whatever you want. Buy 10 of them.
If $400 is loose change for you then sure, buy it
If you’re anyone else - Don’t buy. But here’s what you can do - let the ardent followers buy PO3 – wait for their responses and how NI support deals with issues.

Update: We just received a terse email from Rohan Shravan.

• We are sold out again for the PQ models
• Damian Lang wanted refund after 30 4 months, and he is being ferunded (sic)"