Week-End Special – Part VI

Dear All,

Last week passed like a day!

First an announcement:

• Voting has been closed and you have selected your winner! Notion Ink will go with you choice.  Notion Ink will get in touch with all the top 10, because we have something special for all of  them! Will post the results on Monday (need to take permissions from the Winner that we can use it commercially)

Here is a short video on the 1080P performance and Full Volume (it’s really loud, so keep your volumes low)

You will  find audio and video out of sync cos of software conversion from MOV format to MP4.

Lets talk about the UI little bit.

The Aqua (Aero, Glass and Gloss)

We feel they all are one. At Notion Ink, we are definitely not in love with Gloss. Here are the current generation icons and styling:

(iTunes, WMP, Playbook, Samsung Galaxy and then Android in order).

You can see that Android was already little low on gloss for their icon sets and we are further away from it.

The Browser

We faced a very serious issue of how to handle the tabs. (Those who have or see other Android Tablets around, do check how the tabs work on their browsers and they would know!) Tabs are essential, without them we will die! That’s multi-tasking as well! There was also an issue of how to NOT BLOCK the screen and not force the user to “go hit menu and then “tabs opened” then select the one you want. That’s not Notion Ink style.

We wanted speed. Speed of switching, closing, opening the closed tab, and closing all in multiple and that through our thick fingers. This is what we have come up with:

Internally we keep on fighting to push one system or the other. One team would think theirs is the best idea and other the same. But the best results and options comes from our very special Usability Team which will test all the feature, measure the reactions and easy and then report which path to go!

The Panels

These images will first be previewed by those who get the EAP and the SDK access. To make the UI development seamless and easy, we have converted our ideation into guidelines. Here is an example:

The more on how to design seamless interaction will get covered in the “UI Blog” which we mentioned.

There is still a lot of restriction (from patent lawyers and investors) on what I can reveal and what I can’t and I have to agree to their stand. I am waiting eagerly with you to get the Power Table Up so we all can check our usages.

With Warm Regards

Rohan Shravan

How to discharge your Adam with-in 6 hours?

Dear All,

I wrote in the last post that you can easily get 15 hours from the device. My personal use case is different and so will be yours. Blogs world over picked up this line as posted as Adam gives 15 hours. I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it.

You might have noticed that your phone might work for 2 full days and might require 2 charges a day. Based on the use cases devices claiming 10 hours have ended in 4 hours (3D gaming). Clearing this confusion is extremely important, so here we are with the post “How to discharge your Adam in 6 hours only?” Here is the list which we have compiled:

• Play 1080P continuously with full brightness and at full volume (displayed as 1024 on Adam and not via HDMI to TV) (no idle time) (Adam has BIG speakers)
• Play YouTube Flash videos on Wi-Fi or 3G network (no idle time)
• Use Streaming 3D maps on 3G network with GPS
• Record HD Video and stream it over the Wi-fi networks
• Play an augmented reality 3D game with camera input over the network (wi-fi of 3G)

There can be so many use cases where you can discharge it much faster than your normal use case, so be cautious when you read “Adam claims minimum 15 hours of battery”! There tests are on full display, full volume which is never going to be true. Pixel Qi display is 10 times efficient so a huge drop here, if you use earphones, you get more juice and so on..

Will be posting that interactive chart so we all would know our own usage times.

Warm Regards

The Final 10

Dear All,

So here we are with the final 10 logos. In general the original work always looks better (as you might see in lots of entries here). I have noticed the comments as well and have tried to add those here. No wild card entries even though we received more logos after the deadline. No more words from me now, lets start voting (I will have to keep the voting secret as else it will hint the new voters, remember you get tracked, so can’t vote more than once!)

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Remember:

• You can vote only once
• Voting ends on 30th 11:00AM IST

Happy Voting!

With Warm Regards

The Week-End mini-Special – Part V

Dear All,

Its getting busier and busier here, and there is lot more to communicate.

Today I want to cover stuff of battery and some clarification on UI. But before we do that, there are two things I need to share:

1. There are so many reasons that why so many logos were not selected, like being similar to a lot of existing logos, extremely difficult to print in one-two color, using proprietary images from the net (serious issue), in-sufficient explanation when the logo was not self-explanatory, etc. You will find that many logos in the top 43 are not either perfect or better than the ones not in there. But the reason they are there is because they represent a very different concept, and if given a face lift, would be much better! My uncle used to say, “You should be disappointed at least for a while, when you don’t win, cos it shows that it was your genuine effort and you really loved what you did!”
2. The EAP. Probably we will have to do the closure earlier than on 3rd November because of the sheer entries and participation. We have got real serious people out there, and just after reading their application (and without even communicating back) it was sure that they MUST get the first Adams. What we are doing here is to talk to all of them personally and check what is the end use case, how can we work together and improve the current eco-system and Adam itself. If you have submitted your application and feel that there is still more you can add in the sections, or there is something missing, please do so, cos your words count a lot!

Now let’s get started on the mini-special part!

The Speakers!

I am also a musician (I play guitar and mouth-organ). And since starting it was extremely important for us to get the best sound to come out from Adam. And we think Adam has the best sound when compared to any tablet out there! You can easily watch movies on it without using any other speaker (that would mean that now more than one can enjoy the Media on the device if you are not closer to your home theater and it’s really important) or head phones.

Most of the small speakers falls in the category of syndrome called “No Bass Man!”. In simple words they have good treble but bass is just not there! You can generalize that small speakers will not have good response below 200Hz (it’s not manufacturing or speaker quality issue, there is a lot of physics and surface area properties involved). We have tried to resolve this problem by designing better speaker enclosure and using the body of the Adam itself as the resonator!

The battery!

The most power hogging elements on Adam are (in decreasing order) LCD, Wi-Fi, 3G, Speakers (in full power mode) and then CPU (Tegra). I am getting from more than 2 full days to minimum of 15 hours (on average which will some idle time as well) ! I am thinking of posting an interactive chart where you all can fill in details of how you will use it and then get the usage value out! Tegra consumes nothing for Open GL so it’s definitely a paradise for Gamers. I have seldom seen it crossing its 60-70mW line (idle) and touching 200-400mW for heavy usage. Adam has 24Whr, and you are bound to be extremely happy with its battery performance. On a comparison, iPad (couldn’t find other device to write here) has 25Whr, and gives you around 11-12 hour. On similar calculations Adam has 24Whr battery and consumers around 1.2Whr (on similar tests as mentioned on their website) and ended up giving 24/1.2=20 hours. (That’s why I want to develop that interactive chart which you can use and see yourself).

The USBs!

Its real fun and time saver to watch 1080p movies, videos, etc. (on device as reduced 1024 or on 48″ LCD TV, full 1080p via HDMI) directly from the USB without actually transferring it into the memory of Adam!

See an old image of Adam here. 2 quick USB connections and your keyboard and mouse are alive! Tablets are supposed to be independent devices. Not requiring a MASTER (PC) to get data from, get songs from, etc. And hence I/O ports are extremely important.

For the UI I am waiting for something very important to be done first. I read the comments on the Eden blog and wanted to clarify few things here. Eden has 3 panels. That would mean you can run 3 application which you can SEE. On the right and on the left there are as many applications opened as you wish! You just need to swipe across to access them. The Eden allows you to easily switch panels, so you have full control which one to view. You can set Application to auto open as panel when they have some notification, etc (like chat window).

Things are getting hectic here and I will start the next week-end special right now so we have actually something very special (that’s why we have “mini” in today’s header.

With Warm Regards

The Top 43!

Dear All!

Last week was really amazing in terms of the activity! More than 4500 logo submission and around 3500 EAP Registrations!

As you might have predicted, it was really difficult for us to pick these 43! The reason we are choosing 43 and not 10 (as said earlier) is because of the sheer number of entries we have received. There was a chance of some improvements, changes and tuning which can make the rest (not in top 10) of the logos better. So now here we are!

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You will see our comments on the image itself, so for those who find your entries selected here, please take a note of the comments and send the logos again.

So this becomes the second last phase instead of the last phase. You need to send the revised logo (which you think is the best you can do after looking at the comment (which is really short)) by 27 Wed 11PM (IST). On 28th Oct the final 10 will go live, and we all can vote. (You will notice 2 Notion Ink’s entry as they are the fav among here in the team and in the comments they were popular as well). (Also do read comments on your Logos, as there are a lot of suggestions. My fav words are simple, elegant and with a reason. Please do not submit new entries)

The whole Notion Ink team thanks everyone for the effort they have taken. (I read somewhere, that nothing dies, specially the effort, cos it will always be there for people to see!) We will always remember all the entries and to do so, we will have them printed on the walls of our firm (December)!

Also I read in the comments about the discount which the finalists should get, will announce the same with the results!

There is a lot of work to do now, the 3500 EAP registrations (and growing) requires personal attention and we will be communicating with most of the soon. Since the deadline for EAP is longer (3rd Now) we are expecting it might cross 6000 after which we will have to stop excepting the entries! We wish to select the best deserving candidates as EAP is extremely close to our heart!

With Warm Regards