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Lessons from Notion Ink’s Adam

The tech world is NOT a friendly place to be in, especially if you are a startup dealing with hardware in India. The guys at Notion Ink dared to do what no one else had attempted in India - make a world class tablet which can rival the best out there. And they called it Adam. It wasn't meant to be a cheap "Chinese" tablet, but a worthy competitor to the likes of the iPad, Motorola Xoom, et all. With an active blog with passionate people commenting, discussing, debating almost every aspect of its design, development, sales and marketing, it seemed that the bad days were well past the folks at NI. Its been a few months since the Adam was launched officially at CES 2011, and it was a very low key launch to say the least. This is my take on what they did right, where they screwed up and where they could've done better.

Hardware

The Adam has been in the works for more than two years (The first blog post was in April 2009). And right from the beginning, they went with the best hardware platform available - nVidia Tegra with a dual core CPU, irresistible Pixel Qi display, a lot of RAM for a tablet, plenty of connectivity options all in a sleek package(Complete specs). And all this translates into real world advantages - longer battery life due to the Trans-reflective display, a camera that can be used as both front and back facing capture, HDMI output, and a full set of connectivity options including 3G.

When your product is aimed at tech savvy Android users, it better be right on top of the hardware game. Selling all this under $500 seems like a gamble, but NI have probably realized that its the software ecosystem that makes more money in the long run as in the case of App store and the Android Market. Also, they probably needed all this power for their custom UI on top of Android, the Eden. Unfortunately, by the time it became available to the consumers, tablets with similar/better hardware and by well known manufacturers have already hit the market. While the Adam's hardware is not aged by any standard, it cannot boast of being the best hardware platform.

Software

Choosing Android as the platform isn't something that would've take a long time to decide on. After the runaway success of the iPad, almost all competitors have adopted Android, partially due to the fact that there aren't many good alternatives for a tablet OS. Also, owing to its "Open source" roots and a wide support by the developer community, it would mean more developer and user love, which translates into more sales. The Adam currently runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread with custom enhancements and applications. Android 3.0 Honeycomb was released this year with major improvements to the UI for tablets. In fact, Honeycomb is specifically targeted at tablet manufacturers and hasn't hit the phone format yet. NI has been fortunate enough to get access to it as Google has started to pick and choose the manufacturers it is giving away the source code to (The source to honeycomb hasn't been made public yet). Customizing Eden for honeycomb will take a while, now that it comes bundled with UI components for tablets. That said, it might not matter a lot as Eden has been a major selling point for NI and they wouldn't want to throw all that hard work away.

NI has been rolling out patches for major issues, as well as performance/feature enhancements. While it might not have been very quick, they have at least shown the inclination to support the device in the long run, which is important for them to build up a reputation in the market.

Marketing

This is where things got real bad. The launch at CES was a bummer. Very few review sites had a hands on and fewer still had a preview on their blogs. The launch didn't even include actual demos of the device and available images were mostly mockups. When you want to be taken seriously, you had better have a few working devices for tech journalists and reviewers at your launch. There was a lot of anger from fans, mostly due to the complete lack of communication and genuine pics/videos from the company. It seemed to be yet another vapourware, and people quickly grew disinterested and started focusing on other upcoming android tablets which had, by then started flooding the market.

With constant delays at every phase of the project, the team should have planned accordingly for the launch. Had they released it a month later with working review pieces, detailed demos and hands on videos, the reaction from the tech world would've been better. Also, there is hardly any online/offline marketing. When you do not provide enough visibility for your new product, don't expect much in return. Word of mouth publicity and social networking can only sell so much. NI should definitely put in some effort and do some advertising, especially in growing economies like India and China, where cost of advertising isn't as high as in the developed world.

Sales & Support

When you screw up your marketing and still have your pre-orders booked out, you are counting your blessings. But then that wasn't smooth either. Constant delays, website and payment gateway issues, lack of communication regarding shipping delays put off many potential buyers. Manufacturing should have been handled better, and support folks should have kept buyers updated on shipping issues. Pleading that you are a startup will earn only so much sympathy and understanding from your customers. Plainly put, the whole buying experience needs to be fixed, and support has to be expanded. An online support forum is always good, but getting knowledgeable staff and a quick response is crucial too.

Applications

One thing NI seems to be doing right, is getting in a lot of applications on their device. They have been constantly adding newer applications and enhancing the existing ones. Android lovers will be kept happy as kernel sources are open sourced (github), and community support at XDA is just getting started.

The Adam still is a decent device, but NI needs to pull itself together very quickly and fix its sales and support issues. The jump to honeycomb is crucial for the future of the platform, even if their custom skin isn't ready. They can always go the Galaxy Tab 10.1 way, and add the UX customization later on top of a default Andriod experience. I do hope they try and expand the market for the Adam before planning on a successor. In India, where the company is based, the tablet market is booming with the iPad2 and Galaxy Tabs, but the Adam isn't even known outside the enthusiast circle. The faster they move, the better it is for the company and for other hardware startups here.