I have been following the NotionInk Adam since it first surfaced in January 2010. A nice little interview with Rohan – the founder / designer / inventor – of the Adam. At that time iPAD was the one and only option in the market and it was felt really good to see a small little Indian startup coming up with what seemed like an extremely great product – the Adam.
Over the year, the hype increased around the Adam as more and more vendors started talking about their own Android tablets. Adam always seemed to stand out based on the great specs and more importantly the open blog where Rohan and team “seemed” to listen.
Finally the big day gets closer where Adam was supposed to open for “pre-order” and all hell broke…. it was, in my opinion, the worst ever launch of any product I have seen. First of all, it would have definitely helped if Rohan and team worked with a few of the Tech Blogs closely. I understand the challenges of entertaining every Tech Blog out there – there seem to be more of the blogs then the actual products out there these days – but it would have helped to work closely with at least a couple of them. The others could have picked up the interviews / reviews anyways.
Even though that did not happen, people were still excited about the pre-order but the entire ordering process was another disaster. It was unclear as to who were getting the pre-order early access links and who did not. And it was a mess on exactly when the ordering will open for the rest of the world. I checked the site at the time it was supposed to go live and when it did not happen, went shopping but made it back just in time – even though as per the page there was an update that said pre-order was an hour away, ordering was opened. Regardless… picked my PixelQi and almost got to the credit card page and then started debating if I needed to pay the extra $125 for the PixelQi or not. Apparently that was a mistake I made – now my actual shipment date got moved by a week, because I did not click submit fast enough. Seriously….
Anyways, I think Rohan and team took enough heat from various blogs, communities, readers – everyone out there. Seems like Rohan gets it but just hasn’t cleaned up the act yet. For a product that holds such great potential and following, I would have hoped they had better PR and communication. It would be sad to see NotionInk go out into the sunset because of their communication capabilities. Rohan isn’t one of the great communicator representing the company… he needs to look for a better face on the company or it is going to hurt.
Either ways, I felt compelled to support an Indian company that has set out to compete in the big world where Apple and Microsoft (and Nokia ;)) play and that was one of the reasons I bought the Adam.
I would love to see some more Indian companies popup and compete….
Still waiting for my NotionInk Adam to ship out….