The Notion Ink Adam Tablet is one of the first devices due out with a Pixel Qi display and NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset. If you put those things together, what you get is a heck of a lot of positive buzz for a product from a company that most people hadn’t heard about before CES. But it looks like Notion Ink is a few steps closer to bringing the Adam to market. Today the company posted the specs for the tablet on its web site, and tech blog Technoholik has snagged some hands-on photos of what looks like a production sample (as opposed to the rendered images we saw last week or the handcarved wooden prototype I saw at CES in January).

So here’s what we know about the tablet. It has a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel matte (non-glossy) touchscreen which can function as a full color display or as a high contrast (almost black and white), low power display that’s easily readable in direct sunlight. It has a Tegra 2 chipset which combines a low power dual-core ARM A9 CPU with enough graphics power to play 1080p HD video.

The tablet has a 3 cell battery, which should run for up to 16 hours in full color mode. Technoholik claims you’ll get up to 160 hours with the backlight off, but I’m pretty certain that’s not true, since the folks at Pixel Qi tell me you should generally expect to save just a few watts of power by shutting off the backlight. They’re also working on software that will afford greater power savings by allowing the CPU to shut down when the screen is inactive – for instance, when you’re reading an eBook and only need the CPU to power up to flip pages. But I don’t think that technology is available yet.

The Adam tablet supports 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth, 2.1 and 3G wireless. And it has a 3.2MP camera that you can rotate so it faces the front or back of the tablet, allowing you to snap pictures or use the tablet as a webcam.

There are 3 USB ports, an HDMI output, A-GPS, and an accelerometer. It will weigh about 1.4 pounds and measure just about half an inch thick.

What we still don’t know is the final price or when the Adam Tablet will be available.

Update: SlashGear has more photos, plus a demonstration of the Adam running Adobe Flash, something that rival tablet the iPad can’t do. What’s interesting is that the Adam uses the Google Android operating system, which doesn’t officially support Flash yet either. So either that’s about to change this week at Mobile World Congress, or Notion Ink has some pretty neat tricks up their sleeves.

via Engadget

When Notion Ink showed off an early prototype of its 10 inch tablet at CES last month, the device was still in the early prototype stages. How early? The case was hand-carved out of wood instead of being made of metal or plastic. But the Adam tablet still got a lot of buzz as one of the most exciting devices on display at CES thanks to two factors. It has a Pixel Qi 3qi display which looks as good outdoors as it does indoors, and which can be flipped from full color mode to a high contrast, low power mode for reading eBooks or web pages. And the tablet uses NVIDIA’s Tegra platform which bundles high quality graphics with a low power processor.

The Notion Ink Adam still isn’t ready to ship yet. But the company sent SlashGear a series of mockup images showing what the finished product could look like. All told, it doesn’t look that different from the device I saw at CES. But the company does have a few new details to share.

First, there could be two different versions of the Adam. One would measure 12.9mm thick, while the other would be just 11.6mm. Both would be thinner than the 13.4mm iPad, although it’s likely that the thinner model would not have a Pixel Qi display.

Notion Ink claims that the Adam might be able to run for 2-3 times longer than the iPad for surfing the web or performing some other tasks. SlashGear reports that the tablet will also launch with partnerships in place with digital magazine, eBook, and comic book content available.

You can check out my hands-on video with the Notion Ink tablet prototype from CES after the break.

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This year’s CES has been dominated by 3D TV, eBook readers, and a plethora of tablets. But the Notion Ink Adam tablet manages to stand out from the tablet crowd by sporting some of the hottest new technology. And I really do mean hot, and not just hyped.

First, it’s one of the first devices to use Pixel Qi’s 3qi LCD display which features a higher contrast ePaper mode that uses just 0.5 watts and a full color mode that uses the same 2.5 watts as a standard LCD screen.

Second, the Notion Ink tablet is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chipset. Tegra 2 is based on a low power ARM processor and high performance NVIDIA graphics that allow tablets like the Adam to handle 1080p HD video playback without breaking a sweat. The chipset can also handle games that would make an iPhone cry, while still providing excellent battery life.

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