Some time ago I began questing for a movie-playing device. I may have found one, but unfortunately not one which I necessarily should be buying.

The potential solution is the Adam, by Notion Ink. It’s an Android tablet with a Pixel Qi display and (significantly for my quest) both USB and HDMI ports. That means I can carry my library on a portable drive (meaning there’s basically no upper limit to file size: I can store them as ISOs) and plug the thing into a big screen if such is available (our cheapo movie-watching screen at home via an HDMI-to-DVI plug, for instance, unless I mean DVI-to-HDMI).

There are some downsides. The most significant is that Notion Ink reeks of nerdery. Not that I don’t fit the demographic, but my experience with the iLiad by iRex has made me cautious of these bleeding-edge hacker products. The iLiad was a device built on cutting-edge hardware, with open software intended to attract hacking, all put together by a small company. The exact same description fits the Adam. In the case of the iLiad, this led to various problems:

  • The cutting-edge hardware quickly got overtaken by new developments (driven by larger companies with larger R&D budgets, one assumes);
  • The cutting-edge hardware also required custom software support, which meant that almost no standard software could be easily ported to the device (this will be less of a problem with the Adam, because the display technology is more standard, although not entirely);
  • Because of a small but devoted user community of hackers, the company themselves didn’t need to polish their software to gleaming perfection: they made clunky but working solutions, which the users either put up with or hacked around;
  • Similarly, the physical design of the device had all sorts of minor issues that a larger company with more time (and money) for design cycles would have eliminated; again the hacker-ish ethos of much of the user base means that there wasn’t any strong pressure to improve on these problems;
  • The company went out of business in 2010; you can’t get iLiad components any more, and lots of the connectors (being somewhat prototypy) were decidedly non-standard.

The end result was a product that was at the same time incredibly exciting and incredibly frustrating. You could spend hours messing about with hacked versions of the OS and basic utilities — and I did. (If you were hardcore, of course, you contributed to these projects. I wasn’t hardcore.) At the same time, you had to spend hours installing hacked versions of the utilities if you wanted a usable device; or when you found the latest Cool Thing (“a web browser!”) that would work if you just installed someone’s hacked connection manager, which however didn’t include someone else’s additions to the connection manager so you had to compile a merged version yourself, etc etc. All wonderful fun, but also taking an incredible amount of time.

And now, the battery of my iLiad no longer holds a charge; the AC cable, though, only works if you prop it up at the right angle (said angle being inconsistent with comfortable reading). Since the company went bust, the proprietory cloud-based content management stuff presumably doesn’t work any more, so you need the cable hub which (again) needs careful positioning to make it work. And so on and so on: the first-generation hardware design has meant that the device hasn’t really survived the death of its support company.

Which brings me to Notion Ink. They’re a small independent company, competing with the iPad and the increasing number of increasingly slick Android tablets on the market: going up against giants like Apple and Samsung. They’re writing custom software to make things go, which doesn’t always run smoothly: as long as the company is in business you’ll get support, but if they go under then you’re on your own.

As for my original needs, there’s one sticking point: I’m still not aware of any ISO player for Android. (Daroon Player reportedly plays unconverted DVD folders, which is probably close enough, but I haven’t put it to the test.)

And then there’s one more problem. The Adam is a tablet. I already have an Android tablet (the Samsung Galaxy Tab, ridiculously overpriced and bought in a moment of foolishness: I use it every day, and it doesn’t need replacing). I’m going to buy an iPad (lured by various apps only available on iOS), although possibly secondhand. It’s hard to justify the idea of owning three of these things…