What you have to know is that its not a great screen. I’ll be quite honest: compared to just about any LCD screen of comparable size that you are likely to find anywhere today… the Pixel Qi screen really sucks. Its low res (only 1024 × 600,) grainy (due to the touch overlay added by Notion Ink) and has pretty wretched viewing angles with the backlight both on and off.

But its the only device currently on the market that lets you sip a cocktail on a sunny Hawaiian beach while updating your blog. And in my case it might even be solar powered.

The sunlight readable mode of the Pixel Qi (or PQ for short) screen is essentially an LCD screen with the backlight completely off. The PQ screen has a reflective layer that allows ambient light to reflect back through the screen in place of the backlight. Voila. Unlike normal LCD screens it gets more viewable the brighter the light gets.

That does a couple things that I really like. First, it makes the Adam a sort of all terrain vehicle of tablet computing. It s the only LCD device I’ve ever used that is truly visible in any lighting conditions. Using it as a GPS in the truck on a sunny day? No problem. Sitting at the park in the dappled shade of the Ironwood trees? No problem. Its not a bad trade off for the lower overall quality of the screen if you like relaxing outside with the internet.

Second, the backlight is off. Those of you that have wrestled with getting the most life out of a mobile device’s battery well know that the screen backlight is one of the big power suckers. With the Adam in Q mode the thing sips power and the battery life goes way up. With some clever planning of your lighting conditions you can nurse a huge amount of screen time out of the Adam. I can even use it inside with ambient daylight streaming in the windows, though it is fairly dim.

The PQ screen is why I bought the Adam. I had a Plan. And so far that Plan has played out very well. I’ve been able to fairly easily power the Adam via several small, homemade solar panels.

I know that not very many people would follow me into that kind of madness, but its the kind of hardware tech tinkering that I quite enjoy.

About a year ago I bought a bunch of small, reject solar cells designed to be installed in satellites. They crank in full sunlight but their performance drops off quickly in shade and off angles: satellite cells aren’t designed for atmospheric variations. They were cheap, though, and very easy to assemble. My goal when I got them was to build a series of small, portable panels that I could use to power a laptop. That’s a very challenging task as the standard laptop draws between 30 and 60 watts. With my letter sized panels I can get about .5 amps each at 12volts… to a 60 watt laptop would need require 10 panels.

I made 3 for 1.5amps (~18 usable watts) and used them to charge an old motorcycle battery. That would then power the laptop for a while and was quite the fun experiment… but it wasn’t really all that convenient.

The Adam, however, in its lowest power state (PQ mode with the internal batteries not charging) only draws around 5 watts. At its highest power state it draws 18 or 19 watts. My 3 little panels should be enough to power it. Turns out they aren’t quite due to the satellite cells demanding pure, direct light for full output but adding a 4th panel did the trick. The 4 panels fold up to about the size of a laptop and fit in a messenger bag with the Adam, a USB keyboard, a 7 amp hour battery from radio shack and its charge controller, and the various cables and whatnot I need to make it all work. And there is still room leftover for my keys, wallet, phone and journal.

The entire first month and a half I had it I never plugged it into the wall. Its more geeky than it is convenient but it has been an interesting exercise in scaling back a high energy consumption lifestyle and replacing it with something more energy sustainable. On cloudy days you find yourself noticing each break out of sunlight. Quick! Get the solar panels out and charge up the battery! Or… wait… is that rain? Quick! Get the panels out of the rain! It was a very odd and technocentric avenue of connecting with the day’s natural rhythms but I love that kind of apparent irony.

It has some theoretical practical applications, as well. Here in Hawaii we are prone to a wide variety of natural disasters. It may be paradise but its one of the few places in the world where earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are all fairly normal occurrences. The power could go off (snap!) like that and not come back on for days, even weeks. An earthquake could reduce our homes and roads to chaotic rubble in a matter of minutes. An Adam with an outdoor viewable screen, a few portable solar panels and a digital library of emergency manuals makes for an emergency-ready replacement for when Google is temporarily unavailable. I even have a copy of Wikipedia on the device.

And a wikipedia app that even reads it outloud to you.

I’m such a geek.

Android had tons of potential for a mid-sized tablet, though. And I already knew which one I was interested in. It was Notion Ink’s Adam. A 10″ android tablet with a sunlight readable screen! USB ports! An external microSD card slot! GPS! It’ll even wash the dishes for you! So I joined the eager ranks of Notion Ink followers and awaited the coming of the Perfect Android Tablet.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I can honestly say now that it was worth the wait. But that’s true mostly because there still weren’t all that many appealing tablets available when I finally bought one. And none with that sexy Pixel Qi screen. It took quite a bit of work to get it running acceptably but I don’t mind doing that kind of thing too much. Hacking is fun! Is it an ideal tablet? No. And it certainly doesn’t do the dishes. But its is a very interesting device that has its niche. I am one of the people who lives firmly in one of those niches, too.

The skinny:

You can find lots of discussions about the Adam online. People who love it. People who hate it. People who love the Adam but can’t stand the company that made it. People who swear the GPS doesn’t work, people who swear it does. Disappointed Waiters who have abandoned the Dream and bought an iPad II. Eager Waiters who are still waiting for their chance to order from the next round.

For me, though, its a perfectly handy little device that’s a lot bigger than my phone. I can plug USB keyboard into it and do some real typing. It easily handles email, chat, facebook, forum surfing. And I can do it all outdoors. It’s not without its flaws but I can live with them.

I’ve had lots of thoughts in the 2 months I’ve lived with the Adam and I’ll post them here as I have time to assemble them well.

And yet over the years I have had a variety of thoughts and experiences that I’ve felt would make interesting reading on a blog. Since I have a website already I might as well use it as a blog. And so… here’s a blog. You can, no doubt, so the flawless logic in my reasoning.

And for my first blog entry… have I ever mentioned how much I dislike the word “blog?” There is just nothing graceful about the word. Too close to slog, flog and grog. For some reason I always think of “blog” as referring to writing that unrefined and tedious by its very nature.

But I highly respect the artform at a whole. There are some excellent and well thought out blogs to be had these days. With any luck this will eventually be numbered among their company.