Developers Received Development Units?

[jirex]

I was more than a little put off by the poor quality of the order pages. I can hack together something better than that in my sleep in PHP.

So here I am wondering if my money that I just plunked down is safe or if this is simply going to be vaporware. That got me thinking... have developers received development units? I mean, if people have then that would ease a lot of fears with our money.

Also, I'm sorry if you take offense to that statement but come on... that order page sucks and makes me wonder 1) if this product is simply vaporware; and 2) if it is eventually released, what the UI is going to be like if NI (being designers) cannot even design a professional payment page. For example, I have looked at a lot of the released images and I am really not a fan of the bright red color and other UI elements such as the music player. So why did I order? Well, I am more interested in the hardware aspects of the Adam such as the sweet design, scratch resistant class, pixel iq screen, tegra 2 processor, and memory card slot.

[KarmaPolice]

I'll tell ya, i don't disagree with you...

1) Invite email was auto-forwarded to just about everyone's spam folder
2) Order page was pretty cheap looking
3) I got a call from my credit card company about fraud prevention right after I ordered

All of those are pretty disconcerting...

On the other hand... it is a brand new company... they are a hardware company and that is their passion... so i don't really fault them for having a rough launch day (hell, find me one major product that hasn't been swamped... the dread Apple even crashes on iphone launch days still)...

And in the end... I still plunked down my cash for the pre-order... I have yet to see anything that makes me think they are incapable of delivering the product that has been discussed over the last year+... they may not have the greatest business model figured out yet... but I remember ordering from DELL when they were still a startup too and getting the same feeling as all of the above... so who knows...

[swedshcancerboi]

This past week I've seen nothing but red flags about "Vaporware." If it is real, there are only 2 possibilities:
1) They are smart enough not to advertise because they know they can't handle the traffic.
2) They are scared to share it since its too buggy. Is it better to have no reviews than bad reviews?

I hope I'm wrong.

[JonnyBoy]

2) They are scared to share it since its too buggy. Is it better to have no reviews than bad reviews?

I believe that it is still extremely buggy, hence the lack of real videos and feature walk-throughs. Also, I attribute the shipment delay to NI taking 4 more weeks than planned to get their hands on Gingerbread and work out the kinks so they can release Adam with that instead of Froyo...

[buddhafrog]

Good question OP. Did any developers actually *receive* an beta adam? I know there must be tons of confidentiality involved, but just confirmation that an actual, tangible product has been seen would be appreciated.... and just to type that is quite sad, isn't it? I wouldn't be completely surprised to find out that no one received the developers model. Each person just assumed he/she was not chosen and that others were receiving these models....

Where, 'o where art thou?

[killer2021]

Well first, I've seen videos of rohan talking about the adam but the device he had appeared to be the first generation of the adam. It had pixel qi and the ability to play videos etc. The 2nd gen version appears to have the swivel camera from what I can tell. The 1st gen version had no camera. Here is a video of an adam in the, "wild" which appears to be an adam with the swivel camera. Thats basically the only identifiable video of the 2nd gen adam I've seen. I have no idea where this guy got it or what. He has a couple other videos labeled adam but you can't really tell. All the videos are dark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmNOfIqu4Kw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVQAi73ypPA