Whats wrong with Notion Ink

Rather, a lot is wrong with Notion Ink. There is no demo on their site to look before preordering Adam. They say it will be out on 18th, but I took a leap of faith and went ahead to preorder. The preordering is one of the worst, if not the worst experience I have ever had with online shopping. Only Visa and AmEx cards accepted, mandatory area code field in telephone number which doesn’t accept 00 (I live in a city state), and upon entering all the details the site refuses to go ahead. On the 9th attempt I got through and made the payment. I got an ID for my preorder and when I enter the ID to check the status, the system pops up a message telling me that my ID is invalid. Worst still, I dont even have an e-mail confirming my order.

What the heck are people at NI doing. If you cant manage a pre-order then don’t do it dammit. You can write all sorts of excuses on your blog but facts are facts at the end of the day. I still dont know whether the product is worth the hype and the US$475 I paid for it.

I would love to study this as a case study in a B-School as how not to launch a product. No, I am not being unfair or judgmental. The whole thing sucks.

P.S.: I wanted to check out the performance of NVidia Tegra processor and other made for NI apps and that was the reason for sticking to Adam despite all this.

Update: December 15th

After a few e-mail exchanges Notion Ink has said informed me that my e-mail address was garbled up and hence I couldnt get a confirmation mail or I couldnt check my preorder status. My mistake. Apologies. However all other things still hold – no support for MasterCard, crashing of the payment gateway 8 times etc.