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Note Taking Devices for Students?
Gavin Scott asks: "I'm looking for solutions for a college student who needs an inexpensive mechanism for note taking in class. She suffers from a condition that makes writing notes out by hand slow and painful. One of the small sexy sub-notebook computers would be ideal, but at $1,500-$2,500 these are completely out of reach budget-wise. She has a perfectly good desktop system at home, so something that simply allowed typing in notes that could then be transferred to the PC would be ideal. I've considered things like a Palm-type device with an external keyboard, but I'm interested in knowing what other options people might suggest. Or any opinions on what kind of lightweight almost-laptop devices are good in, say, the sub-$500 range?"
I am not a l33t hardware guy, or anything, but this gives me an idea for a product:
... and which buffers your keystrokes into a couple of K of RAM, then writes it all out to a CF card (or flash card standard of your choice).
... just increment a pointer on every keystroke, writing the scan code into the cell; decrement the ptr on backspace ...
.. maybe even around $25 (given enough volume ... keyboards are < $10 nowadays).
a device consisting of a keyboard, with a 1 line LCD Screen across the top (can even be segmented, like on a cheesy calculator), that allows you to type, and see what you are typing, and not much else
Maybe even skip the flash; just have a MB of RAM; that's it. the KB could have a regular old kb connector, and you can hit a special key sequence to dump the memory to the KB Port. (The software here would be SO simple
The point is, this could be manufactured REALLY cheap; and would be ideal for taking notes. You could even outfit it with the guts of one of these to take snapshots of blackboards, etc.
It would seem like something like this could sell for < $50
Even starving college kids could afford one.
We are approaching off-topicness, but I have an HP calculator (HP-48GX) from which I have surfed the net (yes, Slashdot worked), checked my e-mail, played ADVENT and Nethack via the serial port, and taken notes in class. It is possible to get software to remap the keyboard to be qwerty-like and to rotate the screen, to aid in note-taking. Not only is it cheaper (~$100 now) but it can also do a lot more than many other calculators. Back on topic, I also new a guy with the same writing problem, and he was able to get money from the local government to help pay for a subnotebook for the purpose of note-taking in class. He certainly did not let his disability slow him down.