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Jumbo Dual-Screen "Kno" Tablet Debuts At D8
itwbennett writes "The Microsoft Courier may be a dead project, but that doesn't mean you can't still have a dual-touchscreen e-reader. And a super-sized one at that, says blogger Peter Smith. The Kno, which debuted at All Things Digital's D8 conference yesterday has 'two 14.1-inch (1440 x 900) capacitive touch screens. Each screen has its own battery, giving the Kno 8-hours of battery life, but a hefty weight of 5.5 lbs. ... If Kno (the company) has its way, students will be carrying around a Kno (the device) rather than a stack of textbooks. That's the reason for the huge screens; most textbook pages can be shown 'full size' on a 14-inch screen.' Engadget, who got some hands-on time with the device, says 'the entire experience is essentially a WebKit instance.' Price is still up in the air but Ina Fried at CNET says the company is aiming for a price well under $1,000."
So why not just get a laptop? For $400 you can get a 14 inch screen, full keyboard, a real OS, can do tons of other things, etc.
If its not e-ink to reduce strain on eyes, not running a real OS (as in full Windows, Linux or OS X), no full keyboard, etc. Why buy it? Under $1,000 means nothing, if its $200, yeah, I can think about getting one. For $250, I can buy a dedicated e-ink e-reader, for $350, I can buy a low end laptop or decent network, for $500 I can buy a great laptop or an iPad and anything more than $500 would just be pointless.
Really, why would I want a giant, heavy, LCD tablet not running a real OS?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
They're clearly making up for something. I'll buy one of these, and say to my classmates, "Hey, when you stick that iPad in your backpack, does the backpack say, 'Is it in yet?'?".
I wasn't impressed with the performance of it in the video. The scrolling stuttered and he had to press/click some items multiple times in order for it to register. It is an interesting device so I hope they can improve its performance. I doubt they'll get the price "well under $1000" with two 14" touch screens.
I thought naming your product after your company was a Kno Kno
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The Kno will be a serious failure.
.epubs that ran well on Kindles and iPads alike. Of course, when you publish electronically, you can't justify $149 for a copy of Organic Chemistry 14th edition, and you can't publish new editions every year to force the used market out of business. Who cares about the consumer when the market is inelastic and professors are forcing you to buy books that equate to the yearly incomes of people in third world countries?
Publishers damn well could spend a tiny bit of time publishing
If publishers won't bother doing such a simple thing for popular devices, do you honestly think they are going to support this monstrosity?
A second screen seems less useful than a keyboard, so I'd rather just have the latest tablet offering from Lenovo/HP/etc which converts to a tablet mode with a pen. 5.5 lb is way too heavy to be used like a book (people complain about the ipad's 1.5 lb feeling heavy), though I suppose it's comparable to very large textbook. Still, a now-standard tablet with an extra-large battery and some decent software can do most of what this hopes to do and act as a primary laptop, all for around the same price ($800-$1000).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I agree completely. I'm much more interested in the Entourage Edge, or at least the general idea of something like that. One regular LCD screen and one e-ink screen.
Of course i'll be waiting to see if there's a second generation version that fixes all the problems present in the first model. In particular, it needs to have Android 2.2, complete with access to the regular app store. Both screens need to have multitouch. You need to be able to put it in laptop configuration and use the bottom screen as a virtual keyboard. And it would be nice if when you have it folded all the way backwards you could use the screen on the back to control a pointer on the front screen. (I think the Motorola Backflip does something like that?) Oh yeah, and it needs expandable memory. Now if they could get all that together in one package for a reasonable price i'd be seriously interested.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's both incredibly cool, and unbelievably stupid. I love it. But they can't possibly make this monstrosity sell at a reasonable price.
Doesn't make much sense as an e-reader, but might be awesome for 2-player gaming.
I have never wanted anything less.
Speaking as a student I want to know why all these companies keep thinking we want e-readers and e-books instead of textbooks. I don't want my textbook to go dead 9 hours into studying, or not be able to have 3-4 books open to 3-4 different sections each. I would however, like one for pleasure reading, but not a $500/5.5 lb machine. What exactly is this for?
I grabbed an average size texbook (out of my engineering texts) and the largest from my shelf:
largest: 1.5kg, 12 inch diagonal
average: 1.2kg, 11 inch diagonal.
So for less mass than this device (~2.5kg) I can carry two decent sized dead tree books. If not all publishers sign on for the Kno, then I would need to carry the heavy Kno and paper books.
Among my course, this device wouldn't be particularly successful. Most of my subjects are lecture oriented, as such I've only needed to take more than one textbook a couple of times in the last semester. Where possible I have copies of texts on my Kindle. It's not ideal, it's not convenient to annotate. But if I just want to read or find a reference quickly, the kindle does a great job. No need to carry a large reference with me. The find-in-text is great for some situations when I know exactly what figure or section I want to see.
If they made this 'Kno' smaller and thus lighter and cheaper (ie, MS Courier) I think it'd be great. Two iPads stuck together should be under 1.5kg (given 1x3G is 0.73kg) and that screen is sufficiently large.
The ergonomics of using that large, heavy, thick thing on a desk are dubious too:
- I place my paper on an angle when I write, which would push the opposite page of this Kno away from me.
- Reading of a textbook for long duration on that screen would be uncomfortable.
- As it's so heavy, you're desk bound, unlike the paper alternatives
I doubt this monstrosity will make make it to market, or be a success if it does. The weight needs to come down, a lot.
In a stunning turn of events, and uppiddy nigger actually did what he said he would.
Good job Jigaboo President Obama! Way to fix the economy!
do you hate black people?
No? Then it doesn't exist.
It's amazing these people had the knowledge, funding and support to build a sophisticated device like this, based upon such a ridiculously bad idea.
How is this possible? Maybe "imagine sticking two iPad clones together as a book" looked good on paper?
There was a time, not so many decades ago when, "Made in Japan" meant, "Crap".
India has a long way to go before they figure out the design and marketing game. It's an art form and they're still finger painting.
At the moment, absolutely everything about India's global marketing efforts stress me out. -I had the 'pleasure' of dealing with a couple of different go-getter hyper-competitive lunatics from India trying to engage me in business deals which had no chance in hell of happening because I was speaking at the speed of sane and they were speaking at the permanent setting of won't-take-No-for-an-answer-total-readiness-for-verbal-combat. It staggers the mind to think that Yoga came from India. Alert: The following IS A RACIST COMMENT:
India stresses me right out.
Until that country relaxes a LOT, nothing they make will be attractive to me and unless I am mistaken, the West. Fortunately for India, the West appears to be sinking fast, so it looks like they may be selling largely to themselves in the future. I hope they like their own media and technology because I absolutely can't stand it. It screams, "TRYING SOOOOOOOOO HARD! DO YOU LIKE ME YET? HOW ABOUT NOW? ACTUALLY YOU ARE WRONG BECAUSE HERE ARE SIX EXCELLENT REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD LIKE ME..."
All my herd instinct "cool genes" are begging, "Please tell me you didn't invite India to the party." And I don't HAVE any cool genes. I'm a giant geek with a Slashdot UID over ten years old. That's how much India stresses me out.
But I do wish them well; give them another ten or twenty years and I'm sure they'll figure things out. Everybody seems to.
In the mean time, their giant freak show of a touch screen textbook is both endearing in its earnest attempt to please the market it is aiming at, and so entirely idiotic that I have to actively fight my instincts to not want to strangle it.
-FL
Well finally we can have Penny's computer book from Inspector Gadget
There's the Asus Eee T91, a touchscreen netbook. It's cheaper than the other tablets, runs a real OS (Windows XP, and you could presumably put Linux on there), and isn't too heavy.
(Unfortunately the problem with Windows 7 Starter seems to be a problem with netbooks in general - there's always XP or Linux; and I'd still rather have Windows 7 starter than a locked down OS designed for phones that can't even multitask.)
"Most products i intend to buy haven't been invented yet" - The Big Bang Theory
Well, i'd buy this. I'm all for dualscreens and like the fact that it supports both fingertouch and pens. I've never been apt at writing in anything other than italic with my pointy finger.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Sure, in history or english 101 or whatever, I'm sure I could type faster and more legibly than I could write. But when the prof is covering the board in Hamiltonian dynamics equations... you can damn sure bet that I could write that down faster than I could peck it out in an equation editor. I would have been hopelessly behind. And I never got very much out of pre-printed notes - it was the act of writing stuff down that helped me understand and remember it.
For one thing, I really don't understand why you'd want to have a device like this with a split screen (aside from slavish copying of the appearance of a book). It would be a lot more useful to have a single screen with the same width - then you're not stuck with a giant seam down the middle of the thing. I suppose being able to fold the thing in half is useful, but I'd still prefer it as a single screen.
Also, this seems like an awful lot of money to pay for a device that just displays books. I can't help but think that a netbook would be more versatile and cheaper.
It ain't real - it's just a trial balloon to test the market.
We see all sorts of "iPad competitors" now that the iPad has shown it is possible to make a profit in this format, but unless it is actually for sale, it's just a marketing exercise. I get really tired of reading all these breathless "announcements" of products that never see the light of day...
To my mind the whole process needs a re-think. Contemporaneous note-taking in a lecture (or a business meeting or a deposition etc.) is a vastly different task from research reading. I don't see how a single device should be bound to be good at both tasks. For notetaking, I want to be able to create links to various pieces of information quickly (photos, soundbites, manual notes, text clips etc.) and then be able to make sense of it afterwards, eg. follow the text clipped from a book back into the book to read some more if I want to. It's not like court stenography, although at least the stenographers have put some thought into their profession and come up with the tools to do their jobs.
The whole thing needs a rethink and it needs infrastructure to support it too. Things like a video feed of the lecture being wirelessly broadcast live and sound on an inductive loop and links to background material being sent out in real time during the lecturer's presentation. Something that allows the student to create, on the fly, whatever mash-up passes for notes in his imagination.
The real test will be if the technology facilitates a change in the way lectures are presented.
Nullius in verba
Dell Latitude XT2 with the same sort of touch and pen technology = $2,686.00
HP Tm2 with the same kind of pen and touch technology as the Dell Latitude XT2, and faster gfx = $700
Da Blog
I was wondering when something like this would be produced, as I thing it's design is the only true replacement for school books. Being a student myself I would defiantly consider getting one of the these devices. This easily weighs less than than the text books I have to carry for a mile to school everyday. Some people say that a laptop is more useful, but I really don't think it is. Have you ever attempted to do a-level maths in a word processor? You can't type maths. I honestly think this device would increase productivity. A feature I would like to see is handwriting recognition so you are able to search through your notes. So although this device still looks a bit clunky it is good to see that at least one company is heading down the right track.