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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."
I finished undergrad three years ago, and am still at university doing postgrad work.... Some lecturers certainly do provide either hard or soft copies of all their notes, but plenty still don't. I can't see this changing, as they do it to encourage students to actually attend lectures, rather than just get the notes off the website and not bother.
There are certainly some papers in mechanical engineering that are still pretty heavy on copying down notes here -- and I don't see it as a bad thing, I actually learned more in this style of lecture simply because it forces you to pay a certain amount of attention....
Apparently to you reading the post before replying is pointless, the device that would be over $500 isn't a laptop but the Kno. The op made no value judgement on laptops over $500, just saying that slate devices over that price don't really have a market segment.
Monstar L
We do not have to be forever shackled to the laptop paradigm. It is OK to develop other types of computers. A laptop is not the END ALL solution for computing. It is a great general purpose design, but there are many areas it can be improved. Not every type of personal computer in the world is going to require a full hardware keyboard to be useful, why is this so hard to understand?
Good-bye
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.)