A new Silicon Valley company is discreetly showing “The Kno,” a dual-screen tablet being marketed as the future of college textbooks. While several companies are pushing dual tablets here at CES, this one is unique in that it’s already shipping, is designed as a textbook replacement, and offers a large catalog of ready-to-purchase digital textbook content from all the major educational publishers.
Navigating on the customized Ubuntu 9.10 OS was intuitive and easy, and the tools really did reflect the way students want to use textbooks: highlighting, note-taking, zoom, definitions, and a lot more. The Wi-Fi enabled device plays video and has a built-in Internet browser. The textbooks themselves are PDFs of the print version, enhanced for greater interactivity.
The 14.1-inch dual-screen is frankly humongous, and weighs in over 5.5 pounds (although that’s still an improvement over the 40 pounds of textbooks this reporter remembers lugging around). Other specs include NVIDIA Tegra T200 CPU, 512MB RAM, 16 or 32GB onboard storage (no option to upgrade further), microUSB, microphone, 3.5 mm audio ports, and 6-8 hours of battery life in normal use.
The glare-resistant touchscreens are bright and pretty, and Kno claims they are densely packed with sensors and run with “new smoothing algorithims,” but in five minutes of fooling around I witnessed multiple bugs, freezes, and problems with the stylus.
The Kno is pretty pricey: $899 for a dual-screen or $599 for a single-screen version, and digital textbooks in their online store are nearly as expensive as the print versions. Kno, Inc., won’t say how many they’ve shipped.
Not a perfect device, but there’s nothing else like it. A product worth watching.