My interest is piqued:<p><i>As proof of our commitment: from the start we treated our own internal app developers as third party developers. A developer-friendly environment is in our blood. We’re powered by the WebKit browser engine, so if you can build a website, you can build a Kno app.</i><p>Also, don't miss the photos on the home page. This thing is enormous.<p>Engadget has a hands on: <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/02/kno-dual-screen-tablet-appears-at-d8-we-go-hands-on/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/02/kno-dual-screen-tablet-ap...</a> (edit)
The Kno... revolutionizing digital textbooks with a 5.5 pound, original xbox size, dual screen tablet device that starts just under $1,000.<p>Shoot me in the face.
Tablets are going to expose all sorts of new ways of interacting with hypertext on the client side. Supporting html5 is nice for authors, but the real revolution comes when readers can compare multiple hypertext documents, naturally browse through interlinked documents, make annotations, etc. These things have been tried and failed on other form factors, but I think they might succeed on a device like this, Courier or the iPad where the new form-factor requires new interaction models anyway.<p>This device doesn't look perfect, but they're exploring the most interesting aspect of the tablet problem.
Reminds me of this competition for brand names worse than Knol:<p><a href="http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/08/50-for-worse-brand-name-than-knol-we-have-a-winner/" rel="nofollow">http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/08/50-for-worse-brand-n...</a>
Yes! I've been waiting for an ebook reader that I can use to take hand-written notes with.<p>I really can't concentrate on a book unless I have a pencil in hand, underlining, circling, and taking notes. Stylus instead of pencil, here.
Having just researched Personal Learning Environments (PLE's) [1] - this is a timely reminder of just how bad standard teaching portal type application are for the goal of teaching and learning. Hopefully this will spawn a few imitators which will drive the costs down so that it isn't just useful in the US.<p>[1]<a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.97.2772&rep=rep1&type=pdf" rel="nofollow">http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.97....</a>
Drop the hardware, write an iPad app. They do some very cool things with the software that neither the kindle nor Apples book reader app satisfies. But when it comes down to how to spend the money, $1000 on one Kno or two iPads, there isn't enough of a value add on for the Kno. In fact, the iPad has more features and a better form factor.<p>Kno is about a year late for their hardware, but their software could work as an iPad app.
So basically, it's a tablet, but it's as unpractical to use as a laptop. (If you can use it comfortably somewhere, you can probably use a laptop instead.)
It looks cool but it's massive and with two screens that size and the batteries that would be required to support them, I can imagine that it is <i>very</i> heavy.<p>Which is definitely one of the biggest problems with paper textbooks, something we should try and get away from with etextbooks.