Mother of pearl, that’s a giant tablet. The student-centric “Kno” is made of two 14-inch 1440×900-resolution capacitive IPS touchscreens and weighs 5.5 pounds. It’s meant to replace a college student’s textbooks, though, which collectively weigh at least 5.5 pounds and can’t connect to the internet.
The company is apparently “working with publishers whose textbooks represent 90% of higher educational content” such as “the top four higher education publishers including Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson and Wiley,” according to Kno’s press release.
Where traditional electronic book readers and tablet fall short, Kno displays full textbook pages, pictures, and charts “exactly as their authors intended, only better.” Navigation is handled with an included stylus or by finger and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform powers everything, with the promise of HD video and full Flash support. There’s 16GB of built-in storage “and the entire experience is essentially a WebKit instance,” according to Engadget.
The Kno will have its own app store and the company is developing “an in-classroom beta program that will launch fall 2010 at major universities and colleges across the country.” It’ll apparently be priced at “under $1000” which may very well mean $999, so hopefully the digital versions of the textbooks cost far less than the paper versions.
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