GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

The much anticipated Kno, an oversized reader/tablet targeted at students and teachers, is taking preorders to ship just before Christmas. Prices run between $599 for a 16 GB single-screen tablet and $999 for a 32 GB dual-screen folio. That’s with an educational discount.

Sound expensive? The 14″ Kno has the same relationship to the 6″ Kindle that college textbooks have to trade paperbacks. Textbooks are big, heavy, they cost a lot of money, they’ve got expensive illustrations, and the publishers are all different.

Kno doesn’t compare itself to other e-readers, or even other tablets. It compares itself to new textbooks. Considering the thousands of dollars students spend on books, the company says — and the tens of thousands they and their parents spend on college — $599 for our entry-level unit is a bargain.

Kno’s extraordinary benefits represent only a tiny fraction of the overall cost of college, but its impact on the student’s career – and the energy it adds to the experience, the thrill of learning, and the ultimate grade – is dramatic,” said Osman Rashid, Co-Founder and CEO of Kno, Inc. “Even better, when you do the math, it actually pays for itself and still saves $1,300 in digital textbook costs.”

That figure is misleading, since it assumes a student purchases all their books new and doesn’t sell them used. What’s more, Rashid, founder of textbook-borrowing site Chegg, knows it.

The Kno is an extremely capable device and deserves to be sold on its own merits. It’s got either one or two 1440×900 LCD touchscreens that support both fingertip navigation and stylus notetaking. It supports either a virtual or a bluetooth keyboard, and it’s backed up by an impressive library of electronic textbooks.

It doesn’t have third-party apps, which will make parents happy: it’s built to read, write, and browse the web. But it can play the major audio and video formats, including Flash. It’s got an NVidia Tegra 2 graphics chip with an A9 dual-core 1GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. Despite this giant display of video power, it still claims up to 6 hours of battery life on “normal campus use” (whatever that means).

The Kno is heavy (2.6 lbs for the single-screen, 5.6 lbs for the dual-screen) by e-reader and tablet standards. But again, that’s not necessarily the relevant comparison. Compared to a bag full of first-year biology and calculus textbooks, 5.6 lbs is light as a feather.

A lot of companies have tried to make e-reading in this space work. It’s more complicated than direct-to-consumer trade publication, because there are just so many stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, authors, publishers, retailers. The timing is tough because the economy’s forcing many people to curtail their academic spending, not ramp it up on new gadgets — which is one reason the company is pushing the money-saving angle. But Kno’s hardware looks good, the pricing is high but reasonably competitive, the company’s strategy is sound, and its people understand those complexities as well as anyone.

I think we can expect a gradual rollout of the product this semester for holiday-season early adopters, and if it’s successful, a big push for back-to-school next fall. we’ll just have to see whether it clicks.

Kno Announces Pricing and Pre-Order Availability for Tablet Textbook; Pays for Itself in 3 Semesters [Press Release]

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Tablet startup Kno has created a single screen slate specifically for students in the hopes of making electronic textbooks a widespread reality on college campuses.

The tablet will have a 14.1-inch screen, making it the biggest slate available in the market. It will have a touchscreen and a stylus to take notes on the device.

In June, Kno showed off a dual-screen device that would have two 14-inch LCD touchscreens that fold in like a book. The idea behind the device was to make textbook pages fit perfectly across the screen and flow from one digital page to another.

The company plans to ship both the single and dual-screen tablet by the end of the year. However, it hasn’t announced pricing for either of the products. The dual-screen version was expected to cost “under a $1000.”

“Our new tablet will be absolutely cheaper than the dual screen version,” Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno said at the TechCrunch Disrupt event where the device was introduced.

Detailed specs for the single screen tablet are not yet available. But it is expected to be powered by a Nvidia Tegra processor. The tablet will also have a stylus for handwriting recognition, a full browser and support Flash.

Apples iPad has led to renewed interest in tablets. Companies such as Dell and Samsung have released tablets in the last few months. But most of those devices are targeted at general consumers. Kno bills itself as the first tablet created exclusively for students.

But Kno’s competition is likely to come from iPad apps. For instance, a startup calledInkling has created a rich, beautifully designed iPad app that delivers textbooks to students. Inkling is working with publishers to offer coursework and texbooks in areas such as biology, management and engineering. Users can pay for just a chapter of a book or buy an entire textbook through the app.

The Kno tablet, says Rashid, will help students do more. The device lets users draw, take notes, create stickies on it, highlight text and collaborate with other students.

Kno, which was started in September last year and now has more than 90 employees, says it has written its own software that will “normalize” books in the PDF format. It will also add interactive elements to the books and allow students to make notes and annotate the margins of an electronic textbooks.

Similar to Amazons Kindle, Kno hopes to have its own bookstore.

The company has inked deals with four major textbook publishers, including McGraw Hill, Pearson and Wiley.

Check out more photos of the Kno:

Kno tablet has a touchscreen and a stylus

Students can take notes and highlight text on the tablet.

Photos: Kno

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Kno Movie from Kno, Inc. on Vimeo.

Big players have tried and failed to bring out a “textbook replacement” e-reader. Kno won’t be shipping their entry until Christmas at the earliest, but it’s a serious candidate that’s worth a second look.

Kno’s form factor is essentially two slightly-oversized iPads on a giant 180-degree hinge. It has two 11″ stylus-compatible touchscreens, which you can keep separate for a textbook or multi-screen layout, unify for a single widescreen display, or fold back for a single tablet.

(I’m guessing you could also lay one side flat and use it with a software keyboard like a notebook, but I haven’t seen that configuration advertised — maybe you can’t make a hinge fluid AND stiff enough to pull that off.)

Under the hood is a 16GB hard drive and an NVidia Tegra 2 processor. You could compare it to Microsoft’s scrapped Courier project or a larger take on the Toshiba Libretto. The Libretto, though, is a warning sign; Kno wants to keep their price under $1000 (preferably under $900) but Toshiba’s smaller entry is stuck starting at $1100.

That said, it just might work. Kno’s CEO Osman Rashid has raised a lot of venture capital money, brokered deals with most of the major textbook publishers, and already has one education-market success with textbook-rental service Chegg. He’s been making the rounds, giving interviews talking up the product. Your college student just might discover a Kno in his or her stocking, just in time for Spring semester.

Story via Fast Company and TechCrunch.

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E-books may be taking off for Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, but there’s one category of printed matter where digital hasn’t made a dent: Textbooks.

It’s not for lack of trying. Most textbooks are massive tomes that weigh several pounds, are printed on hundreds of pages of glossy paper, can cost upwards of $100, and are often out of date as soon as they’re printed. You’d think someone would have figured out how to make e-textbooks work — and plenty of companies have tried.

Yet print still rules, with over 99% of the textbook market. But with the rise of tablets and e-readers, software developers and textbook publishers are making yet another effort to take textbooks digital.

Matt McInnis is one of the new hopefuls. For eight years, he ran Apple’s education division. But last year, when the iPad was still just a rumor, McInnis started thinking about starting a digital textbooks venture. He left Apple to follow his dream, and the result is Inkling, which launched two months ago.

Inkling is an iPad app that turns textbooks into bite-sized, illustrated, interactive pieces of media. With Inkling, William Strunk’s Elements of Style is reinvented with humorous hints and cheeky cartoons, while a biology textbook has beautiful diagrams and color photos.

“With the iPad, there’s an obvious opportunity in education,” says McInnis.

Inkling allows readers to jump into any chapter. Users don’t have to buy the entire textbook: They can just buy a few chapters and later get the entire textbook.

Inkling is just one of the companies looking for a way to make digital textbooks work. Earlier this year, textbook publishers such as McGraw Hill and Kaplan struck a partnership with software company ScrollMotion to bring textbooks to the iPad.

Digital textbooks have been struggling to take off for nearly a decade. Publishers were slow to adapt print editions to PCs and professors don’t usually recommend digital textbooks to their students. And for all their texting and video games, some say, students are not as comfortable with the technology as you might think.

“There is the issue of trust,” says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, which looks at use of IT in education. “Even though we think of this generation of students as being wired, they have dealt with print all their life for core education. They know how to master that but they are less certain of electronic material.”

Last year, digital textbooks generated an estimated $40 million in sales, according to Xplana, an educational software and consulting company. This year, it is expected to grow to $80 million — but that’s still just 1 percent of the total higher education textbook market. By 2015, Xplana estimates digital textbooks will be 20% of the total market.

But a lot has to change in the next four years before that prediction can become reality.

Why haven’t digital textbooks taken off?

Despite their promise, digital textbooks haven’t taken off for two big reasons: ease of use and price.

Publishers have long been offering some textbooks for PCs but these digital editions have never entirely replaced their paper cousins.

Digital textbooks haven’t become really popular because they aren’t easy to use on computers, says McInnis.

Story continues …

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