William Beard – The Corsair
Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I wish I could be more organized, carry less books, spend less money on books and supplies, and look futuristic all at the same time.”? Okay, maybe you don’t say “Man” or have a desire to look futuristic, but either way all four of those are now possible. Chegg’s founding CEO has started a new business aimed at the academic world with one idea in mind: Making the college student’s life easier. Chegg has already saved me tons of money and made getting and returning books easy. You may ask yourself, how can it possibly get an easier? With The Kno.
What is it?
I stumbled upon this double-paned eReader the other day and was blown away by how intuitive it is. This isn’t your typical Nook, Kindle, or iPad. This is a Linux-powered tablet, created specifically for students like you and I. One problem I’ve always had with the idea of replacing my regular hardbacks is that most tablets were made with a single screen. It didn’t feel natural. None of them were made with the specific tasks of a student in mind. Kno’s engineers knew this and turned these challenges into a genius solution. The Kno boasts the ability to write notes on top of your book’s pages or outside in a separate app, with either a stylus pen or keyboard. It organizes your books and related documents and notes by semester and class, mimicking the functionality of a notebook and binder. If you lost your Kno or don’t have access to it, its sync feature puts all of your notes, books, and class docs in the cloud, so you can access all of those resources at any time. On top of all of this, it has built in WiFi and contains a web browser so you can jump online and do your research right on the same screen as all of your other relevant information.
What’s Inside?
If you’re like me, you want to know what’s under the hood too. First, let’s look at what’s on the hood itself. The Kno sports a 14.1” LCD backlit, anti-glare screen, complete with high resolution. Behind the screen is its 1GHz Nvidia Tegra processor and 512 MB of onboard RAM. These are bound to rip through some pretty intense graphics. The 16 or 32GB of storage will allow for more notes than your hand wants to write, or books your eyes can read. If that’s not enough it also has input for a microphone, headphone jack, and features bluetooth. At a whopping 5.6 lbs, you’re carrying around 4 books, a number of pens, notebooks, and still weigh less than the average laptop.
The Future of The Kno
I know what you’re thinking: Amazing. It gets better. Just like the Android and iPhone/Pad/Pod, they’re going to allow every day people to create apps for the Kno. With the growing popularity of mobile apps, and the increasing number of students involved in writing apps, you can be sure that we’re going to have some great solutions built for the Kno for students, by students. I’m forecasting that the Kno is bound to become the next addition to the student’s technology ensemble, so put on your creative hats, PSC. Let’s see what you can come up with to solve every day problems you have with books, notes, etc. Who knows, you could be the next Zuckerberg.
If you want to “kno” more about the product and its pricing, visit them on the web.
If you have any questions or want to toss some ideas around with me for this device, shoot me an email at wmb1071@students.pensacolastate.edu