The NoteSlate is a very odd appearance on the tablet and e-book market. While most manufacturers offer devices with high performance graphics and able to cope with work and entertainment, the NoteSlate bluntly confesses that it can’t do too much for you. You can use it as an e-book reader, note taker, music player and… that’s about it. No word on video performance, but I suspect there’s none. So then, what makes this device worth mentioning?
Well, it’s a tablet with a mission. That of offering people the chance of enjoying a digital device, draw, write for a fraction of the price you would pay for a tablet. And when I say a fraction, it’s completely true, as the NoteSlate will cost around $100, which is way cheaper than most slates out there. The tablet has a 13 inch, 760 x 1080 resolution resistive screen and is just 9 mm thick. Under the screen, there are three navigational buttons- save, show, delete. On top, you have a audio/mic jack, SD slot, USB port and a share button.
NoteSlate supports red, green and blue, but just one at a time
The NoteSlate is powered by a 233 MHZ ARM processor and uses a completely open source operating system. So, what can you do with this low tech tablet? Read books, for starters. The basic model uses black ink on a white background and the display is e-ink. The e-book experience will not be available from the start, as it will come with second generation NoteSlates, but it’s a main feature and probably developers are taking their time to perfect this as good as possible, considering the cheap hardware they have to work with.
Then, it’s the note taking function, which is possible with a stylus which transforms your handwriting into data stored on the device. Basically, you can write and draw with a variety of widths for the pen and you can erase it with the eraser on the other end of the pen. The tablet comes with some templates, like boxes and pie charts, which could prove very useful, especially for those using this at school. Every page you open and modify is a brand new document that you can save or delete. Moving through documents is possible by some directional buttons, namely next and previous page.
The e-book reader has a 13 inch screen
A cool touch is that you can design your own icons and environment. For example, you can draw a little face for your contacts, place the contacts like thumbnails (handwritten) and so much more- I guess you’re much more creative than I am, so you’ll figure it out. The WiFi module allows you to share your screens and notes with other NoteSlate users, via a community portal or private channels. Later versions will support OCR recognition, so you can save your texts written by hand as a .txt file, for example, and after that convert it into pdf or whatever.
Doodling around with the pen seems pretty fun
As I said earlier, the simplest version has a white background you can write on in black. Alternatively, you can go for green, red, blue and white on a black background, but remember- you can have only one color at once. The manufacturers intend to offer a luxury edition, so to say, which allows to have all the colors available, but we have no idea when this will appear.
These are the standard models, but you can also configure your NoteSlate- just choose a color for writing with a black background and they’ll set it up for you. The battery of the device is said to go for 180 hours on a single charge, but that sounds kind of preposterous and I doubt it’s true. But anyway, the battery shouldn’t be a problem, as the technology used requires less power to work and the absence of graphic intensive applications could guarantee an out of the ordinary battery life.
The pen comes also with a razor at the other end
The first version is said to appear in June for $99 and will work only as a note taker. Later on, we’ll have the colored versions, with support for PDF and OCR. I think we should give something like this a try, maybe even only to see how we can manage without internet and HD able tablets, some sort of digital back to the roots thing. Might be a good summer distraction.
But whether the NoteSlate will manage to become more than an interesting concept as it is today or not, that’s yet to be seen. We sure hope so though!
