NoteSlate stops daydreaming, might not show up at all

We were quite excited when, last winter, we first found out about NoteSlate, a note taking tablet with a 13 inch screen. Sure, it had only two colors and lacked most features even a budget tablet has, but the $99 price tag and the charming “low tech philosophy” behind it got to us. But the oh, cruel world of gadget manufacturing and marketing was too much to handle for the group of idealists behind this project- they recently announced on Twitter that they won’t be able to sell the slate for only 99 bucks after all.

The slate was scheduled for a 99 bucks June release, but of course, that didn’t happen. It’s clear that something bad happened along the way, as the slate never made it out of research and development; maybe component manufacturers raised prices or maybe working prototypes were not quite working. Fact is that the slate can’t be bought or even seen right now, as the official website was taken down.

Another Twitter announcement from the company says that the website will be operational again when the team behind will finish reassessing the situation, even from a legal point of view. There’s too much uncertainty around the NoteSlate right now, but the sure facts we can gather are not good: the device will cost more than $99 and it’s not sure when or if it will be released. And this is really a shame, considering how promising this device was when we first saw it.

The NoteSlate might never make it out of R&D

It had a 13 inch screen and only two tones, black and white, and a couple of color options, including blue and green, also on a black background. This under a pound slate was meant to take notes and wasn’t designed to have functions like video playback or surfing the web, although there was the option to browse certain networks that contained only NoteSlate users.

The first version of the NoteSlate was meant to take notes and listen to music, while later versions should have had support for a bunch of text formats, including PDF, and also OCR recognition. For now, if you’re after a very cheap and basic device for taking notes, you should set your sights on the BoogieBoard, which will get an hardware update pretty soon and come with built in storage. Of course, we’ll keep an eye for NoteSlate and see if they’ll truly come up with something in August.