{"id":4948,"date":"2010-11-10T07:35:25","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T15:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=4948"},"modified":"2010-11-09T18:11:28","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T02:11:28","slug":"is-kno-news-good-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=4948","title":{"rendered":"Kno news is good news"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kno has announced the <a title=\"Kno specs\" href=\"http:\/\/www.kno.com\/the-kno\/specs\" target=\"_blank\">specs<\/a>, price, and availability dates for its slate computers designed for the academic market. According to the <a title=\"Order Yours | The Kno\" href=\"http:\/\/www.kno.com\/the-kno\/get-yours\" target=\"_blank\">Kno web site<\/a>, the one- and two-screen devices will be available in the US on December 20th. The one screen device with 16GB ram will cost $599 for students, and the two screen device will cost $899. 32GB versions will be $699 and $999, respectively. These devices feature both a touch screen and a stylus, and come with some pre-loaded applications, including a textbook reader that handles annotations, a notebook, and a web browser. There are provisions for third-party developers to deploy other apps, which will be written in Javascript: &#8220;We\u2019re powered by the WebKit browser engine, so if you can build a website, you can build a Kno app.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting to consider how this device, designed for a specific vertical, stacks up against its obvious competitor, the iPad.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Drawing only on Kno&#8217;s description, here is my sense of the pros and cons compared with the iPad:<\/p>\n<h3>Advantages of Kno<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Good integration between reading and note-taking applications<\/li>\n<li>Notebook app designed specifically for active reading<\/li>\n<li>A stylus designed for writing<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Advantages of iPad<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Light-weight: 1.5 vs. 2.6 pounds for the single-screen Kno; dual-screen is 5.6 pounds.<\/li>\n<li>Longer battery life: 9-10 hours of use vs. about 6 hours for the Kno<\/li>\n<li>More applications<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Unknowns<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 13.2px;\">It&#8217;s unclear how the Kno application development framework will stack up against the iPad. JavaScript development makes it easy for Kno, but doesn&#8217;t necessarily make it easy to create appropriate interfaces. For example, will there be built-in support for inking? Will it be possible to share data among applications, so that, for example, one could write an app that used the presence of annotations in a textbook to launch searches using associated terms? Will it be possible to analyze or present data from the notebook in a novel way?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 13.2px;\">The iPad development model is well-understood, and some of these data integration ideas are precluded by design. On the other hand, it&#8217;s possible to build sophisticated, elegant interfaces for the iPad, that may be difficult to rival in JavaScript. The other advantage of the iPad is scale &#8212; the large deployed base creates obvious incentives for developers to produce affordable (if not free) software. The Kno market will likely be much smaller: it&#8217;s aimed at a vertical that doesn&#8217;t feature particularly rich consumers, and the total number of users is likely to be smaller for the foreseeable future.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kno has announced the specs, price, and availability dates for its slate computers designed for the academic market. According to the Kno web site, the one- and two-screen devices will be available in the US on December 20th. The one screen device with 16GB ram will cost $599 for students, and the two screen device [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[17,191,268],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4948"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4948"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4956,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4948\/revisions\/4956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}