14 DAY TRIAL // Students everywhere can now rejoice since the Kno, a innovative tablet aimed at the academic market that comes in either single screen or dual-screen configurations, has now been finally priced and it comes bellow that $1000 price tag that was announced a while back.
Available at $599 and $899 respectively, these tablets are now available for pre-order (the numbers are limited though), the company expecting to ship these by the end of the year.
For those of you that haven't been keeping up to date, the Kno features one or two 14.1" (1440 × 900) anti-glare touchscreens with stylus support and runs on an Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC with 16GB of storage, with an estimated battery life of between six and eight hours.
Software wise, its operating system is based on Linux, comes with advanced note taking capabilities and packs e-mail support, a e-Book reading application, calculator, collaborative whiteboards, a calendar as well as a WebKit based browser that features HTML5 and Adobe Flash 10.1 support.
Digital textbooks will be available for purchase through the Kno bookstore, which will be accessible on every Kno device, this including tens of thousands of the most popular textbooks and supplement materials.
The company is also working with a large number of textbook publishers including Cengage, McGraw Hill, Macmillan, Bedford, Freeman & Worth and Holtzbrinck as well as BarCharts Publishing, Kaplan, Random House and various University Presses, to increase the number of titles available, so things look very promising in this regard.
“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.
“Even better, when you do the math, it actually pays for itself and still saves $1,300 in digital textbook costs.”
According to the company, the Kno has been already beta-tested by students and the response has been “overwhelmingly positive for both the single and dual screen devices,” so things seem to be shaping up really good for this Silicon Valley start-up.