As I prepare for yet another semester of school, I’ve decided it’s time I finally find a method to electronically record my notes. At this point I’m putting a call out there for some help / suggestions on what would do the trick.
As a student there are a few main requirements I have for this project:
1. Cost ($500 would be ideal – $1K is getting out of control)
2. Functionality (must be able to draw notes in to it at a relatively high speed and resolution)
3. Reliability
4. Portability
As it stands there’s one device that meets 3 of these requirements really well, as far as I can tell. That would be the iRex iLiad (see image below).
iRex iLiad
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Pros: Very thin
Uses e-paper display
Supports a ton of peripherals (USB, SD/MMC, Wifi)
Relatively large screen
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Cons: Quite expensive (~$700USD)
First generation technology
Very slow startup / page turning times
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So at present the iLiad is the best device I can think of for this job, but I don’t like the price tag and the fact that it’s a first generation machine. I seem to recall HP releasing a tablet PC for about $1K somewhat recently – so paying 70% of that for the iLiad kind of seems totally foolish to me, though a tablet pc will clearly be a lot heavier and thicker, as a student I don’t care, but I also don’t need a second laptop.
So the search goes on…
I’ve seen a youtube video that made reference to a new ebook reader from iRiver which looks pretty snazzy to me. In the video they said it had a touch screen interface, so that suggests it could be capable of recording annotations. See image below:
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The challenge with this iRiver device is that it seems that iRiver still hasn’t decided if they’re going to actually put them in to production. Further it seems that the screens are relatively small and given I’m left-handed.
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So that means that I’d only be able to annotate on the left screen as my wrist would ream pretty hard on the left screen if I were writing on the right screen.
So, community, please tell me, do any of you know of some other devices which will suit my needs? I wouldn’t mind the tablet PC option that lets me use MS OneNote – I think that’s an outstanding application, though I’ve yet to try Dia, which I hear is fantastic too.