//pburgess.net

I know we’ve had a few false alarms in the search for the ideal student client. I’m now of the opinion that having every student in the school with a notebook computer or even sub-notebook/netbook is not the way to go. We use books, we read, we annotate, we make notes. So go for an eBook reader that also doubles as a light weight computer for email, web browsing etc., e.g. iRex’s amazing iLiad is a strong but pricey candidate and running Linux the hacks for browsing the web etc. with the device are well know and proven.
However the French company AlwaysInnovating have recently announced a box that seems to have the potential to get it just right. It’s a netbook with huge battery life thanks to the ARM processor OR is it an eBook reader. Take your choice. It has a touch screen! You can pull the screen off and thanks to the magnetic back even stick it on your fridge. You don’t even have to buy the keyboard part.
The project is open source including the hardware so there is the potential for a really good user interface for education being developed.
Requirements as I would understand them would be…
Browser with gears for web apps like mail, document authoring and sharing.
Reader for pdf, doc and common file formats.
Ability to annotate documents with a stylus and save annotated document.

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