The Kno c/o kno.com

Products with a specific targeted market can always spell success. Sometimes, capturing a niche in the market is always the best way to compete. If the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab target the general consumers; and the HP Slate 500 and RIM Blackberry Playbook target the business users; then the Kno , a new product entry in the tablet market, targets the students.The Kno is a 14" single- or dual- touch screen device designed specially for studying purposes. It allows you to browse, research, read, take notes and much more. It is designed and engineered with the students in mind.The tablet has multi-touch support and can support pen-stylus for input as well. Built-in apps include the Reader, Notebook and Browser. As a new product entry, the company is still building a community of developers but we can expect more apps to come.The Kno is, basically, a digital textbook. The Kno website sells and rents textbooks on-line. The Kno also supports PDF files, and depending on how the PDF was created, you can add and save annotations as desired.Technical specification shows that the Kno is an Ubuntu tablet device powered by an Nvidia® Tegra™ T200 series CPU, Dual-core ARM© Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ and 512MB on-board memory. There's built-in Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and accelerometer. It supports Adobe Flash™ and HD content. Battery life claims up to 6 hours of campus use.The single-screen Kno is available from $599 (16GB) to $699 (32GB). The dual-screen Kno is priced at $899 for the 16GB model and a hundred bucks more for the 32GB model. They come with a 1 year warranty and a 30-days no question asked return policy. The warranty can be bumped up to 2 or 3 years for an additional fee.The Kno is a promising product for students. Although it seems bulky at 14" diagonal, they could still save a lot of backpack space. The Kno also seem pricey for the target market, but claims that it can actually pay for itself if you consider the cost of books and notebooks per year.Initially making the Kno available only in the US, Kno, Inc. is open to international and institutional partnerships. Visit their website or blogsite for more information.