Kno Educational Tablet Shipping delay

February 4, 2011 By Michael Kozlowski 4 Comments

kno tablet

The Kno tablet currently has two iterations, none of which are are in hands of their student ambassadors or the people who pre-ordered them. Emails sent to the sales department normally go answered and it looks like the company is in trouble of folding before it even got off the ground.

Firstly the trouble woes had begun at CES with Kno with the company attended without a booth and was meeting with press at random locations via text messages and normally failed to meet them. This was normally due to the fact that the the traffic at the convention made it impossible to effectively meet without rooms or a booth.

The delay with shipping out customers pre-orders was not mentioned on the Kno website and most users did not receive emails either telling them it was delayed. The only comment Kno had regarding this matter was when we pressed them. “Things at Kno are going well. However, as you noted below, there has been a shipment delay. As soon as Kno has new information, we will share that with customers and can certainly give you a heads up if that is helpful.”

Michael Kozlowski

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

JM

Why do they have to be folding because they haven’t met expectations at CES ro someonelses timeline? Chicken Little, the sky is falling. Let’s wait and see what they do (or don’t do).
Good E-Reader

Not only that, but they have failed to release their product 2 times, without even informing the people that have ordered them. Interested in ordering one yourself? Try sending them an email, we have daily complaints that NO ONE has ever wrote them back.
Pat_c_ink

I wrote them and they responded. I call them to check on updates weekly and they answer too. They’re a good company, they just want to make sure everything is working before they send it out. As a student I am going to use the hell out of this tablet. Something similar to the Kno that will let me take notes in math and engineering classes run around $3000, and thats without the benefit of a duel screen. It’s not an entertainment hub its a learning tool and its a damn good idea.
tlt.1

I think that Kno had one good idea: make a large tablet with one or optionally two 1440 x 900 screens with good inking capability. Unfortunately, the rest of the execution is flawed. Basically, you have a tablet that has only random cloud storage, a usb that only operates in client mode, no local storage of any kind for backup, and no ability to run spreadsheet, database or word apps. That means that the target user – a student – really has to have two computers. So the cost benefit eludes me. It’s not clear why a Lenovo X201 tablet at 3.5 lbs running OneNote would not be a better choice than the kno at 5.6 lbs. Moreover, Kno’s business model seems to be based on the idea of downloading e-texts at cheaper prices than their pulp equivalents. Unfortunately, kno’s business model is further crushed by the fact that it does not take much effort to find almost any text at prices that are less than kno’s online quotes. In fact, if you include the international editions, which exist for many popular engineering science and math texts, the prices can be as less than 1/4 the cost of the U.S. text (for identical content). For example, Holman’s 10th edition of Heat Transfer is sold at kno (http://www.kno.com/store/search?search=heat+transfer) for $144 (discounted from $200), but you can buy it easily from Abebooks for $31.00!! Add to that the security issues of having all your notes and texts in one location with no local back up capability makes the kno business model a real head scratcher. How do you suck so much venture capitol out of folks for such a thin idea? If all you want to do is take notes on a capacitive screen with a good wacom digitizer than there’s the Asus EP121, the EA800, and a bunch of tablets which range in cost from about $275 for the former to about $1200 for the 121 and for some tablets.