A lot of us have said this from day 1 - it's only worth it if you want the handwriting features. But, students really *should* want the handwriting functions, IMHO.

This thread reminded me of an article I read on Science Daily not too long ago: "College Undergrads Study Ineffectively on Computers, Study Finds: Students Transfer Bad Study Habits from Paper to Screen"

Excerpt:
Highlighting has not been shown to be an effective study technique, so there are advantages to having real annotation options for students. Handwriting has advantages (taking extra notes in the margin, recopying notes), and that's something that right now only the edge and the iRex Illiad (and to a lesser extend, the iPad - people are McGuyvering a stylus and reporting varying degrees of success, and I'm still not sure whether they can write directly on pdfs) seem to offer at this price point, unless you're willing to buy a 4 or 5 year old tablet PC and upgrade RAM/OS and/or HD.

As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, maybe the edge is overkill simply as an electronic (spiral-bound) notebook. Maybe combined with the Android tablet features it's worth it for some people. Having tutored students for almost 2 decades, and spending a couple of years tutoring on a tablet PC as an experiment, I would say there's a real advantage in having your notes in electronic, editable, shareable (though we didn't use a searchable solution) form. Yes, it's maybe a high price to pay to keep notes from getting lost, available in the cloud, organizable either in folders or with tags. But it makes even more sense when you combine with either e-textbooks or self-created pdfs. Given that highlighting really is a pretty weak form of studying, and making your own notes is better, I could envision a situation where a student reads even a physical textbook and takes notes either on the edge or by typing into a document that's converted to pdf. Then, these notes or this pdf is annotated during a lecture, where a student can compare what they thought was important about the reading ahead of time to what the prof discussed in class. None of this requires an edge, but it does turn the organization/storage from a physical problem to a computer task, and some will find advantages in that.

Comparing the edge to a netbook as a student machine, I haven't yet seen any research done on whether taking notes by hand or typing notes is significantly different in terms of brain engagement, memory/recall or academic achievement. Part of me thinks that the more involved physical motion of forming the letters would use different parts of the brain than remembering a letter's position on a keyboard, but I don't know the consequences of the differences. Certainly the netbook makes typing essays easier (or an external keyboard for the edge), but if you have to take notes that involve diagrams, graphics, or math solutions, the netbook isn't a useful note taking device. So, if a student really does want all their notes in electronic form, the edge makes much more sense.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've seen advantages to using electronic, handwritten note taking and organization even before it was common to have e-textbooks, so for me, whether or not the textbook is e-available isn't a make or break factor in how useful the device is. If anything, now that the possibility of getting the texts in e-format is much more likely, it just seems to make the concept even more appealing to a certain kind of student.