[corona]

I'm a student, and spend an awful lot of time around other students in classes. My take is that students want either netbooks, or big, ostentatious laptops. Although this Kno thingie looks useful in some ways, it's neither. I also think we are a very very long way from large-scale electronic textbooks. The university I attend prides itself on its electronic resources, but e-books of one sort or another aren't really on the radar. The library has electronic versions of books, but they're in these insanely kludgy proprietary formats -- ebrary reader, anyone? -- non-downloadable, with UIs well outside the library's or the user's control.

Another factor that I think will severely limit the uptake of this device is its form in relation to a (real!) desktop. How will you set it up to type on, especially on one of those tray-tables in a lecture hall? And many students -- or at least the ones who habitually bring laptops with them -- don't take notes -- or know how to -- on paper, so a stylus isn't going to work for them.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but another morphological limitation is that, unlike a laptop or netbook, the screen of the Kno isn't hidden from view (nor does it hide the user). Sad to say, at any given time in the classes I attend, a great many of the laptop-enabled students are doing Facebook, e-mail, etc. This is even in small upper-division seminar courses.