Meet Note Slate tablet – it does electronic ink tricks

E-readers settled into a pattern these days and they could really use a revamp. Not because they are not useful as they are, but because some extra features will never hurt. T

his is the case with Note Slate, a still-concept tablet with a 13 inch diagonal. Engadget notes that the tablet will come with “colored ink” (that’s said to be e-ink), but with only one color scheme per model. So you won’t get the chance to draw a rainbow from the start, but just draw green, blue or red things, but not together.

At least not on the standard models, which will come with a black background and a white foreground or the other way around. You can go for red, green or blue editions or an all star one, which will feature all of them. The tablet will come with three physical buttons (save current screen, show last screen and delete current screen) and the OS is said to be completely open source.

The stunning detail about the tablet is the battery life (around 180 hours!), but the shabby looking site says that browsing is not possible. The first version (black and white) of the tablet should be available in June for only $99 and will support note taking (both touch and pen), storing notes and MP3 playback, while in December we’ll have the color versions.

NoteSlate tablet

Next versions of the OS are said to support PDF and text viewing and OCR writing recognition. The tablet will come with an SD card slot, mini USB, 3.5 mm audiojack and will weigh around 280 grams. In a sweet, naïve way, developers admit on the website that their product is low tech and they want to offer an affordable work tool for those without hundreds of dollars to spend on Kindles. I couldn’t agree more with the idea of a basic, cheap gadget for writing and reading and I’m looking forward to the initial June release.