Cook with the QOOQ tablet PC

It has specifically been designed to be your cooking guide

QooQ tablet PC can be your personal chef

These days, a lot of nettops and netbooks are being marketed. Technology is growing so fast that everyday new laptops are emerging. Some are really powerful and are ready to take on any challenge thrown at them.

But some are specifically made underpowered so that they are within reach of the common man or the requirements for which they are made don’t need powerful hardware as such.

Talking about these underpowered ones, these aren’t just for email and web browsing: they’re now being purposed to replace the brown-edged recipe card catalog and that old, musty copy of The Joy of Cooking.

This so called ‘underpowered device’ has a name that some of you might have a hard time pronouncing, but just say the word “cook” and you got it. I’m not certain what the heck QOOQ stands for, though.

In the past, cooking tablets and recipe readers have been pretty limited (and not very good) -- but this one looks extremely promising and actually designed to withstand the rigors of being used in a kitchen.

It comes with 10 recipes from chefs on video, can connect to the internet, and the user can even subscribe to monthly updates for lots more recipes.

It has a 10.2 inch touchscreen and an onscreen keyboard. For extra protection that is really required for it being used in kitchen, it has a glass screen which protects the device from the splatter of grease and the accidental drop in the sink.

Specwise, it has a glass touchscreen, 8GB onboard memory, ethernet, and USB ports, an SD slot, WiFi, and a built-in stand. It has a built-in lithium polymer battery so there are no cables. It doesn’t have an internet browser, but can be used to update your recipes, get weather information, as a digital photo frame and even listen to internet radio stations.

At the moment the QOOQ comes with support for French language only, so unless vous parlez Francais, or you want to learn it while you learn to cook it’s probably not much good to you. But hey, I’m sure they’ll internationalize it, right?

A QOOQ will cost you €349 ($516) for the unit with 500 recipes installed and then €12.95 ($19)/month for the updates if you want them. It’s certainly a lovely little device… but it’s pricy for something with such limited functionality.