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Kno tablets begin shipping today

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The single screen and dual screen Kno tablets are primarily intended for students at universities

Kno, the Silicon Valley startup primarily founded to provide e-learning solutions, has started shipping its 14-inch tablets starting today. Pre-ordering for the tablets, in variants of single screen and dual screen 14-inchers, had begun in early November and the maker had promised an end-2010 rollout for them.

The Kno tablets are focused on providing easy reading to university/college students by providing them with digital editions of their textbooks. Kno had earlier announced that students would be able to purchase the digital textbooks from the Kno Book Store, and also that the digital books will cost between 30 and 50% less than printed books. These tablets are also good enough to serve the purposes of taking notes, surfing the web, and performing other basic tasks.

Talking of the hardware, the tablets get 1440x900 WXGA pixel, 14.1-inch screens (two each for the dual-screen model) and are powered by the Nvidia Tegra T200 series CPU. Under the hood, you also get 512MB of memory and 16GB/32GB of flash-based storage. The tablets also get 802.11 b/g  WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, a micro USB port, accelerometer, ambient light sensor and a 50.6-watt-hour rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, which is good enough for 6 hours of runtime.

Although, both versions of the tablet seem to be a bit on the heavier side, with weights of 2.6 lbs and 5.6 lbs for the single and dual screen ones, respectively. The tablets run on Ubuntu 9.10 and support Adobe Flash. To get a single screen Kno tablet you will need to shell out $599 and a dual screen one will cost you $899, both with 16GB of storage. Add a $100 more if you want 32GB of storage. A tad expensive for a student-centric tablet intended for reading e-books? We think so too.

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Pallab Jyotee Hazarika, 2010-12-21 (Update: 2012-05-26)