The consumer market can be pretty lucrative. The enterprise market can be particularly lucrative too, but the educational market is one that is still largely untapped by the rising popularity of tablets. Well, Kno wants to change that and they’re doing it with some big bucks from Intel.

It sounds like Intel Capital, the investment arm of the chip company, is set to point $30 million towards the development of the Kno digital textbook. Yes, it’s very educationally based, so it’s not completely fair to call it “just” a tablet. This money will really help the relatively young startup, but just like Dragon’s Den (or Shark Tank), the investment also means that Kno taps into Intel’s network and expertise.

Use those hardware partners, speed up the development, and get the Kno into classrooms. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a few Intel doodahs end up in the final product too, just so one hand can pay the other.

It’s not like Intel and Kno are the only ones tapping into education either. Some school in Auburn, Maine has just decided to buy 285 iPad 2s for every kindergarten student and teacher. The idea is that the kids can learn better from them than they can from a traditional PC. The Kno might not be targeting quite that young, but it’s clear that the competition for school-focused tablets is heating up.

[Read]

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Student-aimed tablet startup Kno, who has already raised about $56 million to design and manufacture their textbook- and notebook-replacing clamshell tablets for college students, is reportedly in talks to sell off its entire hardware division to focus on software.

The company originally wanted to follow Apple’s lead by designing and manufacturing a seamless combination of both hardware and software under the same mark, a claim few other companies can make. But now, after selling only “several hundred” of their devices, Kno allegedly wants the freedom to design their university-focussed platform for the iPad, as well as upcoming Android devices.

Their dual 14″ touchscreen tablets, complete with fine-tipped styli, eight-hour batteries and Nvidia Tegra T200 CPU and dual-core ARM Cortex A9 MPCore processors are specifically designed for the cause and undoubtedly played a large part in garnering the vast amount of both investment money and partnerships with various colleges and universities country-wide. But sources close to the situation say a focus on the OS as a platform and its content delivery for those using the wide variety of other tablets would be a better use of the money they’ve raised, allowing students to use the next-gen textbook on their own devices.

But the Kno’s screens are sized the way they are to fit an entire textbook page on each screen without scrolling or scaling, and that’s been a very strong selling point for the company so far. Trying to fit the pages on an iPad screen would be a struggle in itself as that’s only about half the size of one screen on the Kno. And that’s not even bringing into account the multitude of 7″ tablets expected over the next several months.

Whether the deal goes through or not, it does definitely show that Kno is more about redefining the student arsenal than anything else, making digital notebooks and textbooks the new norm and in the process, dropping the weight of backpacks from the usual 20 lb average.

There’s no word on which two companies are in talks with Kno, though it is known that they’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement with one of them.

[All Things D via Kno]

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Most of these are going to fly under the radar, coming from companies like Augen, Enspert, and Rullingnet, but a good number come from more notable names. The marketplace is about to really get flooded with so many iPad alternatives that you won’t know what hit you.

It’s not like they’re all going after the same kind of size as the Apple variant either, as sizes ranged from a pocket-friendly four inches to a notebook-worthy dual 14-incher. Granted, the four-inch Panasonic VIERA tablet was just a prototype, but it’s probably more suited as a smartphone-like device than anything else.

A quick rundown of some highlights include the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Samsung Galaxy Tab 4G, Sharp Galapagos, BlackBerry PlayBook, Dell Streak 7, Kno dual-screen, and the $800 Motorola XOOM. If nothing else, this proves we’ll have no shortage of choices if we want to veer away from Cupertino.

This list is only partially complete (76 tablets), right now it’s work in progress and we can expect it to keep growing to Shawn Dubravac.

Here’s a few notable tablets we reported on during CES;

• Motorola Xoom Android 3.0 tablet is best at CES 2011
• MSI unveils pair of Android and Windows “WindPad” tablets
• Sprint to get 4G BlackBerry Playbook “this summer”
• Motion stakes out rugged tablet market space at CES2011
• ASUS unveils new Eee family of tablets at CES
• MicroVision packs a laser projector inside Android Mini-Tablet
• iPad 2 mock-up pops up at CES
• Lenovo IdeaPad U1 marries Android with Windows in 10-inch hybrid slate

The post Over 100 tablets unveiled at CES 2011 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news for all the tablet fans in the audience. The good news is that a bunch of new images have been released for the hotly anticipated Kno tablet. The bad news is that they’re pushing the shipment date until around the middle of next month.

Yes, even though they started taking pre-orders in early November, the physical Kno tablet textbook device still isn’t ready for public consumption. Here we were thinking that both the single and dual-screen Kno tablets would be ready for the spring semester in colleges across the country. Not so.

That’s a real missed opportunity for the folks at Kno, because they already missed the bigger launch window for a textbook-oriented tablet back in the fall. “Mike Annab” commented on the Kno Facebook page that he was supposed to have his Kno delivered yesterday, but he wont’ be getting it until January 12 “due to inventory.” Presumably that means lack of inventory.

It’s unclear whether Annab is the only one getting the run-around, but “Fabian van Burk” is saying that his order shows an estimated ship date of December 20, 2010 (yesterday) with no mention of a delayed shipment. The official folks at Kno say that “some pre-orders have already shipped,” but it looks like many other folks are going Kno-less for the holidays.

[Kno on FaceBook]

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If you’ve ever been to college, then you’ll know that textbooks are expensive. Very expensive. And kind of wasteful with all the trees they have to cut to print all those pages. The Kno tablet textbook is supposed to change all of that.

In a sense, you could say that the Kno is like a Kindle or an iPad in that it can be used for reading e-books, but this device was designed from the ground up as a “digital textbook,” as well as a means of “creating a powerfully effective learning environment.”

The single-screen Kno is being pegged at $599. If you want to go with the dual-screen Kno, then you’ll need to pony up $899. Both feature displays measuring 14.1-inches.

They say that, thanks to the “lower cost of digital textbooks,” the Kno effectively pays for itself in three semesters. The hurdle, of course, is convincing the textbook publishers to adopt this format.

Kno is taking a “limited number of pre-orders” now, with the first shipments expected by the end of the year.

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That dual 14.1-inch Kno tablet unveiled earlier this month has just been slimmed down to a single screen model. The reasoning? It will be “absolutely cheaper than the dual screen version,” according to CEO of Kno, Osman Rashid who spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference earlier today.

Kno still has plans to release the sub-$1000 dual screen version, so today’s announcement is an addition to the Kno family, not a revision. Kno has McGraw Hill, Pearson and Wiley on board for textbook publishing and plans to take the electronic textbook market by storm. The device is designed to make textbook pages fit perfectly while seamlessly flipping from page to page. With their custom software to “normalize” books into PDF format, Kno should have a large database of ebooks to offer very quickly.

The company plans to have their own bookstore similar to Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle. But the Kno is not just a reading device, with a touchscreen display students can take notes and annotate in the margins at an incredible speed thanks to the Nvidia Tegra processor. Availability has yet to be announced.

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Among the $55 million raised, a solid $46 million is put forth by Andreessen Horowitz, championed by Marc Andreessen. Marc is so enthusiastic about Kno that he’s calling it the “most powerful tablet anyone has ever seen.” Kno CEO Osman Rashid isn’t forthcoming about the price, but he says this puppy will be less than four figures; $999?

The Kno device will be the first dual-screen tablet computer and they’re saying that it will be a “total product,” encompasing software, hardware, and services. That sounds a lot like the Apple approach, but it seems the Kno is being targeted at the college crowd. Students can download and read textbooks directly, as well as take notes and draw on pages.

Rashid is also saying that Kno-provided textbooks, which look awfully like what the Microsoft Courier concept was trying to pull off. Regardless, it will be cheaper than the dead tree editions, which usually average about $100 each. That all sounds good, but one of the many challenges will be getting the textbook publishers to jump on board. I’m sure the Kindle, Kobo, iBooks, and other folks are itching for that kind of a deal too.

Kno Movie from Kno, Inc. on Vimeo.

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