The Digital Reader

I have the new Boogie Board RIP on my desk at the moment, and I have to say that it was a lot more interesting than I expected.

Early last year Improv Electronics shipped their first product, the Boogie Board. This was an 8.5″ digital writing tablet based around a new type of cholesteric LCD screen.

This isn’t your average tablet.  It might have a new hi-tech screen, but Improv built a product that behaved as not much more than a sophisticated etch-a-sketch. You might also think of it as a digital whiteboard, because like a whiteboard the Boogie Board couldn’t show anything other than what you drew on it and it also couldn’t save your scribbles after the screen was wiped.

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I’ve long been a fan of Asus and their new designs, so I’ve been waiting to see what reviewers thought of the eeePad Slider. It’s generally so-so.

Asus first started teasing this tablet  hybrid around the time of CES 2011, but the device only hit store shelves in September. I’d planned to get one but I never got around to it. Other, cheaper gadgets caught my attention, and I passed on this one.

But now that I’ve read a few reviews, I thought it would be interesting to compare the Slider to the Transformer. Much to my surprise, I think the Transformer comes out ahead.

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When HP launched their webOS tablet earlier this year they had planned to release the 10″ TouchPad and follow it some time this fall with thew TouchPad Go, a 7″ model. The Go was never released, but over the past couple months a number of pictures have been leaked.

There were even a couple Ebay auctions (here, here) for the Go in the beginning of December. One was bid up to 1,500 before HP killed the auction.

But now one of these scarce tablets has shown up in the hands of webOSNation, a gadget blog. They liked it. According to their review the interface works well on that screen size and it had decent hardware.

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 I’m in the planning stages for CES, and Ive really been wanting to upgrade my camera. So today I ran a field test of the refurbed Galaxy tab that i posted about a few weeks ago. Woot was selling it for $199, and that turned out to be a spectacular price.

I had heard that the Tab had a good camera, and that some people had even used it for blogging. But I wanted to see if I could use it as a blogging tool.

I’ve just got back from spending the afternoon at BB and a local bookstore, and I have to say that I am pleased with the outcome.

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Yesterday afternoon I picked up a cute little handheld at Walmart, and tomorrow it is going back.

The eMatic Twig first caught my eye a couple months back. I’d been wanting to find a cheap small Android tablet to carry around as a pocket media device. So long as it could play music and read an ebook format, I would have been happy.

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The Reader2 tablet is the second of  recent tablets launched by eMatic, a small gadget company. It looks to have been originally designed by another company (Rockchips would be my guess), with eMatic importing it into the US.

This is a cheap 7″ Android tablet, and it’s running v2.1 Froyo on a 1GHz CPU. As you can see it has a basic tablet shape with slots and ports on the lower edge, a speaker on the back, power button in the bottom left corner and the 4 buttons to the right of the screen.

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Last week I posted about a super cheap 7″ ebook reader, the Slick ER-701. That post drew a fair amount of comment from owners, and they pretty much agreed that it was a great device for the under $50 market.

Mine arrived today, and I second that opinion.

I wasn’t too sure about this e-reader. It looked awfully clunky in the photos, but in person it is actually quite nice. As you can see, it has all the buttons along one long edge, which at first seems like a bad idea. But it works.

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