Improv Electronics has started selling the first of its Boogie Board writing tablets that lets you write notes with a stylus and save digital copies of those notes to built-in storage.
The company has been offering inexpensive digital writing slates since last year, with prices as low as $40. But the Boogie Board Rip is the first model with storage. It also costs a bit more, with a price tag of $129.99.
First introduced in September, Improv Electronics started selling the new device this week.
The Boogie Board Rip has a 9.5 inch scratch-resistant LCD, measures 11.1″ x 7″ x 0.5″ and weighs 11.5 ounces. The slate comes with a plastic stylus and includes 8MB of storage space for notes. That should be enough for about 200 images.
Improv Electronics estimates that you should get about 1 week of usage time under normal conditions, or 60 days of standby time. That’s because the tablet is only used for taking notes. You can’t surf the web, play games, or perform other tasks on it.
You just scribble on the screen to leave a message. And if you want to save a message, you click the save button to create a PDF file which you can transfer to a computer by connecting a USB cable.
The mythical $99 NoteSlate might never see the light of day. But it looks like the Boogi Board Rip might be the next best thing.
First, we call finger painting slates “tablets”, and then we call tablets “writing slates”. I guess this makes sense since we now call a return the very same client-server paradigm that so desperately failed consumers as to spawn the PC revolution the “post-PC” era. If we’re living through a revolution in technology, then it’s a revolution of ignorance in which we are eager to let marketing departments and their mouth-piece media work over our pathetic little brains.
The nicest feature of this product is that the user is not exposed to Android.