[nabs-l] netbook replacing notetakers

[T. Joseph Carter]

David, I think in this age of netbooks being so cheap, the days of 
the Windows CE based notetaker are numbered, even if the notetaker 
lives on.  I say that because the notetaker is a hideously expensive 
custom device from the ground up, and the netbook is a cheap 
commodity device with higher power.

The cost of adapting a netbook to Braille display and keyboard is 
cheaper than the cost of building a notetaker.  Plus, notetakers do 
not really "boot" so much as they "wake up" from a power-saving mode.  
When you have to reboot them, they do take about as long as starting 
Windows XP off a solid state disk--primarily because they're doing 
something very similar with a Windows CE platform on a slower system 
with fewer resources.

I fear though that the rise of the notetaker gave us easy access to 
Braille.  That's likely to go away if netbooks supplant them, even if 
the power/usage differences are resolved.

Joseph

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 04:00:01PM -0600, David Andrews wrote:
> While the consensus here seems to be that notetakers will do fine, I  
> think their days are numbered.  I Direct the Assistive Technology unit of 
> the state agency for the blind in Minnesota, and I know that we buy very 
> few note takers, as compared to a few years ago.  This doesn't mean they 
> are dead, but it is a huge factor.
>
> We do buy some, but we buy a lot of laptops, some sub-laptops, some  
> smart phones, some Net PC's.  There are now Bluetooth Braille displays 
> which you can use with desktops, laptops, phones, and net PC's and while 
> not as convenient, they are more flexible.
>
> Dave
>
> At 01:40 PM 1/26/2009, you wrote:
>> My opinion is that they will not. Like others have said, notetakers  
>> take less time to boot up than does a laptop, plus for those of us  
>> using braille it's a lot easier to pull one device out ofthe backpack 
>> to put on the desk. In addition to that, you can guarantee that you 
>> won't have to plug in any time during class, and that's often a bonus 
>> as plugs aren't always readily available. With that said, I can't use 
>> my pacc mate as my primary device, either. I'm still working with 4.1 
>> because all I use it for is a notetaker, andi find it slow online 
>> compared to my laptop and there are many other things like formatting 
>> which i have found much easier with a full laptop/desktop. But I never 
>> think, at least for class settings, that I would ever go back to a 
>> laptop without a braille display like i had in high school, I've gotten 
>> too used to working without speech in class, andseing things instantly. 
>> I think those are reasns enough, even though I am working with the QX 
>> version and could switch to a keyboard easily. That's because I can 
>> type much faster than i can braille, since I adopted the computer early 
>> on in my life.
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> David Andrews and white cane Harry.
>
>
>
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