6 ms·

10" GoNote - The Touchscreen Android 4 Notebook

25 points by yitchelle 14y ago

roymabookie 14y ago
How much?
- wrath 14y ago
  At the bottom of the webpage there's this link: http://liliputing.com/2012/08/gonote-android-4-0-netbook-heading-to-the-uk-for-235.html http://liliputing.com/2012/08/gonote-android-4-0-netbook-hea... which suggests it will seek for $235. If that's really the price I'd buy one today for my son.
  - ljf 14y ago
    Being released in the UK first at £150 (which is $240ish) - so they might be higher in the US at first with import costs. A great price though, and with HDMI would also double as a media centre for me.
    - unwind 14y ago
      If it's a UK company, I'm doubly amazed at all the editing misses on the main landing page. And I'm not a native speaker by far. To be constructive: -Inch symbol missing in first sentence - Weird switch from "to work hard" to "and then relaxing" - Repeat of "to use" in first smaller paragraph (by the Android icon) - "its" instead of "it's" under Power and Portability - Weird ellipsis in the Play Store, should be "blah ..."/"... blah", not "... blah"/"... blah" - Missing opening parenthesis in the Ethernet port caption
  - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    I just noticed that it's got a resistive screen. I have a Samsung NB30 netbook with a resistive touchscreen and I wouldn't recommend this if it uses the resistive technology. At the very least I'd wait for a thorough review.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
s_henry_paulson 14y ago
Interesting, but with all that marketing, they fail to mention any advantages of actually having a touchscreen.
- zalew 14y ago
  because there's no advantage of a vertical touchscreen. the lcd should rotate so you can hold it like a tablet.
  - ljf 14y ago
    There is no tilt sensor on this device, so i don't think it will.
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  They mention a few. The main strapline includes "playing amazing android apps on the GoNote's touchscreen".
- ljf 14y ago
  If you've not tried the Asus Transformer, then seek one out. With that you can use either the 'touchpad' as on a normal laptop, or the screen. To me, Android makes much more sense when touching the screen not a trackpad. Just because we are used to using laptops with trackpads, doesn't mean that's best way to interact, especially for children. It would be great if they did some research or show videos of children using the tocuhscreen to browse and surf.
marknutter 14y ago
"Within minutes of using it, GoNote turns years of web browsing on its head, and you intuitively touch, swipe and pinch the web rather than reaching for your mouse. GoNote’s resistive touchscreen recognises 2 finger inputs so you can pinch to zoom into webpages and get a close up with your digital photos." This strikes me as incredibly naive. Since when is "reaching for your mouse" a bad thing when using a laptop? If adding touch screens to laptops was all anybody needed to do to improve our computing experience Microsoft would have run away with the tablet market years ago. Pinching to zoom is a pattern that makes sense on tiny mobile devices, not large laptop screens. If I have to zoom in on a webpage to make it usable on my laptop, it's time to increase my font sizes. Zooming into a photo perhaps makes more sense but why not simply support the pinch gesture on the trackpad like Apple does on it's Macbooks? Instead I need to gorilla-arm it every time I want to zoom into a photo? Tacking multitouch screens onto traditional laptops does not a better computer make.
- ljf 14y ago
  On a 10" screen it might still do - it feels fine on the Asus Transformer.
- klez 14y ago
  My arms already hurt just seeing that thing. I don't get this 'stretch to reach the screen and swipe'. I agree with another user below that a gesture-enabled touchpad would be a better idea. That said, does anybody know of any usabiltiy study concerned with this kind of interface?
  - freehunter 14y ago
    I've used a Lenovo Ideapad 10" touch screen netbook. After using it, I keep trying to touch my Thinkpad's screen. Using the trackpad is awful in comparison to just touching exactly what you want to manipulate. On a small laptop, it doesn't seem too bad. It's not hard to move the entire laptop to a position that's comfortable to touch the screen, then resume typing. After switching back to the Thinkpad, using a mouse just seems like a layer of unnecessary abstraction. Just my experience.
  - 14y ago
ams6110 14y ago
At the bottom... No GPS No embedded 3G No G Sensor – eg tilt racing games will not work. No access to Buy or Stream Movies via Google Play Also does not look like the screen will fold all the way back to make the device useable in an exclusive tablet mode.
protonormal 14y ago
"We thought about this years ago we have done tons of user interface testing on this and it turns out it doesn't work" Steve Jobs - Back to the Mac 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=ULZmlH59yKpqY&v=ZmlH59yKpqY&feature=player_detailpage#t=691s http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=ULZmlH59yKpqY&v=ZmlH59...
austinlyons 14y ago
I like the idea of a tablet/laptop hybrid with a touch screen, but I would want the "convertible" form factor.
- ljf 14y ago
  Check out the Asus Transformer series, or the new range from Archos - a bit more than this though
ck2 14y ago
It's $235 which will make people pause. Another direction is the sub-$100 new generation of dual-core android desktops - just add any cheap 1920x1080 monitor/keyboard/mouse. http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/65596-this-dual-core-android-mini-pc-has-a-90-price-point http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/65596-this-dual-cor... Amazing what android has done for decent, cheap computers. I expect any HDTV over 32 inches in a couple years will have a full android computer built in for just a $40 premium.
- podperson 14y ago
  Remains to be see whether any of them are decent. Cheap certainly, but they could be just as cheap running some random Linux build. Don't most HDTVs these days have built in Linux-based computers? My new TV does (it shows ads on power-on, something not advertised on the box).
- Splines 14y ago
  I wonder if there is a market for android-ready shells. Screen, webcam, keyboard, touchpad, battery, storage, and a slot for any android-on-a-stick PC. I'd buy that, knowing that I could "upgrade" the stick when I needed to.
baggachipz 14y ago
Two things immediately strike me about this: 1: Resistive Touchscreen? Really? 2: If the touchscreen is so great, then why does the device also have a trackpad? I would think a touchscreen should alleviate the need for a trackpad, freeing up space for a better keyboard.
netcan 14y ago
This is just close enough to what I want to be frustrating. I want a Android/iOS-like notebook. Don't need touch. I need a browser, facebook, youtube, email, malware resistance & an app store with a handful of essential apps (eg google docs, games). A substantial percentage of laptop owners can't reliably get a word doc in an email, edit it & email it back. They used to be able when they used Firefox which launched doc files in openoffice which had an "email as an attachment button." Now they use chrome which launches Word where they can't find "email as an attachment" and it wouldn't help anyway because it would launch thunderbird which isn't configured to use their email address. I want a laptop for them.
- cjoh 14y ago
  Isn't this a chromebook?
  - netcan 14y ago
    I've never seen anyone in that category (bottom 30% on the "knows how to use a computer scale") using one.
cnlwsu 14y ago
I have a nexus 7 and love it. I absolutely love my netbook and this seems very similar. I dont care about GPS, G or cell connection so this seems really great for me. A lot cheaper then the Transformer too. I guess I am alone though as the rest of HN seems personally offended by it.
Kilimanjaro 14y ago
Yeah, yeah, cool and all, but... why so thick???
- ljf 14y ago
  9000mah battery? A base heavy enough to allow the device to not tip over when you touch the screen? To be able to offer it for £150?
underlines 14y ago
It's using the out-dated RockChip RK2918 SoC. This is a SoC from Shenzhen, China. RockChip mainly build their RKxxxx Boards for OEM tablets. AFAIK the RK2918 has a singlecore ARM Cortex A8 CPU with a max of 1.3GHz. The successor is the RK3066 SOC with awesome specs: ARM Cortex A8 1.6GHz Dual Core MALI-400 Quad Core GPU 1GB RAM HDMI@1080p out, USB-OTG support, 802.11n I have 2 unbranded tablets with the RK3066 SoC: The "McPad N90" and the "Window/Yuandao N101" Why they don't use the RK3066? This SoC is about 90$ for OEMs. More info at: http://armdevices.net/ http://armdevices.net/ which is an US correspondant for chinese ARM based SoC devices... You can even buy 1000 RK3066 powered 10" tablets with android 4 for 150$ / pcs. This GoNote is crazy compared to this price!

25 points by yitchelle 14y ago

roymabookie 14y ago

How much?

wrath 14y ago
At the bottom of the webpage there's this link: http://liliputing.com/2012/08/gonote-android-4-0-netbook-heading-to-the-uk-for-235.html http://liliputing.com/2012/08/gonote-android-4-0-netbook-hea... which suggests it will seek for $235. If that's really the price I'd buy one today for my son.
- ljf 14y ago
  Being released in the UK first at £150 (which is $240ish) - so they might be higher in the US at first with import costs. A great price though, and with HDMI would also double as a media centre for me.
  - unwind 14y ago
    If it's a UK company, I'm doubly amazed at all the editing misses on the main landing page. And I'm not a native speaker by far. To be constructive: -Inch symbol missing in first sentence - Weird switch from "to work hard" to "and then relaxing" - Repeat of "to use" in first smaller paragraph (by the Android icon) - "its" instead of "it's" under Power and Portability - Weird ellipsis in the Play Store, should be "blah ..."/"... blah", not "... blah"/"... blah" - Missing opening parenthesis in the Ethernet port caption
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  I just noticed that it's got a resistive screen. I have a Samsung NB30 netbook with a resistive touchscreen and I wouldn't recommend this if it uses the resistive technology. At the very least I'd wait for a thorough review.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

s_henry_paulson 14y ago

Interesting, but with all that marketing, they fail to mention any advantages of actually having a touchscreen.

zalew 14y ago
because there's no advantage of a vertical touchscreen. the lcd should rotate so you can hold it like a tablet.
- ljf 14y ago
  There is no tilt sensor on this device, so i don't think it will.
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
They mention a few. The main strapline includes "playing amazing android apps on the GoNote's touchscreen".
ljf 14y ago
If you've not tried the Asus Transformer, then seek one out. With that you can use either the 'touchpad' as on a normal laptop, or the screen. To me, Android makes much more sense when touching the screen not a trackpad. Just because we are used to using laptops with trackpads, doesn't mean that's best way to interact, especially for children. It would be great if they did some research or show videos of children using the tocuhscreen to browse and surf.

marknutter 14y ago

"Within minutes of using it, GoNote turns years of web browsing on its head, and you intuitively touch, swipe and pinch the web rather than reaching for your mouse. GoNote’s resistive touchscreen recognises 2 finger inputs so you can pinch to zoom into webpages and get a close up with your digital photos." This strikes me as incredibly naive. Since when is "reaching for your mouse" a bad thing when using a laptop? If adding touch screens to laptops was all anybody needed to do to improve our computing experience Microsoft would have run away with the tablet market years ago. Pinching to zoom is a pattern that makes sense on tiny mobile devices, not large laptop screens. If I have to zoom in on a webpage to make it usable on my laptop, it's time to increase my font sizes. Zooming into a photo perhaps makes more sense but why not simply support the pinch gesture on the trackpad like Apple does on it's Macbooks? Instead I need to gorilla-arm it every time I want to zoom into a photo? Tacking multitouch screens onto traditional laptops does not a better computer make.

ljf 14y ago
On a 10" screen it might still do - it feels fine on the Asus Transformer.
klez 14y ago
My arms already hurt just seeing that thing. I don't get this 'stretch to reach the screen and swipe'. I agree with another user below that a gesture-enabled touchpad would be a better idea. That said, does anybody know of any usabiltiy study concerned with this kind of interface?
- freehunter 14y ago
  I've used a Lenovo Ideapad 10" touch screen netbook. After using it, I keep trying to touch my Thinkpad's screen. Using the trackpad is awful in comparison to just touching exactly what you want to manipulate. On a small laptop, it doesn't seem too bad. It's not hard to move the entire laptop to a position that's comfortable to touch the screen, then resume typing. After switching back to the Thinkpad, using a mouse just seems like a layer of unnecessary abstraction. Just my experience.
- 14y ago

ams6110 14y ago

At the bottom... No GPS No embedded 3G No G Sensor – eg tilt racing games will not work. No access to Buy or Stream Movies via Google Play Also does not look like the screen will fold all the way back to make the device useable in an exclusive tablet mode.

protonormal 14y ago

"We thought about this years ago we have done tons of user interface testing on this and it turns out it doesn't work" Steve Jobs - Back to the Mac 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=ULZmlH59yKpqY&v=ZmlH59yKpqY&feature=player_detailpage#t=691s http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=ULZmlH59yKpqY&v=ZmlH59...

austinlyons 14y ago

I like the idea of a tablet/laptop hybrid with a touch screen, but I would want the "convertible" form factor.

ljf 14y ago
Check out the Asus Transformer series, or the new range from Archos - a bit more than this though

ck2 14y ago

It's $235 which will make people pause. Another direction is the sub-$100 new generation of dual-core android desktops - just add any cheap 1920x1080 monitor/keyboard/mouse. http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/65596-this-dual-core-android-mini-pc-has-a-90-price-point http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/65596-this-dual-cor... Amazing what android has done for decent, cheap computers. I expect any HDTV over 32 inches in a couple years will have a full android computer built in for just a $40 premium.

podperson 14y ago
Remains to be see whether any of them are decent. Cheap certainly, but they could be just as cheap running some random Linux build. Don't most HDTVs these days have built in Linux-based computers? My new TV does (it shows ads on power-on, something not advertised on the box).
Splines 14y ago
I wonder if there is a market for android-ready shells. Screen, webcam, keyboard, touchpad, battery, storage, and a slot for any android-on-a-stick PC. I'd buy that, knowing that I could "upgrade" the stick when I needed to.

baggachipz 14y ago

Two things immediately strike me about this: 1: Resistive Touchscreen? Really? 2: If the touchscreen is so great, then why does the device also have a trackpad? I would think a touchscreen should alleviate the need for a trackpad, freeing up space for a better keyboard.

netcan 14y ago

This is just close enough to what I want to be frustrating. I want a Android/iOS-like notebook. Don't need touch. I need a browser, facebook, youtube, email, malware resistance & an app store with a handful of essential apps (eg google docs, games). A substantial percentage of laptop owners can't reliably get a word doc in an email, edit it & email it back. They used to be able when they used Firefox which launched doc files in openoffice which had an "email as an attachment button." Now they use chrome which launches Word where they can't find "email as an attachment" and it wouldn't help anyway because it would launch thunderbird which isn't configured to use their email address. I want a laptop for them.

cjoh 14y ago
Isn't this a chromebook?
- netcan 14y ago
  I've never seen anyone in that category (bottom 30% on the "knows how to use a computer scale") using one.

cnlwsu 14y ago

I have a nexus 7 and love it. I absolutely love my netbook and this seems very similar. I dont care about GPS, G or cell connection so this seems really great for me. A lot cheaper then the Transformer too. I guess I am alone though as the rest of HN seems personally offended by it.

Kilimanjaro 14y ago

Yeah, yeah, cool and all, but... why so thick???

ljf 14y ago
9000mah battery? A base heavy enough to allow the device to not tip over when you touch the screen? To be able to offer it for £150?

underlines 14y ago

It's using the out-dated RockChip RK2918 SoC. This is a SoC from Shenzhen, China. RockChip mainly build their RKxxxx Boards for OEM tablets. AFAIK the RK2918 has a singlecore ARM Cortex A8 CPU with a max of 1.3GHz. The successor is the RK3066 SOC with awesome specs: ARM Cortex A8 1.6GHz Dual Core MALI-400 Quad Core GPU 1GB RAM HDMI@1080p out, USB-OTG support, 802.11n I have 2 unbranded tablets with the RK3066 SoC: The "McPad N90" and the "Window/Yuandao N101" Why they don't use the RK3066? This SoC is about 90$ for OEMs. More info at: http://armdevices.net/ http://armdevices.net/ which is an US correspondant for chinese ARM based SoC devices... You can even buy 1000 RK3066 powered 10" tablets with android 4 for 150$ / pcs. This GoNote is crazy compared to this price!