Noate is concept devices, made specifically to perform only one task, replace the long used copy & paper everywhere.
On first look, Noate will look much like a Tablet PC but it’s not. A Tablet PC can do various tasks, it can even play music & video however a Noate, can only take text input via a Stylus. It is is not supposed to play music or video, it’s not supposed to connect to the Internet, for that there are other devices & Noate is made not to compete with them, but to accompany them.
Noate is just half inch thick, & 10 X 8 inch long tablet, much like a paper or conventional notebook we have in school, or offices. It consists of a non reflective, scratch resistant, OLED screen, which acts as the display & the input area, on which the user writes with a light Pen, similar to the method of text input in Tablet PC or PDA for input, Noate, supports 16.7 millions colors so you can also read PDF with images. The key feature is simplicity, just a notebook, that’s all.
Noate has 1 GB of inbuilt flash memory on which everything is stored, additional memory can be added via USB pen drives, & Memory cards, it supports normal MMC cards. Connectivity is possible by a USB port, as well as Bluetooth 2.0
Noate is not supposed to be standalone; it assumes that you have a PC or Mac at your home, where you can copy all the data & process further. Suppose you are in a college & you took notes for whole day, when you reach home, simply copy the notes to your computer & do whatever you want to it.
By default, Noate disables handwriting recognition, because it makes the writing process slow, you simply write on it & it will save it as such as, without any processing, the handwriting recognition is performed later by the application bundled with Noate which is available for all major operating systems. By default, Noate saves the files in PDF Format, because that’s how you can save your scribbling easily, it can be converted to ODF format & if the MS office is installed it can even convert to MS Onenote format, with the help of the Noate application. You can also convert your MS office documents or images as PDF with the bundled Noate application installed in your PC.
The battery in Noate lasts for 20 hrs. It’s a simple battery used in mobile phones etc, & you can even replace with 3 AAA batteries, if required. Since the power usage of Noate is very low, the battery is quite small in size & dimension, adding to the overall weight of Noate which is only 150 grams, much of which is possible due to the OLED screen, instead or LCD panel. You can turn off Noate or put in sleep, by pressing the buttons on the side.
Noate has no operating system, instead it has a firmware, which is very simple, to make & manage. The CPU of Noate which also acts as the GPU, is custom made, which is sufficient to draw everything on the screen even when scrolling through the pages quickly.
The interface of Noate is also very simple, just a few icons on top, for New, Open etc, & two arrows at the bottom for forward & backward page. When you write on Noate & one page is filled you simply click on the forward arrow which switches to the next page & you can continue to write. No matter what you write, one page or multiple pages, it’s saved as PDF, you can either write your own name for the file, in which case the input text is on the fly converted to ASCII text, because scribbling cannot be used as file name, or you can set to automatically, name the file, according to the Time & date stamp. Remember, Noate assumes that you will further process the file on your computer
Since Noate is a simple device, it’s cheap to produce, which results in very low cost.
