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Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

Actually, this just gave me a crazy idea... what if laptop manufacturers included something low powered like a boogie board device on the outside of the screen, which could write / save directly to some small internal storage of the laptop, and then the resulting notes could be accessible via the laptop when turned on? Kind of like.. a poor man's tablet on the outside of a laptop? I wonder the cost of that vs. touch screens / digital pens.

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But, in that case, how would it be different from just drawing on my Surface with my surface pen?

It's kinda exactly what you need.

Latency and n-way multitouch.

I feel like buying a Surface just to have drawing capabilities is expensive -- why not just make a screen ascessory that lays onto of your keyboard (or not) and plugs in via USB-C?

Rather than a screen accessory plugging into a laptop, this is what I got a Samsung Galaxy Tab A With S-Pen for. Retails for about $250 USD, it's an Android tablet that also comes with an integrated active pen, like the Note series of phones. You can share your drawings / writing with your laptop using Dropbox etc, at a fraction of the price of the Pencil-compatible iPads.

[I think you've been downvoted unfairly - although I think the Surface drawing capabilities are excellent & superior, they might be overkill for some use cases.]

One upside of the Boogie Board approach is trivial battery usage.

I've found they're extremely fragile though. I can't imagine it would hold up in a backpack, without a hard cover.

It's also instant access. It's just there, always running, always immediately ready.

What the Boogie Board does, it does really well but I really missed being able to page back and forth and an easy OCR workflow when I still had one.

getting a thinkpad X230T or a thinkpad helix (with wacom pen) from Ebay is much cheaper ;)

About $1000 dollars last time I checked. Add to that the cost of mental health issues associated with the use of Microsoft products and its a non-starter.

What experience do you have with using Microsoft products and resultant mental health issues? I'm guessing none, and it's just another throw-away remark that is anti-Microsoft, ignorant of the interesting and - in my experience at least - pro-good-mental health work they've been doing recently.

I used to dislike Microsoft till recently. After using OneNote (on Wine) and their keyboard (Natural 4000) I am now a fan.

I switched from Windows to Linux in 2001, from Linux to Mac in 2004, and from Mac to Windows in 2016.

The Surface is a great machine and Windows 10 is a good OS.

I've seen some prototype laptops with a bistable e-ink touchscreen on the back, that could retain its image with the laptop turned off.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2604775/intel-pastes-se...

I know it's low-tech, but I just keep a pad of sticky notes in my laptop bag. If I write a note, I can stick it to the screen when I close the laptop, and it's there to remind me when I get back to the office.

And my cousin is a sales rep for a drug company, so I have a whole crate of logo-ed sticky notes.

And to erase it you could... shake your laptop?

I don't really see a problem with that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only moving parts in higher end laptops are fans. Nothing will break, so why not?

I mean, it's annoying to do I guess, and requires hardware to detect shaking, but it's not terrible.

The Boogie Board is erased by pressing a button.

And have a mode that lets you tilt the laptop to draw!

Some previous attempts at this kind of second-screen/low-power interface that never really caught on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow

http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/intel-second-screen

Do you know you could have a X230t for 160$ on ebay ?

http://www.ebay.com/bhp/lenovo-x230t

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x230t...

The price seems steep but I like the idea of merging these 2 technologies: http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/12/2/13818796/re...

Here http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/01/28/lenovo-yoga-book-2-in...

You want the IBM TransNote.

http://transnote.info/

You seem to be referring to something like the yota phone. https://yotaphone.com/

I do wish there's an android phone with just e-ink screen. Don't care about latency as long as the battery life is great.

Or you could have a touchscreen and launch an application to do the all the things you want. Plus other things!

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