10" GoNote - The Touchscreen Android 4 Notebook | Hacker News Reader

10" GoNote - The Touchscreen Android 4 Notebook

ergoelectronics.com

25 pointsyitchelle37 comments

"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.

On a 10" screen it might still do - it feels fine on the Asus Transformer.

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?

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.

I have no data or studies, but two people at work have Asus transformers and they use the touch screen all the time even when in laptop mode, and they don't seem to have any problems or complaints.

I can confirm this. I have a Transformer Infinity with the keyboard and have almost no problem going back and forth between keyboard and screen. I usually have the tablet/laptop sitting on my desk at a comfortable distance, so that I can keep my right thumb on the screen for scrolling. I never pinch to zoom on my tablet/laptop. Its screen is plenty big.

So can I, if my transformer lost it's trackpad I don't think I'd notice, reaching for the screen is much more natural and it feels much more responsive than a trackpad mainly because you're not manipulating an arrow in to position before you do anything. I'm not sure I'm ready to ditch the mouse on my desktop yet but for most day to day tasks I find the touch screen to be king.

...and if I'm really feeling lazy I use the two finger gesture on the touchpad to scroll.

On my Asus Transformer I find that touching the screen as opposed to a touchpad is the best mechanism.

The direct interaction it allows is very useful, and I would be fine with just a USB socket for plugging in a mouse for when precision is needed.

You're putting way too much thought into what will be a drug store computer.

How successful is HP's Touchsmart brand?

How many people use touchscreen monitors for desktop computers, anyway? They make sense for tablets, but mice and trackpads are easier if your using a (physical) keyboard.

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-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.

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).

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.

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.

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/ 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!

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.

Isn't this a chromebook?

I've never seen anyone in that category (bottom 30% on the "knows how to use a computer scale") using one.

"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=ZmlH59...

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

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

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.

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

because there's no advantage of a vertical touchscreen. the lcd should rotate so you can hold it like a tablet.

There is no tilt sensor on this device, so i don't think it will.

They mention a few. The main strapline includes "playing amazing android apps on the GoNote's touchscreen".

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.

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.

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

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?

How much?

At the bottom of the webpage there's this link:

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.

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.

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

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.

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