RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

  • From: "Sina Bahram" <sbahram@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 01:42:53 -0500

There's a market alright. Fed by world governments, insane trade agreements, 
blood sucking AT companies, and the documentedly most
uneducated consumer base ever to exist in the history of consumer bases.

I so should not get involved in this thread.

Signing off.

Take care,
Sina


-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dale Leavens
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 8:10 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book

But so far we don't have the price for the braille display.

What I quoted was the current hardware as shown on the LevelStar Site.

Unless they have some new refreshable braille technology the Orion will be a 
lot more than two grand and you can have braille on any number of devices 
these days.

I agree. A netbook and at least you have a fully compatible word processor, 
one used by the rest of the world assuming one shares documents with the 
rest of the world.

for a hundred bucks you can buy a 32 GB card for your Stream. Modern SSD 
drives are used these days maybe the Orion will upgrade to a solid state 
drive. Even that on the Icon wouldn't justify $1,300.

I will say that I approve the use of braille but for the speed of speech it 
will have to get a bunch cheaper before I'll be buying int.

I guess there is a market but I don't see it.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alex Midence" <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:00 PM
Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book


> Well, if it does braille output, it's got my vote sight unseen.  At
> the price it's selling for, it looks like you can have a little
> braille display for under 2k.  That's really cool.  I still can't
> afford it, mind, but it's really cool.  I wonder if you can use it as
> an external speech synth and/or braille display for a screen reader on
> a laptop or desktop.  That would be really nifty.  The note taker
> stuff isn't really that exciting to me.  I can grab a $150 netbook off
> of craigslist and load up soemthing like Vinux on there and I have a
> powerful note taker right there and then.  You don't even need all the
> stuff Vinux comes with pre-installed really.  All you really need is
> Pico, abook, tudu, mplayer and Lynx running on something with speakup
> installed and you got a decent note taker.  Couple of megs more gets
> you emacspeak and you have something that is just as powerful as any
> word processor out there, imho.  Add a menu feature of some kind which
> launches what you want at the press of a key and you don't even need
> to have the command line come up to bring up your stuff.  That braille
> display and that speech synth though are very attention grabbing for
> me.  Don't get me wrong, I am not knocking all the nice apps featured
> on there.  I just can't see myself going into debt for them when I can
> get a comparable set of them for ffree on a much much cheaper machine.
>
> For daisy, I have a victor reader which also stores songs.  I don't
> need 40 gigs of songs.  IN fact, I have a 2 gig mini flash card for my
> music and an 8 gb one for my audio books.  Podcasts, I get through my
> android phone and stitcher but a braille display, that for under 2
> grand is not to be sneezed at.
>
> Alex M
>
> On 3/9/11, Dale Leavens <dleavens@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Well, I don't get it.
>>
>> The LevelStar Site doesn't give much information on the Icon, look like 
>> you
>> don't get any input other than audio without the docking station which 
>> means
>> $1,300 for the Icon and $600 for the keyboard, $1,900 altogether. For 
>> that
>> you get 8 more gigs of hard drive than you get on an iPhone.
>>
>> I presume you can do input in some way outside of the docking station but
>> they don't tell you anything about that.
>>
>> Having braille output albeit only 18 cells will add to the capability of
>> course but it seems redundant to me to have yet another isolated note 
>> taker.
>>
>> The iPhone and come to that the iPod touch already does all that stuff 
>> and
>> more for less.
>>
>>
>>   ----- Original Message -----
>>   From: Littlefield, Tyler
>>   To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>   Cc: Ken Perry
>>   Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 5:36 PM
>>   Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book
>>
>>
>>   I seen that! And even with no price tag, it's already making my wallet
>> clench up in fear.
>>   On 3/9/2011 1:39 PM, Ken Perry wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     I can now show you what I am helping to work on.  Here is the
>> announcement that was put out today.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> //www.freelists.org/post/accesscomp/Fw-icondiscuss-A-Glimpse-Of-The-LevelStar-Orion-SmartBooks-At-CSUN-2011
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ty
>>
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