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 >> > __________ > View the list's information and change your settings at > //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind > > __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind