RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

  • From: Joseph Lee <joseph.lee22590@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:02:52 -0800

Hi,
Yes - Orion is powered by Android.
Cheers,
Joseph

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Perry" <whistler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date sent: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 21:00:05 -0500
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book


ON the Icon the only two methods without doc is abc mode and a mode called Thumb Braille that uses the key pad. It's a APH patented method. Now if you want the Icon with 6 key entry then what you want is the Braille + it's the same hardware as the Icon but add a control, a shift, a space bar and the 6
braile keys to type if you turn it sideways.

As for the Smart Book it is much much much more than just a book.

ken

-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dale Leavens
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 8:45 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book

I take your point Ken and I was premature in my conclusions. I went to the LevelStar Site and all they show there is the Icon. On further research I gather that the Orion is intended to be more of a book reading solution, I couldn't find out anything about the platform they/you are basing it on.

Just for my own satisfaction though, the Icon, is there some other form of input besides the docking station or is the dock necessary for text use?

LevelStar does not really provide much information on their Site about their

equipment, not nearly enough to help one decide how useful it might be.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Perry" <whistler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 8:25 PM
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book


I understand your argument and know it has merit. I also know there is a market for these devices. The one thing that all the cool touch screens
do
not have is a quick and easy input method. I personally use both an
IPhone
and a G2 right now. The main thing I hate about both is having to write documents and take notes. You can record with them fine but if you're trying to use it as a document or even a good messaging system the input
is
terrible. This new device improves on the input by 100 % and the output
I
will leave that up to the people as they try it. I can tell you this
though
Ivona speech engines are the stuff dreams are made of.


Look we can all argue that one thing is better than the other. We can all say it's too expensive even though I am working on the project and don't know the cost yet. One thing we all have to agree on is that the more
accessible devices the better.

Ken

-----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-Lev
elStar-Orion-SmartBooks-At-CSUN-2011






--

Thanks,
Ty

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