Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book

  • From: Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 18:00:52 -0600

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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