Ok, I’m not a huge fan of the Kindle or the iPad in terms of their use in Higher Ed.  My money has been on some type of enhanced netbook, which I figured would appear this year.

Something like the enTourage eDGe is pretty close to the mark.  You can have book on one screen and make notes on the other.  It has WiFi to access the net, and can record audio and video.

entourage ereader

It doesn’t look like you can have a different book on each screen, and you’d have to get used to a virtual keyboard.  In addition, it only has 3GB of memory, but with an SD memory slot and 2 USB ports you can probably work around it.

And the price – $US 500 – same as an iPad and a Kindle DX!

Is this going to be cheap enough to compete with new crop of ASUS and Lenovo netbook tablets?
Will the other impending dual screen systems be better/cheaper?

This is the best Higher Ed student device I have seen so far (not perfect but getting there).  I’d still recommend you wait for a while.  Even if this is your ‘perfect’ system , remember the cardinal rule, NEVER BUY VERSION ONE.

Will student’s buy them?  Maybe, but not yet.  It won’t make sense until enough lecturers set mandatory texts that are available in cheap/free digital format.