Okay, so whiteboards aren't exactly sexy and conjure up 3rd form French more than that must-have gadget wow factor but Samsung's 650TS Interactive Whiteboard really roused gadget lust in me.
So it's a giant 65inch LCD touch screen pinned to the wall. Choose a line colour and thickness and write on the board with your finger (yes, that is as much fun as it sounds). Select background images, edit text, call up pdfs, power point presentations or control it from a connected PC.
BTW: This chap photographed above spent 10 minutes drawing what looked like blood-soaked explosions on a nice picture of an island. Well, that's tech journalists for you..
In theory the eBooks connect to the Whiteboard too, via a delightfully named connection "Emolink". Imagine a futuristic classroom where a teacher has one of these whiteboards and all pupils are equipped with eBooks: the teacher could call up any given pupil's eBook and display it to class on the board.
But it took two members of Samsung's top brass 10 minutes to get the connection working so while in theory this would be great, I don't imagine it working flawlessly in a classroom situation. You've doomed a PC connection by calling it EmoLink
With high brightness and high definition the 650TS is certainly easy to see but costing around $10,000 it's not something you'd buy for the heck of it. Should be very useful for training or teaching contexts though.
Related: Samsung's ebooks: paper-like and pleasurable to use
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