CDI Computers releases UNOBOOK, targeted at schools
Working IT in a school has shown me there are lots of challenges to deal with when it comes to choosing devices to deploy. Not only do you have to look at what you want to do with the device, you also have to look at who will be using them, restrictions that need to be put in place, what kind of network infrastructure you need, how you are going to keep them powered, how to keep them up to date, and lots of other things. As we are nearing the end of the school year, we have about 300 computers of various forms that we are looking at needing to replace. There has been lots of talk about using tablets in the future at the school. They already have 60 iPads, and are looking at the idea of replacing hard copies of books with Kindles. Every elementary classroom has a couple of desktop computer that we are looking at replacing. The idea came up to replace them with tablets, and so we started looking at our options. We got in contact with a company called CDI Computers to handle some things and in some of their material discovered they were making a tablet called the UNOBOOK.
At the time we got the material there wasn’t a whole lot of information available on the UNOBOOK. It wasn’t yet in production, and their own website didn’t even have any information on it. It was supposed to be an 8-inch tablet running Android 4.0.3 with a gig of RAM and an eight hour battery life. That’s about all the information I could find on it. Earlier this week I got a copy of their PDF marketing material for the UNOBOOK, and it answers a lot of the questions I had regarding the device. All the stuff I had heard before is true, and I found out a bunch more. It comes with an A9 1Ghz processor, rugged aluminum body, two cameras (front & rear), 16GB Flash storage, HDMI output, USB port (I assume full size since it doesn’t say mini), microphone, and a microSD card slot. When you order an UNOBOOK it will also come with a leather case and stylus. All in all it sounds like it could be a decent tablet, depending on the price.
There seems to be two views when it comes to schools and money. Some companies seem to think that schools have a ton of money they can spend on technology and so they mark their products way up. I found a company marketing a tablet for elementary kids for $1000. Upon further inspection I found it was just an Asus Transformer TF100 tablet with some custom software. You can buy that tablet for $300 so what makes this company think it is worth $1000? The other camp knows that schools don’t always have a ton of money to spend on new devices. This is where CDI comes in and they have priced the UNOBOOK at a respectable $297. That’s a great price considering that the tablet also comes with it’s own leather case and stylus, which depending on quality, could run anywhere from $30-50 on there own, making the tablet come in at around $250. That seems very reasonable for a tablet marketed at schools.
The UNOBOOK was supposed to be released for sale this last Monday, but other than the material I received through the school, there is no other information available online about it. CDI’s website doesn’t even have any information. The only reason for this that I can think of is that they wanted a very slow launch of the device since they have never done anything with tablets before and don’t want to get in over their head. Whatever the reason why there isn’t any information available, I do know that they sent out a simple one page flyer to some people on their mailing list about the availability of the tablet. Below you will find a link to download the full four page PDF i received, plus images of each page in case you don’t want to download the PDF. It will be interesting to see if this tablet takes off in the school market.
[CDI Computers]Hit the break to download the PDF or view the images.
