Eking S700 Lays Claim To Title "First E-Notepad"

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You’ve got to hand it to Eking, if for nothing else than sheer chutzpah. Eking is a little Chinese company who’s usually making gadgets for other companies to sell under their brand name, but has recently decided to strike out on its own by offering what it calls the first ever e-notepad. And when you use words like “first” or “last”, or pretty much anything with an “-est” involved, you know you’re going to get some attention. And that’s just what Eking did with the S700, what they call the first ever “e-notepad”.

Basically, the Eking S700 is what amounts to a small tablet PC mounted in what looks like one of those day planner leather notebook / cases. It boasts a seven inch color screen, which is something of a rarity in this kind of device, as well as handwriting recognition capability, input with both resistive touch and electromagnetic induction, perform a variety of web and online applications (web surfing, email, and playing games, among others) with 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, an eBook reader, and a three megapixel camera that can take pictures of business cards and save the data on the card to the contacts database.

This basically makes it a fully-featured business device in an extremely compact frame–about the only thing I can’t find offhand is a USB port or the like to let it hook up to your base computer elsewhere–and will likely be a boon to anyone who needs to do traveling for the sake of business. Speaking as someone who used to handle business accounts for a guy who did a lot of trade show business, this kind of thing would have been invaluable to have.

Pricing and availability data is still sketchy at best, but word says a tipster found one of these for sale on a Chinese website for 4000 yuan, which is roughly $600 US. I personally look forward to these making a wider release.