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Computer Times
Editors' Choice Digital Notepad Boogie Board Review by Angie Kibiloski
The Boogie Board (Retail $39.95 for black, $41.95 for colors), from Improv Electronics, is a very cool device that will replace your need for paper notepads, sketch pads, sticky notes, and dry erase boards. It is a great way to make taking notes a lot greener. Basically, the Boogie Board is a digital notepad, with a pressure sensitive LCD writing surface, and an easy erase button. Write or draw on the tablet with the included telescoping stylus, pressing lightly for a thin line, harder for a wider line. By varying the pressure, you can create detailed sketches just like if you were using paper and pen. The tablet will retain the note, list, or picture that you’ve created until you press the erase button, clearing the entire page. The built-in 3V battery never needs to be changed, and will last for at least 50,000 erasures! That’s a whole lot of saved paper! The LCD screen is also reflective, so the brighter the ambient light, the more contrast you will have between the background and the writing marks. The Boogie Board can be used for so many different tasks that anyone in the family would benefit from owning one. Kids can use it for school, to practice their ABCs, work out homework math problems, or to play tic-tac-toe during recess. Moms can use it to make shopping lists, to-do lists, or compose masterpiece recipes. Office workers can take down memos, phone messages, or even compose rough drafts of a meeting presentation. Art students could make a sketch before committing their work to a canvas. Architects could propose a change to a blueprint on the go. The applications for the Boogie Board are endless. Anytime you would reach for a sheet of paper, you could reach for this little gadget instead. Even on days when you don’t have a particular use for the Boogie Board, its still loads of fun to play with, kind of like those old Magna-Doodles or Etch-A-Sketches we all had as kids. You can doodle away for hours and never have wasted a single sheet of paper.
Not only is it green and very useful, its stylish and attractive too. The large LCD screen, which is roughly the size of a half sheet of notepaper, is held inside an ultra slim, 1/8 of an inch thick, durable plastic tablet. The whole thing weighs only 4.2 ounces! The sleek stainless steel stylus can be telescoped out to fit varying hand sizes comfortably. Originally released in a matte black finish, the Boogie Board is now available in other cool colors. You can get one in pink, cyan, green, red, yellow, and white. If you are planning to order at least 100 tablets for your company or organization, you can get the Boogie Board customized with your own unique colors and logo. Accessorize with a neoprene Sleeve (Retail $9.95) to prevent scratching and unwanted screen marks while on the go. The device slides snuggly into the sleeve with a slim separate pocket for the stylus. You can also get a clip on Stylus Holder and Magnet Kit (Retail $2.97). The stylus holder slides across the top of the tablet, and can double as an erase button protector, to prevent unintentional erasures. The 4 magnets are easy to apply, and will allow you to mount the Boogie Board on the fridge or any other metal surface for convenient display. You don’t have to always use the stylus to make marks on the LCD. You can experiment with different hard implements, like the plastic cap of a pen, your fingernail, a sturdy paint brush, or even a cookie cutter to make a shape. The original black Boogie Board was cool, the new color choices made it awesome, and coming in the second half of 2011, the newest version of the Boogie Board will be even better still! The screen size will be increased by 40%-50%, and there will be an added save feature. This will allow you to save your notes and drawings to either the internal memory or possibly an SD card, and then transfer them to your computer via USB connection or the SD card. This device has so many great uses, and will save you from wasting so much paper. At such an affordable price, each member of your family can have a Boogie Board, one for home and one for the office, and maybe even one color for each day of the week. You can find the original black Boogie Board at your local Brookstone retail store, or you can order the pretty colored options online at multiple sites, including www.amazon.com and at the official product site, www.myboogieboard.com.
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