Amidst Apple iPad announcements, Asus took charge to unveil its own line of Windows 8 computers, featuring the dualscreen Taichi ultrabook. The 11 incher boasts screens on both the inside and outside of the cover, allowing you to use your laptop in a more social setting.
Asus founder Jonney Shih took to the stage this afternoon in New York City to unveil a slew of Windows 8 computers, including a dockable tablet (Asus Vivo Tab RT), a lightweight notebook (Asus VivoBook), and an all-in-one PC. But the star of the show was clear the Asus Taichi dualscreen convertible ultrabook/tablet that can display two screens simultaneously, making even the laptop a social gadget.
The 2.75-pound Asus Taichi features an 11.6-inch screen that’s equipped with Intel Core i5, 128GB of solid state drive, Intel graphics, 10-finger touch capacitive display, and a resolution of 1920 x 1080. It’s also got a 5-megapixel front-facing camera capable of capturing 1080p HD video while the inside cam records in 720p. Did we mention an integrated Bang & Olufsen ICEpower speaker? Battery life takes a backseat for powering two screens, however, coming in at just five hours per charge.
While most Windows 8 laptops have a button on the keyboard that takes you to the Windows Metro UI, once you close the laptop, the outer screen will automatically switch on to whatever you were working on from the inside screen. You have the option of turning this off, of course, as well as the ability to lock auto-screen rotation. At the top corner of the display, you can also jump into the Asus’s own UI which will let you select screen sharing options. Here, you can choose Display Modes, such as turning on just the outer or inner screen, or a Mirror Mode that turns both screens on at the same time with the same content. The fourth option lets you display two different screens between the outer and inner screens, making it easy to share the laptop between two people or play games with one laptop.
It’s unlike many laptops we’ve seen, and certainly have its unique perks. Those who are afraid of getting scratches on their laptop might want to think twice about being extra cautious around using the Asus Taichi. The hybrid laptop slash tablet ships in November, and starts at $1,300 while the maxed out version with Intel Core i7, a stylus, and 256GB of SSD bumps up to $1,600.
Launched in 2008, Evernote started as a “productivity tool.” But it has since grown into something much more — a virtual extension of your brain. For those of you not yet in the know, Evernote allows you to store nearly anything you want to remember — photos, receipts, Web pages, recipes, voice recordings, you-name-it — and access those “memories” through a mobile app or on the Web. You can also share “notebooks” with whomever you like. It’s quite handy, especially if you live a busy, active life, with plenty of stuff you want to remember.
But using a service that literally mimics your memory means putting a lot of trust in Evernote not to misuse or abuse the vast amounts of inherently personal data users upload to its servers. And to do that properly, you’re going to need to understand Evernote’s sweeping terms of service and privacy policy. Let’s boil things down to the most important bits.
While helpful, these points don’t quite tell the whole story. Here’s the rest of what you should know about Evernote’s ToS.
Intruder alert!
Evernote kicks off its ToS with a “Use of Service” section, a dense paragraph that basically says that if you discover any “unauthorized use” of your account, you have to tell Evernote about it. And if you don’t, the company is not responsible if someone steals or deletes your data.
Legal shmeagle
One curious portion of the “Use” section is that you must be “of legal age to form a binding contract” to use Evernote, which in the U.S. means you technically have to be 18-years-old to sign up. Google also has this provision in its terms, meaning anyone under 18 can’t use any Google products. In reality, of course, no company pays much attention to this rule. And Evernote later explains that you can use the service if you’re over 13-years-old. So don’t fret, teens. You may be breaking the law by using Evernote, but nobody cares.
Own it
Evernote has the fantastic policy that you own the rights to everything you upload to its service, and the company promises not to use your stuff to make money. Further, if you decided to ditch Evernote, you can take all of your data with you.
That said, you are on your own if you upload (and share) copyrighted content and get served with a lawsuit — Evernote will not help you in any way.
Contact at your own risk
If you contact Evernote with some ingenious way to improve the product, Evernote may (or may not) use the information you provide however it sees fit, be it for marketing material, or to tell the world about what dumb ideas you have. (Kidding!) It also automatically owns that idea. So if you come up with something brilliant, don’t just email it to the company willy nilly.
Avoid the following
Evernote lists a bunch of stuff you can’t do, but nothing that surprising. All of it simmers down to these forbidden activities. Don’t use Evernote to:
Make money
Scam people
Spam people
Abuse, stalk, or harass people
Share copyrighted content that you don’t own
Spread viruses
Do anything else that’s illegal
Spread naked pictures or porn (even homemade stuff) publicly, though you can upload whatever you want to your private notebooks
If you find anyone doing any of these activities listed above, you can rat them out to Evernote.
Nuts & bolts
Most of the second half of Evernote’s ToS include a bunch of basic explanations of things that don’t really need explaining. So let’s just sum up the potentially important bits:
Evernote uses some other third-party institutions to do business (like server providers, banks, etc), and your account information may be passed on for general business purposes.
Evernote may serve you ads sometimes. If you click them, any data you provide is between you and the advertiser.
Evernote might send you marketing material or other emails from time to time. If you want to opt-out of marketing emails, visit Evernote.com and click: Settings > Personal Settings > Contact Preferences, uncheck all the boxes, and click “Save Changes.”
Privacy and security are of the utmost importance to Evernote, as is evidenced by their privacy policy and other corporate explanations of their practices. As such, there’s not much here you need to worry about, so I’ll keep this short and sweet.
Collect yo’self
Like all digital services, some personal information is collected by Evernote. But it’s really just the bare minimum to provide the service. Here’s what you can expect Evernote to know about you, either because you provided the information by signing up, or through cookies and tracking pixels:
Name
Email address
Billing information (if you pay for a premium account)
IP address
Demographic data (like occupation)
Location information
Device data (whether you’re using a mobile phone, Mac, PC, etc, to access Evernote)
What stuff you click on while visiting Evernote’s website
Whether or not you’ve opened an email from Evernote
Feeling used
Of course, the information above is collected for a reason. The company may use or share it in a number of ways, which include:
To contact you about offers (unless you opt-out)
To obey the law (e.g. if served a judicial subpoena for your data by a U.S. court)
To investigate possible illegal activity from your account
If you sign up for Evernote through the website of a third-party affiliate
Maximum security
Seeing as Evernote can be (and often is) used to store things like passwords, financial data, and credit card numbers, the company’s security practices are probably the most important part of the whole business. (After all, we wouldn’t use Evernote if we thought it be easy for our personal stuff to get into the hands of hackers.) Here’s what Evernote does to protect your info:
All passwords are encrypted, and are not directly stored on Evernote’s servers
All the stuff you upload is encrypted over SSL (the Internet’s standard)
Servers are physically protected, and only a select number of approved employees have access to those servers (a very important part of data security that many average Web users fail to take into consideration)
Your data is never observed by Evernote, or used for data mining, or to provide targeted advertising, which limits the possibility of a security breach
Evernote’s PC and Mac desktop clients allow you to further encrypt your extra-sensitive notebooks and protect them with a password that is never transmitted to Evernote (further limited the chance of a hacker snagging it)
Here’s a video about how that last bit works:
Conclusion
Overall, Evernote’s terms of service and privacy policy are straightforward, and provide little surprises. However, despite the helpful bullet points listed at the top, the terms of service is particularly long and dense. So I doubt many (read: any) users have actually read them. (I certainly wouldn’t if it weren’t my job.) As the company’s user base grows, however, I would love to see Evernote move in the direct of companies like Tumblr and Microsoft, both of which have made a serious effort to dumb-down their legalese for us non-attorney types.
I reached out to Evernote for comment on this story, but they were not able to get back to me straight away. I will update this space as soon as I hear back.
