The Product
SuperBook
The pitch
Let's begin by taking a critical look at Sentio's pitch on Kickstarter.
In essence, Sentio has created a laptop 'shell', loosely defined as a laptop without the guts! The Superbook provides a laptop monitor, a full keyboard, and a multi-touch trackpad. The attached Smartphone supplies the data, files, apps, and of course, the computing power. The Superbook also has the capacity to utilize your Smartphones WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities.
There is, however, a secondary product presented in this pitch that isn't marketed as glamorously: In order to operate, the Superbook requires the Andromium app to be downloaded on a Smartphone. This application furnishes the desktop interface and will be discussed in the "Company" page.
Why Superbook as Subject for a Venture Analysis?
Many educational stakeholders have long been conflicted about an effective piece of technology they can affordably put into the hands of their students. Upon first look, Superbook seems to provide a solution by lowering the cost of classroom laptops, and shifting much of the connectivity and equity problems to the user. By selling a 'laptop body', the perceived advantage is that every student with a Smartphone will also now have a fully functioning laptop computer. Seeing as many, if not all, students are in possession with a capable device, Superbook aims to position itself as a low-cost alternative to say Chromebooks, or other classroom laptop/ tablet options. As we will see clearly in this analysis, there may be more to this line of thinking.
One of the most critical specifications that needs to be highlighted here is that Superbook is compatible with Android devices only. Moreover, Superbook adopts an Android-based operating system and utilizes Android-specific navigation techniques. The problem this poses is significant - By making Superbook synonymous with Android devices, Sentio is effectively cutting out roughly half of their potential market, which should be the undivided corpus of Smartphone users.
Another specification that needs to be considered here is the power of the display monitor. Superbook markets it display as an LCD monitor at 1366 x 768p - These indicate the number of pixels on the screen. Need I remind our investors that we have just entered into the year 2020? Firstly, a 768p screen typically does not harbour enough real estate for multitasking the reading, writing, or editing of documents, images, etc. Furthermore, "Most applications and Web pages need around 1,000 pixels of horizontal space to show their content. With only 1366 pixels of space, you can't fit two full-size applications on the screen at once, without scrolling horizontally or having them overlap each other" (Piltch, 2018).
