I haven’t reviewed an interactive whiteboard for some time now and after visiting the BETT show in London last week, I found some new boards to play with including this one, the IQBoard. Sourced by a company called Mediascene who are working in partnership with Sight and Sound, (who sell the excellent Teamboard), I had high hopes for this board. It promised my three criteria – one you can use a magic pen with it, two you can use your finger or any other pointy device on it and three you can use a dry wipe marker on it.
From playing around with it, it is an excellent board. It’s sturdy, accurate and has everything I could ever want with an IWB. I don’t find this minor issue a big problem but only one user can interact with the board at a time so I wasn’t bothered by this admission from the salesperson. The most important factor was the price. You can get the board for around €2,195, which includes a full installation including a projector. This is a good price in my opinion.
Essentially the IWB market is starting to go in the same direction with touch-based and dry-wipe solutions becoming the norm. The differences between them are minimal. You’ll have to check out prices, guarantees, servicing and all that other stuff now as that’s becoming as important. In the IQBoard’s case, standard guarantee is 3 years with a 5 year option available. The other thing that’s driving the IWB market right now is all-in-one classroom solutions. By this I mean companies are creating IWBs, slates, visualisers and other materials designed for interactivity. The IQBoard does have accompanying slates but I’m quite happy to use different brands with different IWBs.
Mediascene have been around for many years selling computers in the early 90s and are now embarking in the IWB world with many partners. I don’t think they’re going to disappear anywhere so you’re looking at an established company. They have big ambitions to get the IQBoard to be the 3rd biggest selling IWB on the market within two years. I’d imagine Prim-Ed will be trying to get that slice of the pie with the Genee Board and their new Hitachi Starboard. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years.
Last Update: August 17, 2017
Hi Simon,
You have commented about the feature that Teamboard (and mentioned it with the Mimio) has where the laptop captures writing from the whiteboard when the projector is turned off. See below:-
“There’s a couple of other nice features on this board. I like the way you do a “right-click” with your finger – simply press down on the board and wait a couple of seconds. I also like the feature that you can turn the projector off and use some “special” markers, which show up on the board. However, as well as simply showing up on the board, if you’ve got your laptop plugged in, the laptop recognises the writing and saves it into a flipchart. This is an extremely useful feature and very impressive. I don’t think there’s another board out there that does this. I will try and film a video of this in action to explain better.”
The IQBoard also has this feature. The IQBoard software is very comprehensive in its functionality.
Thanks for that Graham, I’ll update my records