Slashdot Mirror

The Alphasmart Neo is almost what you want. It's instant on and rugged, has a nice keyboard and a USB out, and you get hundreds and hundreds of hours of use from three AA batteries. It only has five lines of monochrome on the display, and it has its own locked-in OS, and in the netbook era it's a bit difficult to justify $170 on something so limited. But it's a great machine for cranking out text.

I get that Office Suite 20xx is bloated, but it is not like there aren't a wide array of Novel specific editors that cater to the exact things novel writers need, and it is not like OSs don't come with VI, EMACS, DOS Edit, Notepad, etc...
Scrivener is almost good enough to make me want a mac.
Rough Draft is what I actually use to write novels, it is simple and outputs in RTF, has very few features, but the ones that it does have are what I want.

IMO a good creative writing software package has to be simple, and it looks like TFA is looking to simplify even further... It is an understandable thing, because distractions are killer for a writer...

IMO he should get an AlphaSmart A portable, purpose built device which does text and only text. Full keyboard, it gets something like 700 hours on 3 AA batteries, it does not have fonts or animated assistants or 1gb install files, and best of all, you don't have to look like a pretentious douche on slashdot to use it.

I've seen Asus page before. It's intriguing, but it's not portable. There's no display. If there were a way to use that touch screen as a display, it would still be awkwardly sized and the keyboard looks to be anything but the writer's joy that the M100 was.

As an alternative to the M100, there are low-end computers aimed at the educational and writer's market such as the Dana. However, I've had a chance to hold a Dana and some competing models. None of them have the "Damn, this is so perfect!" feel to their keyboard as the M100. That thing was special.

Of course, all this talk of tactile interfaces is really subjective. I learned to type during the switchover from manuals to electrics in my high school typing class. So the "mechanicalness" of the M100 just feels perfect to me in a way that few other devices (a particular model of Panasonic electric typewriter comes to mind) possibly can. No matter how much I long for that sort of device, I doubt I'll ever have one. I should probably get a Dana and see if I can adapt.

What bugs me is that I know such a thing as an updated M100 is possible. There's a market for the Happy Hacking keyboard, right? So how hard would it be to graft an 8-line monochrome LCD display on top of that? If somebody does it, I'll buy it.

i suppose we were using it for different tasks. i used the psions as a pc replacement. couldn't afford a laptop but managed to do all the things i wanted on the psions.

had a psion 3a, 3c, 5, 5mx. there were things i could do with the software that i struggle to do on more modern systems. the agenda and data app were extraordinarily flexible. i could set an recurring appointment that occurred on the last saturday of every second month. iphone, palm, symbian, google calender on android can't do this. one customer wanted a wince device (it was ages ago) to hold all his customers information (8000 records) and none of the devices of the day would do the job. while talking to him i exported his data as a csv and imported it into the psion over a serial cable and stored it in a compressed easy to search database file.

went to palm iiix, iiic, m125, visor neo, palm e. probably the first device that i would describe as an ereader. read 1-2 books on the psion but the shape was wrong to read a book comfortably away from a desk. read dune for the first time on a iiix.

one thing i really miss from the palm is the palm desktop app and its sync facility. my iphone sync corrupts every now and again duplicating the notes i have so i stopped using it. using android for notes now. the palm sync never mucked up that badly. android syncs ok but has no great note app.

i found the difference was the amount of data i could enter on the palm v the amount i entered on the psion. i could type 30-40 wpm on the 3a. slightly slower on the 5. the flat base made it slightly more uncomfortable to use. maybe 25wpm. palm i could just about managed 15-20wpm. this however dropped when the brought in grafitti2.

i wanted a psion 7 as well but as you say they were expensive.

ooooh the z88! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88 that was a beautiful machine and i wish somebody made a device like this still with a more modern os. i keep looking at the alphasmart dana http://www.neo-direct.com/intro.aspx but the os is just a little short of what i want (i want a programming language, the psions had easy to learn opl). oh well, i'll stick with the olpc for now.

http://www.neo-direct.com/Dana/

Unfortunately, they don't seem to have been able to price their product reasonably. $450 might have been an acceptable price in 1997, five years before it came out, but it's just silly to charge that much for something that really ought to be cheap, almost throwaway, based on specs.

Agreed, moderator was not accurate as this post is describing a low power laptop that is useful.