The full-size Pluggable Folding Keyboard has been a winner for me. Key feel and layout are GREAT, and the hard case folds into a stand that works nicely w my LG G6. My uses are heavy notation and answering emails. Not writing novellas w this setup, so can’t speak to that kind of usage :).
Folded into the case it’s a bit too bulky for pockets, but fits nicely in a jacket pocket or small bag.
Edit: Think I paid $50, which is $15-25 more than most folding keyboards. For me, it was worth the price bump. Think they sell a more compact model for a little less?
(Not mine. Because I can’t be asked to get off the couch, walk, like, ten metres to the Rumpelkammer, dig it out, walk over to my home office corner, clear some space on the desk (The horror. The horror.), adjust the lighting, take a picture… But I’ve still got it. Still works. Full MS Works suite 2.0 hardwired, no booting/loading. 2 PCMCIA slots. Centronics port, serial port. Very light. Getting a couple of days’ worth of work out of two AA batteries. Wrote the bulk of my thesis on it 25 years ago, very handy to take to the library.
Now get off my lawn.)
These things always make me want to come up with some serious writing to work on so that I could get one and actually use it. I was excited when I heard they ran a kickstarter and wanted to enter the US market. (right before I found out they didn’t fund and wouldn’t yet) I wasn’t encouraged when I saw their follow-up eerily-palm-like-but-larger device.
I should just get one of these and get it over with. (I feel like they aren’t going to make anything significantly better or localized too soon)
I still miss mine when I travel. The size was perfect. After reading the dates in your comment, I guess it’s time for some tech-specific KonMari moments.
From what I see on Wikipedia, it didn’t have any kind of non-volatile storage for user files. How the files were saved? Did it have some kind of external drive, or files would be typically transferred to a PC using RS232 port?
I second the AlphaSmart series. It’s definitely not made for more than basic editing (being able to go up a line and correct a typo or separate a paragraph is the most you’d probably use) but I do want to emphasize the batteries last a long time, a year or more, not just 20 hours. And as stated, even though it’s old tech, it’s future-proof and will work with any device that can take input a USB keyboard.
It doesn’t have large storage, and it’s not quite so easy to load existing text into it, but it’s not meant for editing; it’s meant to grab a day’s writing while out and dump it when you get back.
I still use a AlphaSmart Dana. Can be had very cheaply on e-bay. It doesn’t have great battery life, but you can put rechargeables in it. Can sync over USB or SD card (I think it’s limited to some smallish size like 2GB). Optionally you can have it pretend to be a USB keyboard and type your documents as a crude driver-free form of uploading. Built-in software works well enough for writing, and you can install any PalmOS software on it you might need. (like a thesaurus)
Another option is to get a pen and paper and use some of the capture software out there that can run on a phone. Might be worthwhile to improve your handwriting a bit first.
Or the glorious Cambridge Z88 which looked very much like the Amstrad but predated it by three or four years. It ran on four AA batteries and even came with BBC BASIC - what a lovely little machine.
Why do they all bother with engineering a keyboard to go with it?
The window might soon close because the magic of Chinese manufacturing may be going away, but it may still be economically viable to create an open-source (please, everyone and anyone should make it) Kindle clone for writers. Same e-ink form-factor, same touch-screen, but without the locked-down software so that it can pair up with a Bluetooth keyboard of your choice, and load up any text file, markdown, ePub, PDF (and read it like an e-book), whatever.
If the price comes down with commodification (like MP3 players right around the iPod era) you can have multiples of these and use them for reference use instead of printing documents to scatter them around your desk.
This is what I always thought the Freewrite should have been.
(my various rigs included the Atari Portfolio, all the Palm devices with attachable or IR keyboards, so I know what I’m missing now. Especially being able to beam text to another Palm with one swipe gesture. That QR code transfer thing echoes that, but there’s too much fiddling on the receiving end compared to what it was on the Palm)
