That was my immediate thought as well. The T100 was a favorite of reporters, and there was a whole cottage industry dedicated to keeping them running after RS discontinued them.
The apparent flaw in the Freewrite’s design is the lack of removable storage. A journalist would want to make make multiple copies, if they’re in an area without secure internet access. And they may want to wipe the main storage (or fill it with innocuous text) when passing through customs or other checkpoints. Seems like a major oversight.
It’s the same marketing sleight of hand that declares that e-ink readers get weeks and weeks of battery life. Yeah, right, if you read a few minutes every day, strive to finish a book a month, and consider yourself superior to the unwashed who don’t read at all.
Based on my and my spouse’s experience with using kobos to read in the normal manner of bookworms (sit down, read for five hours, put the book down only because of hunger/need to pee), e-ink readers seem to be good for reading about 2 novels per charge, plus or minus depending on how many pages the book has at your preferred font size.
But you’ll never see that kind of metric in the specs for a Kobo, Nook, or Kindle, because it would be actually informative and truthful, and thus it is forbidden by the gods of marketing.
The battery life claim is a marketing lie based on wholly unrealistic assumptions (from their FAQ):
“The Freewrite will last between 3-4 weeks with normal usage, which we
define as 30 minute of writing per day, with Wi-Fi turned off.”
So real world battery life, using standard metrics instead of made up BS, is actually 10.5 to 14 hours of typing, which is about the same as a modern laptop (going by Anandtech’s “light web surfing” benchmark).
My advice: find a cheap used laptop of recent vintage, get it a new high quality battery if necessary, rip out the wifi card to eliminate distractions, and it should give you close to the same battery life, with a far superior screen, far superior ergonomics, actual cursor/mouse controls, your choice of writing apps, and not be nearly as heavy or nearly as expensive. Use the ethernet port when you need to upload your files to dropbox, or just transfer stuff to your regular computer with a thumb drive. The only real downside would be the laptop keyboard instead of a mechanical keyboard.
That thing looks horrible. It reminds me of a word processor I had to use in college with a little window, making editing a nightmare. I hated that thing! Also eInk displays are somewhat sluggish, which would drive me nuts if I were trying to compose text in that thing.
Indeed. If the whole purpose of using this device is to discipline oneself into spending the hours neccessary to crank out a novel, 30 minutes a day seems paltry
It’s weird. If we believe their faq and do the math, it delivers somewhat more typing time than the longest lived laptops (equating typing time to anandtech’s “light” usage benchmark, which I think is rather more demanding than just typing in a text editor), but not tons more. There’s half a dozen laptops in Anandtech’s benchmark archive that deliver 10+ hours of light usage, and maybe 2 dozen that can deliver 8.5+ hours – pretty much spitting distance.
Yet it’s this huge chunky heavy device running very low-powered hardware (e-ink screen plus a cheap ARM CPU). Surely there’s room inside for a full grown laptop battery. If it had the same size battery as a typical $500 laptop, it ought to be able to deliver double or triple the typing time (24-48 hours of typing time, say, which would be impressive), considering that it’s needs are so much less. So I can only conclude (there’s no tech specs on their site, so we would have to wait for a teardown to know for sure) that they really skimped on battery capacity, and stuck in a teeny tablet sized battery, for which they are charging laptop sized prices.
eta: Come to think of it, inside that huge heavy case, it’s basically an ebook reader mated to a mechanical keyboard – so $200 worth of hardware at retail prices, plus the case… the other $250 of the price tag is going to what, exactly?
It’s the same marketing sleight of hand that declares that e-ink readers get weeks and weeks of battery life.
Although: back before I stepped on it, my old Kindle (I think it was a Kindle 3) really did last a couple of weeks or more, with fairly serious reading time per day. My mom’s Paperwhite goes several days (with WiFi off). But for a machine that’s specifically touted as being for dedicated (i.e. “serious”) composition, “normal usage” of “30 minutes a day” does seem to define serious composition down a bit.
But, I’ll see what response I get to my query about it, if any. I dug around and found a cached version of the FAQ from 02/23 that doesn’t have that 30 minutes a day limitation in the text, so for all I know this is a content management issue with a freshly-launched site.
I’ve learned more about key switches in the past 12 hours than I did in my previous four decades. There are over 25 different kinds of Cherry switches (the Freewrite uses Brown). People disassemble them and mix and match switch components to create new hybrids with precisely differing tactile feels…it’s nuts.
And I’m sure that somewhere there is a person who knows every…little…thing…about all of them.
One person’s fairly serious reading time is another person’s “hardly any time at all.” The reason I ranted about e-readers is that the marketing claims for the Freewrite reminded me very very much of the really annoying marketing claims for the Kobo e-reader, with this fine print about how it was assuming you were using it for some ridiculously short period of time per day, in which case it would last for a month.
eta:
Welcome to the world of mechanical keyboard fetishists! I see you’ve already met the Cherry aficionados over there. Over here, we have the buckling spring enthusiasts, and right there, those are the members of team Alps.
IIRC, another plus for the Model 100 was the relatively quiet keyboard. I don’t know how loud this thing is, but a roomful of reporters all pounding on mechanical keyswitches (or just poorly designed keys) could be distracting.
Right?
Why wouldn’t I be able to cobble something like this together from a Raspberry Pi Zero, a mechanical keyboard, some low-power display, and a USB battery pack of whatever size I cared to lug around? I mean, a decent mechanical keyboard can’t cost more than $100, and a Pi Zero is $5, and a display from Adafruit is something like $100 (assuming you want a nice, bit display).
Why am I not making this?
