Got an Alphasmart Neo, it’s basically a keyboard with a big enough unlit screen with a printer port and computer port. The original Neo model was made around in 2004-2006 and was made by Apple employees with education and disability in mind.
For the longest time I wrote on laptops and tablets but the fragility, battery power and eye fatigue made them not as suitable for continuous writing. I had the money and saw others talk about the Alphasmart devices as being the best writing tool, so I got it.
It’s been 2 1/2 years and the batteries I put in are at 60-56%. The device takes 3 aa for power and a coin cell (like for weight scales) for the memory. I can spend the odd multi-hour writing sessions without ever worrying about the device dying from lack of power. And it takes a lot of writing to get the aa batteries to run down a few percentages.
Features:
- Nearly indestructible exterior
- Turning it on/off and navigating between menus and screens takes seconds
- 8 file (tabs) buttons to keep 8 projects open at a time
- Each file autosaves and can save the projects into named files to keep it in the memory
- All or individual files allow for password protection
- Just words on the screen
- Has find, replace, word count, file storage %, wpm, dictionary, thesaurus and calculator
- Uses basic keyboard commands for text (Mac or windows keystrokes)
- Detects sections in the file by how many blank lines are inbetween (1-9 blanks and is set up by the user for how many blanks count as a section break)
- Change font sizes and ‘mod’ for custom fonts and set screen contrast
- Stop accidentally turning the device on by setting on to Enter + On
- Allows other keyboard layouts (QWERTY, Dvorak, right/left hand for disabled users) and special characters
- slow and sticky keys
- Allows Spanish writing and dictionary somehow
Most of the features I dont use but they are nice to have. The biggest plus is that it is not tied down to proprietary software or cables. It uses a printer cable (I have a regular one and a c-cable one for my phone/tablet) and all I need to do is select a file button, plug it in, get a blank document ready and hit the send button so it types everything out as a keyboard emulation. It is faster to get files with software but it is not a requirement.
Best device I spent my money on.
Gave up because of hardware issues. Laptops had fan problems with it on, the grub wouldn’t install right, a lot of the good distros would show up as black before or after installation. My latest attempt with a decade old iMac made the screen die after less than half an hour upon each reboot. Most of these computers should work very well with Linux but they never did for me. Back then it was a matter of just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.