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Laptops are all very well, but poor travelling companions. Heavy, fragile and valuable, they epitomise all the worst qualities you need in your luggage. They’re slow to fire up, liable to crash, tricky and expensive to wire into the internet and run out of battery power well before you’ve written anything worth saving.
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| A tough keyboard for all conditions |
There’s now something cheaper, better, simpler and stronger. It’s the Alphasmart Neo, an almost bombproof portable keyboard that runs for up to 700 hours on three AA batteries and only costs £200. You can drop it, throw it, and leave it in your hand luggage. All it does is Word Process, so when you fire it up – something that takes only seconds – the only thing you can do is write. This means you don’t waste your time checking emails, surfing the web, and generally getting tied up in semi-productive tasks that are much better done in a cybercafé. You just write, about your surroundings, bang out a few more chapters of your last novel, or whatever takes your fancy. When you get back home a USB lead uploads all your pearls of wisdom into any word processing programme you use.
The keyboard is superb, with a much better touch than most computers, lightly sprung keys for typing at speed. The screen is small, and though you can adjust the number of lines displayed the default is four, which is a pretty good compromise. Though it can be a tool for producing very clean copy I found it better for getting impressions down, producing copy that can be tidied later on a full-size screen.
I used a Neo on a recent trip to Jordan and found it a fabulously versatile travel tool. I type about as fast as I write and used to take notes on the road, to record interviews as I chatted to people, and to use idle moments to fill type in impressions. Usually I read books during dead travel time: with the Alphasmart you can use the same time to write one. Memories, impressions, thoughts and experiences were stored in a rattle of keys, safely stored in a system which keeps its memory even if the batteries fail. There’s no need to keep trailing leads and transformers: with an Alphasmart Neo you just forget about charge, because you don’t need to think about it. There’s a charge indicator but it stays at full. I’ll have to do several more trips before I need to recharge it and there are few places in the world where you can’t lay your hands on three AA batteries.
The long battery life does come at some cost. For a start the screen is not backlit, but this isn’t a real problem. You can easily read it in most light conditions and in a Bedouin tent I found I could even use it by candlelight, tipping it and reading the reflection.
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| Alphasmart Neo at Wadi Rum |
Usually I return from my travels with a small notebook filled with scrawling notes I can neither read or understand. From Jordan I came back with 10,000 words of detailed notes: names correctly spelt, memories recorded. Intro paragraphs that occur along the way are usually forgotten: not this time. Thanks to the Alphasmart I have several pieces of polished prose that raise dramatically the number of times I will be able to sell accounts of my experience. You can save hundreds of pages in up to ten files, so the machine wasn’t remotely full.
You don’t need to load any software to download from the Alphasmart to your computer, which recognises it just a keyboard, so when I got home I plugged it straight into my computer and the words appeared, as if by magic, on my screen. Apparently you can upload files from your computer to the Alphasmart but this does involve loading software and I couldn’t make my computer perform. No matter: I didn’t want to hack over old work that is easier tidied at home. I wanted to create new copy that would be useful in the future.
At about the weight of an SLR camera the Alphasmart Neo has already become an essential part of my travel luggage. There’s no need to waste so much travel time: if your business is writing get an Alphasmart.
Copyright © 2005 Jack Barker
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