David Shapshak
All I wanted to do was type up a few stories. With the dauntingly boring prospect of an 11 hour flight – leaving at 2pm, the best time of day to do some work – and not having finished the work before I left, it seemed like the perfect time to complete the articles.
But the last time I tried to work on a long flight, my laptop died after a few hours. Knowing I had access to a computer in Tokyo, I didn’t want to lug a notebook half way around the world either. Logistically, I had no access to a Japanese Internet service provider nor a power supply for their unusual 100V electrical network, so the rest of the notebook’s functions seemed unnecessary.
But I needed to write. The perfect solution presented itself in the AlphaSmart 2000.
Essentially it’s just a keyboard with a text screen that displays a few lines of text, which one can work on. Then one simply plugs the AlphaSmart into one’s computer so it becomes a keyboard emulator. It is an average size, 80-key keyboard that has a small four line screen of 40 characters angled slightly up towards the eyes.
For those of you who remember the early Tandys, the first portable laptops with a rudimentary modem, this will jog your memory. The blue plastic AlphaSmart is as simple to use and as reliable. It can store 64 pages of text (or 128 kilobytes) in eight separate files, which it automatically saves as you work. The real plus is that on three penlight batteries it runs for up to 300 hours. And, it only weighs about 900grams.
Working it is total simplicity. Turn it on and type your stuff.
To upload all your work, plug the AlphaSmart into a normal keyboard jack, open a text program or word processor, and just hit the send button. The makers say it’ll work on virtually any Mac or personal computer as a normal keyboard and can be powered by a wall unit if needs be. I used it extensively on an old 486 PC, two other laptops and a machine loaded with a Japanese language operating system and still managed to retrieve all my texts.
The device allows you to upload text documents that have been generated on a PC. For this you require a software package that comes bundled with the keyboard, but transferring your text to a PC or Mac needs nothing, except the cable that comes as a standard accessory.
The AlphaSmart is also ready for an infra-red port and can print directly to a printer with the same wireless capacity. And, if your keyboard choice differs, you can unplug the keys and shift them around to be QWERTY, left-handed, right-handed and Dvorak. The makers claim spell checking with a 70 000- word dictionary, although I never got to use it.
It seemed to good to be true and from experience it was very useful, despite it’s limited functionality. What I needed was a pure input device, which the AlphaSmart qualified for perfectly. The only thing I needed it to do was cut-and-paste blocks of text like Windows-based word processors. This initially seemed like not much of a sacrifice but when I did want to write a more structured piece or rework anything, it was a drawback. Considering what it is and what it purports to be, it’s forgivable.
The AlphaSmart has seemingly unending applications in areas such as education, where computer resources are in short supply, to teach typing or as homework machines in communities that can’t afford outright computers.
The AlphaSmart 2000 is manufactured by Intelligent Peripheral Devices, , and costs $229