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The Quest
or How AlphaSmart Got Me Out of Office Max and Enabled Me
to Finish My Novel As soon as
technology moved beyond the manual typewriter, the appeal of taking my writing
with me kept me prowling the aisles of office supply stores in search of the
perfect device, often shelling out inadvisable amounts of money in the foolish
hope that I had, at last, found The One. I acquired an impressive number of gizmos over the years, but none suited the needs of a writer in the field. Their shortfalls were many:
Even as laptops
became slimmer and cheaper, they remained disappointingly clunky, delicate,
expensive, slow to boot up, and came packaged with too many distractions. Still
my quest continued; I knew somewhere out there someone was building the perfect
writing tool, and finding it became an all-encompassing obsession. Then the
lithium kicked in, and that helped a lot. After that, I bought an AlphaSmart. The AlphaSmart
3000, or AS3K as we aficionados like to call it, ticked nearly every box. It
was, in effect, a full-sized keyboard with a small screen attached. You turned
it on and typed. It couldn't have been simpler or more ingenious. The AS3K was
rugged, got 700 hours of use out of three AA batteries and, at $200, was
relatively inexpensive. The biggest advantage I found with it was that no one
quite knew what it was so the odds of someone stealing it were low. With the AS3K I
could write on airplanes, trains, while sitting in the dentist’s office or at
the barber waiting for a haircut. I could throw it into my duffle bag and take
it camping for a week and not have to worry about batteries. The only thing I
did have to worry about was running out of room. The AS3K had eight
files, or writing areas, numbered, appropriately enough, one through eight. You
accessed each by pressing the corresponding button. Each file held about 12
pages of single spaced type. Granted, this is a lot of space to fill, but if
you're away from home for two weeks, it is possible to use it all. Files could be
downloaded to a PC but the native software did not allow files from the PC to be
uploaded to the AS3K. Still, I wrote two
books on the AS3K while traveling to and from my office on the bus. It wasn't
until I completed the first draft of my novel that the limitations of the AS3K
became apparent; these included the inability to upload files, the limitation of
four lines of text on the screen and the somewhat stiff and occasionally sticky
keypad. While pondering the
first two problems I thought I'd take care of the sticky key issue by applying a
liberal dose of WD-40 to the keyboard, which brought about the demise of my AS3K
and reconfirmed my need for adult supervision. By this time,
August 2005, AlphaSmart had stopped making the AS3K in favor of the Neo, a suped-up
version of their popular, flagship product. In addition to the Neo, they offered
something called a Dana, which combined the Palm™ operating system with a larger
screen, better keyboard, and heftier price tag. Despite the price (currently
$350, or $429 for the wireless model), I decided this would solve my rewrite
dilemma and promptly bought one. The advantages were
readily apparent; the keyboard was like silk-- silent, smooth, a joy to work
with, the screen had a backlight for easier reading and held around 12 lines of
text and the accompanying synchronization software moved files to and from my PC
with ease. Also, the memory was not confined to eight files and could be
expanded with SD cards. Unfortunately, there were an equal number of
disadvantages. The biggest problem
(and let's set this straight once and for all) is that no gadget is sufficient
for serious novel editing and rewriting. First drafts, articles, short stories
are fine but when you're revising a novel, you need the power, versatility, and
large screen of a PC or laptop. I found a way to live with that; I'm sure you
can, too, so let's get back to the Dana. Despite the
unfortunate WD-40 episode, the AS3K was practically indestructible. I read a
post on the AS3K forum where someone claimed to have backed a car over one and
it kept working. But where the AS3K resembled a Navy SEAL, the Dana was like a
Southern belle: a delicate thing that needed to check its make-up and tighten
its corset stays every time it was called upon. It was not conducive to being
thrown into a rucksack and hauled up a mountain. The increased
electronic wizardry that the Dana boasted brought with it unwanted distractions,
additional weight, and a dramatically reduced battery life. Twenty hours may
seem like a lot when you are used to the limitations of a laptop, but when you
have grown accustomed to virtually unlimited battery life, it's easy to allow
the Dana's power pack to drain completely away, which was how I learned that the
Palm operating system does not respond well to being left without power for long
periods of time. Despite several trips back to the factory for re-education, the
Dana never fully recovered and was always just a little bit "off" after that--
quirky, unpredictable, and prone to sudden losses of memory; sort of like my
cousin Norman after his second motorcycle accident. On its forth trip
to the AlphaSmart hospital, they agreed to let me trade down to a Neo. When I first turned
on the Neo I got a feeling akin to rummaging through the expanded memory bin at
the local computer fair and having a gorgeous blonde sidle up and say, "So
you're into rebuilding the TI-300A model X416 as well? Those peripheral
enhancement modules always make me hot. Want to go for coffee?"; you just know
you've found The One. With more bells
than the AS3K and fewer whistles than the Dana, the Neo, as Goldilocks might
observe, is just right. Gone is the boot-up process, the many electronic
distractions, the fiddly operating system, and the truncated battery life; back
is the instant-on, the robust construction, the astounding battery life, and the
singled-minded nature. While the Neo
remains limited to eight active file areas, the default file size (which can be
increased) is around 24 pages and the improved software allows you to name and
save files to an inactive area so you can actually have as many files as the 2MB
of internal memory will hold. The memory is shared between the operating system,
optional applications (calculator, additional fonts, and the like), and text but
even if you install a few add-ons there remains room for more than 200 pages of
single-spaced text. The file manager is
improved as well and makes moving files to and from a PC even easier than with
the Dana. The transfer uses a standard USB cable or a Beamer device that I do
not pretend to understand. The Neo has the
silky smooth keypad of the Dana and an easily accessible battery indicator (an
item that was oddly well-hidden in the Dana). The screen is only slightly larger
than on the AS3K but the font add-on I installed allows a maximum of 11 lines of
proportionally spaced text, and a minimum of two, which provides easy reading
even in dim light. When you turn Neo
on, it opens to where you left off; there is no hunting for your last file. To
open a different file, press the appropriate button or, use the file manager to
locate an inactive file to open. It's simple, quick, and designed to be as
unobtrusive as possible. (Case and point: I am writing this article while on the
train from London to Birmingham. When my station was called, I simply turned the
Neo off and tossed it in my briefcase, unlike others around me who were
hurriedly powering down their laptops and reeling in various bits of wire. I'm
on the tram now, and with the touch of a button, I'm back to where I left off.) Once your file is
open, just type. AlphaWord, the
native word processing package, does only one thing-- record your keystrokes--
but it does it well. You don't have to worry about formatting, setting bold or
italic fonts, or fiddling with margins or bullets or any of those other tasks
best left to MS Word. That said, you can use some of the advanced features
("advanced" meaning you'll have to actually read the manual) to mimic the MS
Word document map. There is a thesaurus, spell checker, and word-count option as
well, and if you join a user group you'll likely discover a host of clever ways
users smarter than I am have improvised some interesting features. The near-silent
keyboard allows you to work discreetly even in a library or when writing about
the couple in the next seat who appear to be practicing for the full-frontal
snogging event (heterosexual division) in the Beijing Olympics. Thanks to
AlphaSmart, my quest has, at long last, come to an end. Aside from my ill-fated
affair with Dana, their products have satisfied my needs and made me a happy and
productive writer. And even taking into account the Neo's $250 price tag, I've
still saved a ton of money on lithium.
Michael Harling bought his first AlphaSmart in June 2000. He is currently searching for something else to obsess about. Read more at: www.Lindenwald.com
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