Review: Freewrite Alpha
file this one under "The Long Tail"
I've always been naturally intrigued by the range of Freewrite portable word processors/digital keyboards from Astrohaus. They’re an American tech company in the Detroit metro, and they keep the flame burning for the the AlphaSmart brand of word processors, which had a passionate cult following. Astrohaus has developed and sold several such devices for about eight years. Though they’ve released each with a variety of SKUs, there have thus far been two primary models, their original smart typewriter and a clamshell design called the Traveler.
Neither of those have really attracted me, the typewriter because it’s unattractive visually, seems busy, and is almost four pounds, while the Traveler just felt like it would be too flimsy to type on comfortably. Still, I am something like the ideal target demographic for one of these things, and I’ve kept an eye on the company. In September of 2022, when I saw that they were crowdfunding for their new design, the Alpha, I plunked down $250 plus shipping and promptly forgot about it. (The retail price is $350.) And then, recently, the thing showed up at my door.
Part of the reason that I’ve been intrigued by this line of products is that they’ve long inspired a lot of derision in the tech press, members of which tend to dismiss them as overly-expensive and impractical. And, indeed, some of the usual suspects have been just as dismissive about the Alpha. I find this a little rich coming from a cohort of people who’ll spend an extra $50 so that the Apple Watch they barely use comes in mint green, and I find the communal mockery to be very redolent of the way some insult anyone who wants a more involved music listening setup than a cheap Bluetooth speaker paired with an iPhone. So I’m naturally inclined to support these niche devices from a small company. But I also feel both a personal and professional drive to review this thing fairly, good or bad, and for the record I paid for my unit myself and have never communicated with Astrohaus in any way.
Did I write this review on the Alpha? You fucking know I did.
The Form Factor
I fully admit that the appeal of these products is both simple and a little hard to justify: the products in the Freewrite line are writing-only devices, not laptops, not tablets, just keyboards with small monochrome screens, designed for writing and writing alone. They put a premium on battery life, simplicity, typing experience, and especially lack of distraction. There are no apps, no web browser, no media player, no YouTube, no Kindle store. That aspect, what they lack compared to most modern devices, has long been core to the sales job; precisely because these are unitaskers, so limited in their functionality, they remove the temptation to click over and watch TikTok or do some online shopping. And there are many people in the world who want to write but struggle with digital distraction. I’ve always told people to just be adults and make the adult choice to keep their eyes on their actual work, but with time I’ve softened, given that our tech industry works very hard to keep you distracted at all times. Perhaps extreme measures, like buying a dedicated writing device that lacks the capacity to distract you, is better than trying and constantly failing to change your behavior. If you think that might be true for you, you might consider the Alpha, Astrohaus’s latest and greatest, seemingly designed to provide the superior typing experience of their original typewriter with the portability and efficient use of device space of the Traveler.
So, what are you getting for your money? Just what it looks like in the picture. It’s a simple device with a short but wide anti-glare LCD screen, a single power button in the upper left hand corner, a pleasantly-clicky mechanical keyboard, a USB-C jack, a kickstand in the back, some rubber feet to keep it from slipping while in use, and that’s it. The Alpha has WiFi connectivity and can easily be set up to sync to their proprietary Postbox system and, from there, to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, or Microsoft's OneDrive. There’s also a dedicated button to send your current draft as an email. You can connect directly to your PC or Mac via an (included) USB-C cable to grab any of your device’s drafts as well, with that USB connection serving as the charging port. There’s no much to see, but I have plenty to say about all of it. (This is going to be long, is what I’m saying.)
Build Quality & Portability
Despite the minimalist approach, there's a lot to like here in the device itself, I find. In terms of first impressions, I was pleasantly surprised by was the build quality. For a very new device from a small company without a big budget for quality control, the Alpha feels remarkably well made. There’s no obvious production flaws on my unit, the plastics are solid and well-textured, the seams are tight, the power button and keys feel high-quality. I don’t write in a position that typically requires the use of a kickstand, but the one attached has felt sturdy in several tests, and the non-slip feet perform their function. The typing mechanism as a whole is not quite of the same tactile quality and dependable feeling as a real, thick mechanical keyboard. But I find it superior to the typing experience on my Thinkpad or my previous laptop, a Dell XPS. The keycaps themselves are a little less solid than the typical ones that come with a mechanical keyboard, but still feel dependable. Overall, there's a really strong combination of light weight and sturdy feeling to the chassis; I can rest my hands naturally on the bottom of the unit and feel like it's anchored solidly, but the Alpha is also remarkably light, about 1.75 pounds. In fact, it’s lighter than the keyboard plugged into my desktop.
The device takes up the same footprint as my 14-inch Thinkpad without as much vertical height (due to the lack of a screen half), and honestly size and weight complaints that I’ve seen in various places just don’t make sense to me. I easily slipped the Alpha into three different backpacks and my girlfriend's purse, without issue. It’s unclear why anyone would expect what’s fundamentally a traveling keyboard to be significantly smaller than an ultrabook, as comfortable typing simply requires a certain amount of space. For me, portability is a clear plus and an obvious point of emphasis on this device. The space at the bottom might look to the modern eye like a large and useless bit of plastic, but this attitude misses a crucial point: this is a typing device, and for it to be at all useful, you have to be able to rest your hands somewhere. (I do, anyway.) The lower, empty quarter of the front of the device is ideal for that purpose. Could it stand to be a little shorter? I suppose. But a device based around a keyboard that has the same dimensions as a modern magazine just doesn't seem excessively large to me.
That combination of portability matched by build quality, more than anything, is the aspect of the Alpha that assuaged some of my initial skepticism. That the actual physical elements of the device are well constructed - premium-feeling materials, finely machined, snappy keyboard with a satisfying (but not too loud) sound, and a sturdiness that makes me confident that it could survive serious travel - makes me worry less about buying consumer electronics from a particularly small company, which has not always worked out well in the history of early adoption. All of those physical elements had to be nailed for this device to have any chance of being well-received, and I think they were.
Ergonomics
This one, I feel like, is so individual that there’s little that I can usefully evaluate for you. I have to start by saying that I am completely incapable of writing in a traditional seated position. I can’t do it and I don’t try. I’m lying in bed with a laptop on my lap, on the couch with my legs pulled up, or at my desktop, legs up on the desk, big chonky keyboard on my lap, arms braced on the armrests. Those are the positions in which 100% of my words are written. Using the Alpha in that way, I find nothing objectionable about it. I found the keyboard a little horizontally cramped, at first, and I wonder if maybe they could have sacrificed just a bit of portability to expand it in that direction. But again, it’s no more cramped than the keyboard of my 14” Lenovo ultrabook, and like all keyboards it took a bit of time to get acclimated. Nothing feels uncomfortable to the touch, and the weight feels like just enough for sturdy typing - were it to weigh less, I don’t think the unit would feel sufficiently anchored under my wrists.
Like I said, though, this one is really context-dependent and up to your individual typing position and comfort. Unfortunately, I don’t think the Alpha is sold in any stores at present, so I’m not sure if you’d be able to test it out anywhere. This is a situation where you might take advantage of Freewrite’s 30-day return policy.
Battery Life & Screen
Even better than the physical device itself is the battery life. It’s not just long, it’s unreasonably long. This thing absolutely sips energy. I wrote for six hours straight on this thing, sketching out a potential book project for some day in the future as a test scenario, and used less than 10% of the reported battery life. I feel confident that I could use this every day for a week for a typical amount of composing time for me and not run out of battery. The device arrived four days ago, as of this writing, with a 72% charge. It’s got 52% at the moment I write this, despite the fact that I’ve written on it every day since. Astrohaus advertises 100 hours of battery life, and now that the devices are out in the wild I’ve seen reports of it hitting 110. I don’t doubt it. It’s rare in the modern world to have to go nearly that long without access to power, although you can think of some cool edge cases. I can imagine, for example, going on a long camping trip, or spending a week in a cabin or similar with no power, and bringing along the Alpha to be able to keep writing. For the person who is truly looking to unplug for awhile, denying themselves access to (typical) screens entirely and potentially to power, the Alpha could be a real gamechanger. Of course, these scenarios are rare. What’s not hard to imagine though is someone checking their Alpha, seeing that it has 18% battery left, and feeling completely confident that they’d be able to write throughout a six-hour long flight. To put it another way, I can’t tell you how long it takes to charge the Alpha because I’m still not close to taking the battery down enough that I have felt the need to plug it in.
A big part of achieving that battery life is through the selection of the screen, and it’s here that the Alpha makes some serious compromises - maybe the right ones, but compromises nonetheless.
For one, there’s the lack of a backlight. This makes sense if you consider the things Astrohaus is clearly prioritizing - battery life, price, and to a lesser extent weight. As mentioned, the screen is anti-glare, and I can report that reading it in direct sunlight outside is easy, at least on a sunny winter day. The screen also lacks any kind of blue light, which some studies associate with screen-inflicted eyestrain, although the evidence is mixed. What I can tell you is that I could probably stare at the small and muted screen for longer than I could a smartphone’s. But the lack of backlight is going to limit the use cases at times. To return to the example of a commercial flight, you'd probably have your little reading light above you should the cabin lights be dimmed, though sometimes it’s a bit of a faux pas to use one. In the backseat of a car at night, or in the park when it’s particularly cloudy? Without some sort of light source handy, I guess you’d be out of luck. Taking out your cellphone and using its flashlight to brighten your Alpha screen feels a little perverse. I don’t want to overstate this; right now I’m in a room on a sunny day without any artificial illumination, just the light coming from the windows, and I can see the screen fine. But this isn’t like your backlit phone, tablet, or laptop.
The screen itself is… fine. The original Freewrite typewriter had an e-ink screen, which was considered kind of chic, but they go with an LCD here, and honestly it’s the right choice. The advantage of an e-ink screen (a persistent image that requires no power to keep displayed) fits perfectly with a device designed for reading, as what’s on the screen is there for a long while and rarely refreshed; it can also be useful to have the last page displayed if the screen dies. There is no similar advantages for a typing device. A device for writing is necessarily constantly updating its screen, and has no use once the power dies, so e-ink’s natural benefits are simply not useful. E-ink devices are known for long battery life, but again this is largely a function of the screen rarely updating itself, which is antithetical to what a typing device is for. E-ink displays can still be expensive and can be unusually fragile, although both of these concerns have gotten somewhat less salient in the past decade. In any event, I think Astrohaus made the right call with using the simple, dim LCD that it chose. It’s true that merely displaying the text uses battery, but as noted this thing is such a beast when it comes to longevity that this was clearly not a major design problem.
The viewing experience is, as I said, fine enough. The anti-glare coating really works, which helps maintain the fantasy of writing on this thing on a sunny beach somewhere, cocktail in hand. The text is reasonably sharp, sharp enough for me. It’s sufficiently clear that there was no time when I thought to name resolution as a problem. Of course, there’s also no scenario in which you’d ever say “wow, look at that screen!,” but then that’s entirely outside of the scope of the thing. The text is consistently crisp enough to be readable, which is all I want. There also is no discernible typing lag when the cursor is in the last several rows of typing position, which is where you’ll be 90% of the time due to the way text scrolling works. I do detect a little bit of lag if the cursor is in the top two lines of the screen, but it’s mild enough that I’m not sure I’m really seeing it. All in all, the screen that we’ve got does as much as it needs to in order for the device to feel fully effective at its sole task.
But, the size. The size, the size, the size.
The entire time I’ve been writing this, I’ve been trying to figure out how best to define the role of vertical space in a writing environment. The necessity of horizontal space isn’t hard to define; you just need enough room left and right that a sufficient amount of text appears to not feel cramped. This likely varies from person to person, but as someone who has reluctantly written long pieces on a smartphone in portrait mode (that is, with much less horizontal space than vertical) I don’t think you need much, and the Alpha provides enough that it feels like a luxury. But vertically…. The minute I started writing on the Alpha, I felt surprised by the ease and comfort of the actual typing experience and also bugged by something I couldn’t put my finger on. Eventually I realized that, using the default medium font size, I was chafing under the inability to see much of what I had just written. A product like this is always going to depend on your ability to “think” a longer document by looking at chunks, but what I’ve found is that there’s a certain paranoia that creeps in when you can’t see anything you wrote more than a sentence or two ago. It’s a strange, vague feeling and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was mostly a personal problem, but it definitely bothered me. I was in fact sufficiently cramped that I began to feel that I would have to give this product a definite no, until I tried changing the font size.
There are three options, as you can see in the image above. The large font size is eminently readable, but you can only see two lines at a time. The medium size allows for three lines and will probably be the most pleasant reading experience for most people, though as I said I felt cramped with it. The smallest font size gives you five lines of text, and that has made the device usable for me; the cramped feeling has been ameliorated but not banished. I can read the small font OK, with these 42-year-old eyes, though some will likely reach for their reading glasses. Something about the addition of those two extra line makes the Alpha much more comfortable. I just feel a little more anchored, I guess? As I’ll discuss below, navigating around in documents in the Alpha is perfectly functional but not entirely intuitive. More lines makes me feel like the document isn’t constantly disappearing into my memory or necessitating frequent flow-breaking scrolling to reread what I’ve already written. Using the smallest font is a must, for me, but of course some people will be limited by what they feel they can comfortably see. For myself, shrinking the font was the key to unlocking a feeling like I could really compose long pieces on the Alpha.
Still… ugh, why not more screen? I’m trying to understand why, after the square screens of their last two products, Astrohaus has gone with such limited vertical real estate. It’s so clearly a design choice, so intentional that they must have had their reasons, but I think they did the Alpha a disservice. You see how just below the screen, there’s a slanted bezel that’s almost as tall as the screen itself? Could they really not have used that space for a larger screen? I think raising those five lines with the small font to even just eight would make this feel like a more practical and usable device, maybe dramatically so. The actual computing work going on in the Alpha is so rudimentary, it’s hard for me to believe that there’s inadequate space in its case, especially given everything that’s happened in the smartphone world. As I suggested, I get that the screen dimensions (5 inches by 1 inch, or thereabouts) are related to the fundamental ideology of the device and its stark fixation on text. And it’s true that there are no windows to toggle here, no videos to watch. But the experience seems more cramped than it has to, and it’s really hard to see how the problem is a space constraint. They can make smart watches that you can watch videos on, you can make a taller screen, Alpha.
If not space, the issue may be a price constraint, and it’s here that I think Astrohaus is in a bit of a bind. I mentioned the negative media response to their previous efforts, and the most common refrain has always been that the Freewrite line is a bad value proposition. It’s true, for example, that you can get a Google Pixel 6A phone that can do most everything you want a phone to do for the same $350 that the Alpha costs, and the naysayers tend to ask why you would pay as much for a word processor as for a combination phone, music player, mobile payment system…. I think that this kind of thinking is reductive and reflects the Tech Reviewer Brain that’s baked into our media. I remember similar complaints about the original Kindle - why would you pay $400 for a gadget that just reads books! - and I think this reflexive rejection of unitaskers prevents us from getting cool new form factors and product categories. But I’m also pretty confident that Astrohaus designed the Alpha with price, and thus value, heavily in mind. I understand reacting to past negative reviews. But you have to embrace that this product is for people who can afford to buy a dedicated word processor, especially given that it’s never going to be a laptop replacement. You’ve got a luxe-feeling device; if the price bumped up to $375 for a screen with twice the height, I’d say it was a good tradeoff. But I concede that the reviewers would likely not agree.
The other possibility is that they’re simply trying to replicate the look and feel of the AlphaSmart word processors, which looked like this. Those devices are decades old and had far greater technological constraints, so that seems dumb. But perhaps Astrohaus thinks that their best bet is playing to the cult following.
User Interface and Experience
The first thing to note about the user experience is another great selling point for the Alpha: the power button turns the device on and off near-instantaneously. This is really, really important on a device that’s designed to be quickly grabbed and used to tap out some idea in a spare moment. I would typically not start up a laptop on a brief subway ride or while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, not so much because of wake times specifically but just because of the overall sense of production of opening the lid, waiting for it to boot or wake, typing in my PIN, starting up a program…. In contrast, I think it would make a lot of sense to fill brief moments with the Alpha, because you can start the thing so quickly with zero waiting and essential no power cost and because the writing “app” is always on. The device is so simple and low-powered (in terms of compute and in terms of battery requirements) that it appears the Alpha has no standby system like most modern gadgets utilize to make bootup faster. This in turn must have battery-saving advantages. The near-imperceptible “boot” time is among its best features.
I have to tell you, though, that weird design and interface choices cost this device some of the good will it engenders with its positive aspects. And they’re the kind of aggravations that can keep a niche device like this from seeing its userbase reach the necessary critical mass to make more people consider buying one. It’s frustrating because these problems were easily preventable at no greater cost.
First is a matter of keyboard real estate. One of the most obvious aggravations of using the Alpha involves the most basic function you could ask for, the ability to move your cursor around in the text box. In order to go down or up or forward or back you have to hold the Shift key, the New key, and then use the WASD keys. Certainly many people are very used to navigating with those keys, and the arrows are helpfully printed on them. But still, why do I have to hold two buttons down before I push a key to move the cursor around? Why should I have to hold down even one extra button? There’s a way to skip whole words with similar combinations, and Page Up and Page Down skip forward or back an entire “page,” but I would trade those things for simple arrow keys. I take it that this reflects Freewrite’s traditional “just get words down now, edit later” ethos - their minimalist online draft editor is called Sprinter - but it’s a pain.
The lack of those keys make you wonder about the functions that did get real estate. The Send button effortlessly transmits drafts to your email, which is both handy and reassuring when you’re paranoid about losing work. But in a keyboard where every key is precious, why have a dedicated Send button? Isn’t there a more elegant way to house that function? You might naturally be wondering what the New key does, besides combine with Shift to move the cursor. Well, you press that when you want to start a fresh draft/document. (You can switch between your drafts pretty easily, though it can be a little annoying to tell which is which, again because of limited screen real estate.) But because they seemingly don’t want a single key press to trigger a new draft, which could potentially be very annoying, there’s New keys on both sides of the keyboard, and you have to press them both to actually open a new draft. It’s a little odd that the Send key is just a regular old button that can be pushed accidentally, but the New function had to have this failsafe. Why use so much keyboard space for that? If you're worried about accidentally starting drafts, just hide that function in a menu! That's closer to what people are used to anyway; I can't think of a word processor or online CMS that doesn't use a menu to start a new document. Send to Email would also be a very natural function to put in a menu. And if you did that, you’d free up space for things like cursor keys.
After all, there’s already a Special button, which opens a menu. There’s two options in that menu, Archive (which takes a draft out of circulation when cycling through drafts and stores it in your Postbox) and Shred (which deletes the draft entirely, after you enter a confirmation). I find this two-option menu a little bamboozling - why not just label the Special key “File” or similar and put the New Draft and Send to Email functions in there along with Archive and Shred? No accidental key presses, a more conventional and intuitive space for these functions, and you have space for a better layout of various function keys. One potential layout has the current PG Up and PG Down keys becoming up and down keys, New and Send becoming left and right, and suddenly the Alpha feels more spatially efficient and easier to use. It’s hard to divine what their philosophy was when it came to menu and key layout.
These odd design choices are strange because other UI elements are well done. Holding the spacebar for three seconds brings up what they call the heads up display, which gives you useful information like how long your current session has been, how many words your current draft has, the amount of available battery life, your WiFi status, and (this is crucial) how long since your work was last backed up to the cloud. I never saw this read more than a minute, and I checked several times in my Dropbox and Postbox and found that this function was accurate. Between that and the Send function I worried very little about losing work. Setting up my Postbox and integrating it with Dropbox was painless and took maybe two minutes. Document access and constant backups are essential for this device and they work very well here. Additionally, a firmware update was pushed in the short time I’ve had the device, and the process was simple, which is always reassuring. I was worried I would have to plug my Alpha in to update it, but it’s literally a one-button operation drawn from WiFi, right in the Power menu. Now if only that menu housed a few more functions….
Here’s my biggest concern, as a member of the presumably small slice of the gadget-buying market who’s going to get a lot of use out of this thing. The WiFi syncing functions through FreeWrite’s proprietary Postbox online system, and from there you can sync automatically to your preferred cloud service. As I said, I set this up with Dropbox, and it functions exactly as it should. I can however imagine someone being annoyed that there isn’t a direct syncing option, straight from the device to a cloud service rather than through Postbox first, although I imagine this may be impossible because of licensing or API issues rather than technical ones. Here's my real concern: Astrohaus is a small fledgling company, and its ongoing existence is not secured. So what happens if the company goes bankrupt? Would the Postbox service stay operational? I’m guessing no. The Alpha’s send to email system works fine, speedy and seamless. I'm glad this service exists, but again, would it survive the demise of FreeWrite? You can connect the Alpha directly to a PC via the (included) USB-C and pull your files off its built-in memory, of course, but that’s a big pain in the ass. This is the bind for a lot of young tech companies - people don’t trust the brand because it isn’t big enough yet, but brands only become big when enough people trust them.
By the way, you’ll need the Postbox system not just to send your work to others but likely to export and edit it as well. I said I wrote this review on the Alpha, and I have, and had a good time of it too. But I also did a lot of editing in the Substack CMS, and would expect to do that in Word for other files too. And in fact I ended up using three different drafts/documents and combined them to get here, simply because I wanted to write into a blank space. This was perfectly fine for me, and it will be fine for the kinds of future projects that I will write with the Alpha, but it does reinforce the weird niche nature of this product line - it’s a word processor that will output writing that you will almost certainly collate and edit in another word processor. Everybody who will buy one of these things already has a laptop, but that sort of says something in and of itself.
Conclusion
As I’ve suggested, you can see why this has remained a decidedly niche product line. For the cost of an Alpha, you can buy a cheap Chromebook. That Chromebook will also be a limited device, in many ways, but it will still be vastly more versatile than the Alpha. (I bought a Chromebook maybe five years ago and was consistently surprised by how unpleasant the overall experience is, given how often they’re represented as just fine laptop replacements, but that’s not germane here.) For many people, the sales job for this device - the inability to be distracted with podcasts or Wikipedia or Instagram - will look instead like serious limitations and a bad value proposition. It also happens to be the case that, for me personally, distraction is not that big of a problem when it comes to sitting down and writing. I don't mean to sound pious or anything, but it simply isn’t the case that staying on task is a particularly big problem for me, as a writer. (I have all manner of other problems.)
So why my interest? Why not just write on my laptop? Well, here’s where my particular context comes in - I’m a professional writer who can more than justify spending the $250/$350 for a writing device, and I’ve become affluent in general and don’t need to worry about that expense. I am not a big gadget guy in general but when there’s a niche device with character I can become smitten, and that’s the case here. I’m also a major romantic when it comes to writing. And I have a specific use case for this thing: big sloppy projects where I’m going to generate a lot of text, have no need for quick turnaround times, and would always do a significant amount of editing on anyway. I’ve already mentioned a new book proposal (which is a long-term thing, not for shopping anytime soon), and I think I’m going to write my next novel with the Alpha. I probably wouldn’t write a nonfiction book itself that way, due to my need to constantly research while composing, but who knows? Stuff that’s just for me is already naturally gravitating to the Alpha; I keep a scratch document open at all times for my insatiable need for big directionless documents into which I will pour ideas, lines that spring to me, early feeling-out of whether there’s an idea worth publishing somewhere, complaints about the universe, whatever. For that purpose, the Alpha appears ideal, and I will grab it when I want to write things that don’t at all constitute the day’s work.
Of course, I’m a big weirdo, and my only interests are reading and writing. I’m a particular type of creature. Like the Alpha I’m certainly not for everyone, but we’ve found each other. I would love to write a rousing endorsement of this gadget without qualification, in the face of a lot of unnecessary spite and scoffing, but it’s hard to imagine that many people are going to be in the particular use case that this device requires. If you are in that small niche, though, I think that the Alpha might give you just what you’re looking for. It’s the kind of cheapish little tool that you learn to grab reflexively and slowly fall in love with.
God, I wish the screen was an inch taller, though.
Pros:
the build quality is great, the materials feel premium, and my light-grey model looks great, though I don’t care for the black & white version’s look
the Alpha is about the size of a thickish magazine and is light enough that I barely noticed it in my backpack
the device turns on and off instantaneously with a button press, no standby mode to worry about
battery life is godlike
the keyboard is satisfying to type on, not quite as sturdy (or as loud) as a dedicated mechanical keyboard but a rival to most laptops
the WiFi syncing and send-to-email functions have worked flawlessly for me
the screen is generally sharp, is anti-glare, and emits no blue light
stores no personal information, unless for some weird reason you write your credit card number into a document
apparently you can use Markdown for formatting but I don’t know Markdown
might potentially be a good opener with a particular kind of chick if you’re in just the right bar at just the right time
costs $350
Cons:
you type on it - that’s it, baby, no apps, no video, no games
laptops (cheap and shitty ones, to be fair) can be had for the same price
screen height is just too damn small, unless on the smallest font the experience feels cramped, and even then I want a few more lines
some head-scratching UI decisions
no dedicated cursor keys
no backlight
WiFi sync runs through proprietary Postbox service
Astrohaus is a small company and it’s reasonable to wonder how long they’ll be around to offer service or keep Postbox going
some people will make fun of you if you use it in public
costs $350
Me, investing twenty minutes to read an in depth review of a product that I’ve no intention of purchasing under any circumstances and which was not marketed to me in the first place: 🙂
Yeah, that screen height looks like a dealbreaker to me.