New Toy!!

I need a new laptop. My old one, a 3 yr old Dell Inspiron 1100 (as in, can’t get no basic-er) is on life support. The monitor is dead (I have it attached to an old CRT monster) and the keyboard is dying, if not dead (I use an external one). So the laptop is more of a desktop, but smaller and hotter (as in temperature, certainly not as in hot looking).

I have been shopping around for a while but got depressed at the prices. I learned a lesson with this one. I got a cheap one thinking I would use it for writing and maybe games. Nope. I used it constantly and Lorna took over the desktop. It became very important to me and not just my writing, but my life. So I know I can’t get another el cheapo model but need to get a good CPU, better RAM, and better case so it doesn’t get so hot. And that all adds up to big bucks that we don’t have.

NaNoWriMo is coming up again. I was depressed because I wouldn’t be able to meet others in the area for drinks and word wars. I decided to look into the price of PDAs and external keyboards for them. The price was more than I was hoping and never got around to looking for keyboard prices. All those bells and whistles for something I didn’t think I would use, ya know?

Then I remembered the AlphaSmart Dana. I went to their website and took a look around. The price was more than our current wallets could afford but I was really interested in one. So, I girded my loins and went to eBay. I know, I know, the devil itself is eBay but I went anyway.

Found a bunch of Danas there, all less than $100. I did some research for reviews. Raves. Did more research on the software (they are based on Palm). Went back to the eBay search results. Contacted the seller with some questions. Several emails later, I hit the “Buy Now” button on one of them. Including shipping, it was $105. I ordered it Tuesday and it was here Thursday. And I am in love.

The Dana is part laptop, part PDA, part word processor. It has a wide screen and a full-sized keyboard. It has AlphaWord which saves in .doc format. It has 2 memory card slots for making backups but can also hot sync with the desktop using Palm software. The downside is if it completely is drained of battery, it loses anything you have added in. The good news is that the battery is rechargeable via the AC adapter or the USB cable, AlphaSmart sells them cheaply, and it can also run off AA batteries. How cool is that?

I like this machine. It is lightweight, can allegedly be dropped from 4′ up and still work, is simple, and allows me to write anywhere I happen to be. With the flash memory, I just turn the machine off and when I turn it back on, it is exactly as I left it. Granted, if the battery dies before I hot sync or save to the SD card…. This is going to be good for me. No more lugging a 10lb computer, its bag, its power cord, the mouse. Just push the on button and go.

If it can survive November while I pound out 50,000 words during NaNoWriMo, it can survive almost anything.

Linkage:

Alphasmart – Dana
Brighthand Reviews the AlphaSmart Dana (several years old but still great)
NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month

Click the link below to see the photos and explanations.

The lower left area; the CMD key is used similar to the CTRL key Windoze (such as CMD C and CTRL C both are “copy”)

The lower right area; the yellow commands are accessed using the FUNCTION key.

The upper right area, and the most handy.

These four buttons directly access the (assumed) most used programs. The yellow commands are used in almost every program.

These four buttons access commands and the main “Application” screen. The SEND command will send a document to the desktop but w/out formatting. The SYNC command will synchronize the desktop and the Dana (as in update/back up what you have written on the Dana to safe storage on the desktop)

The back of the Dana.

On the right is the Irc beam, then the printer USB link, the AC adapter plug, and then the computer USB link. My used Dana didn’t come with the computer USB cable but I used the one I have for the printer and it works just fine.

The two SD memory card slots. It came with a blank “dud” SD card in slot 1 and the cover over slot 2 must be a dust cover.

The screen, showing the “Applications”

(link for large version of this image)

This is the left most side of the screen

The middle section; the “Card Info” is useful to be able to see how much space is used/left on the SD card; the “Screen” can turn the screen sideways in two ways.

The right section

AlphaWord

(link to a larger version of this image)

Some of the most used options one would use with AlphaWord are shown the screen by default.

However, there is a “full screen” mode that removes all that and shows two more lines of text. This text, by the way, is Verdana, 12pt. and is notes and a scene I was working on for Simple Sarah.

The screen has a back light which comes in handy when I have used it at night.

With and without:

The screen orientation option.

Default orientation. The example the user guide has, so the one I used to, is of a to-do list. I used the grocery list L. and I made earlier.

The two sideways orientations. The direction would depend on if one is left or right handed or how the Dana would be resting on the cart or the table. This is good to use with a long list that you need to view most of at once.
   

Dana applications, such as Alphaword, make use of the widescreen. But many Palm applications cannot so instead are in the middle. This is the screen for Plucker, a free ebook reader program I got to read some of the books I recently downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Currently, I am reading The Best American Humorous Short Stories. The PalmReader and the Palm eReader are both installed on the Dana (I added the eReader) but I couldn’t get either of them to see the book was there. Arrgh! Anyway, they take advantage of the widescreen but kinda useless if they won’t see the added books. Here’s what the Plucker screen looks like first in default then with one of the sideways orientation options.

So while Plucker at least sees the eBook, it only can show me about 10 lines at a time, if that many. Page Down is my friend as I read this book.