The Freewrite series of typewriters with an E INK screen. They have mechanical keys, making them weighty and easy to type with. The company has released a series of models over the past six years and their latest model, looks quite excellent. It is called the Freewrite Alpha and instead of using an e-paper screen, it decided to employ an reflective monochromatic FTSN LCD. This product has just hit Indiegogo and already raised $400k in the past week. Each model on the crowdfunding phase will set you back $269 USD. The company told me that the products should ship out in a year from now, so sometime in 2023.
There is a single screen on the Alpha, previous Freewrites had two. You should easily fit 6 lines @15pt, 4 lines @26pt. You can type on the mechanical keyboard via Kailh chocV2 low profile switches and the keycaps are MX compatible stems. The viewing angle should be excellent with 15 degrees w/ kickstand. There is no word of internal storage, although it will fit 1 million pages right on the device. It has WIFI, and documents can be sent via cloud services with Evernote, Dropbox or Google Drive.
Like Traveler, Alpha has no backlight. Alpha works great in natural and artificial light. Need to write in the dark? A reading light or lamp will do the trick.
The Alpha is billed as a distraction free experience. You can’t check your email, factcheck on Wikipedia, access social media or launch any apps. It is really a singular purpose device, a writing tool, to write a novel or a short story. Using the Alpha is pretty simple, you just start typing. If you don’t speak English, no worries. There are keyboard layouts for German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Japanese. See a list of keyboard layouts here.
Why did Freewrite decide to go with a FTSN LCD screen, instead of E INK? The company disclosed “Our goal with Alpha was to make the lowest cost device possible. Our E-ink screens in Traveler and Smart Typewriter are an off the shelf size, and still cost more than 6x the amount of the custom FSTN LCD display we designed. Additionally, the mountainous cost of producing a custom size E-Ink screen would have made Alpha’s current form factor impossible.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
