I’m writing this on a piece of lofi technology called Neo made by Alphasmart. It’s just a simple word processor…and nothing else. It doesn’t have any games, or Internet capability, or even a great screen. That is, it’s missing everything that could distract me from getting down to the business of writing. I’ve only been using this thing now for about 5 minutes, but I can tell you that I’m really happy with the simplicity of it. It seems kind of silly to be impressed with such a primitive writing tool, given the choices of laptops you can buy for a few hundred dollars at any big box store, but I’m really enjoying using this because it’s for one thing, and one thing only: writing.
Here’s some of the specs that sold me on it:
- Built-in keyboarding and typing tutor
- Compatible with Macintosh and Windows computers
- Uses 3 AA alkaline batteries for up to 700 hours of typical use
Check out the complete PDF spec sheet on the website.
My plan is to take this to work and see how much lost time I can recover. There are several minutes throughout the day that I could use to jot down just one or two sentences, which may not seem like a lot, but over time would amount to a sizable word count. I see this approach to writing as filling a jar with pennies, and I’m hoping that the result will be equally surprising and rewarding.
We’ll see. More to come.
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I want this thing, but Awesome Man laughed at me. Do you really think it’s encouraged you to write more? I write a lot in a notebook, but I’m horrible at typing it and adding it to the master document. I’m hoping something like this could help me be more productive. (And, you know, it would keep me from reading your blog during prime writing hours!) Do you recommend? Please to do a pros and cons post if you have a chance.