I take back what I told
Xineko - I can haz a typey thing! The nice guy in the apartment main office is nice, but sometimes a bit of a dork, and he forgot to bring my box up until well after the office closed, when he was leaving for the night. So now I have a Typey Thing!
Specifically I have a used blue
Quickpad scavenged off of ebay for about $50 with shipping, all cords and the infrared receiver and even a full pack of batteries included (after they swore they couldn't ship them with batteries, but lo' and behold, when I got it out of the box it turned right on. I think somebody forgot to take them out.)
Given that it is ooooold 1980's technology masquerading as a portable word processor, I am immensely amused that the box came stuffed with dot matrix printer paper. =D (no, seriously. It has 113K of file storage. LOL!)
It's small and blue and cute! It's almost a full sized keyboard - it's maybe half a key shorter in width than my macbook keyboard. It's not at all hard to get used to that. On the other hand the keys are the 'rugged' type and made to be nearly indestructable (also easily removable and cleanable!) which seems to mean that I have to hit them much harder than I'm used to doing on my macbook. I found I was missing a lot of letters on my weaker fingers at first, but a bit of practice has smoothed that out. It does slow my typing speed down just a notch, but that's not a bad thing, really, and when I'm writing cold from my head (instead of transcribing handwritten notes) I'm not that fast anyways. (note - "fast" means I've been clocked at around 90wpm when transcribing, but drop that to stop and start bursts of 50-70wpm when writing cold.)
The IR receiver plugs right in, plug and play, and will happily beam text to any open text program - works just fine, on a Mac, in OpenOffice, Bean, and my personal favorite of Scrivner. It was trial and error again to figure out what the best settings were for uploading - there's a speed of 0 (slow) to 9 (fast) out of which 5 seems to work best for me, and oddly enough it likes PC mode better than Apple mode. It will still occasionally drop a letter or two when transferring the text, but I think that's because I was transferring it on my lap with the receiver on my knee and it wasn't exactly steady (infrared, not wireless). Alternatively, if I want to hit up RadioShack, there's a different type of cord that would connect it straight to the computer for direct transfer, I think.
The little screen isn't backlit, which is sad, but it's quite crisp and high contrast, not at all dirty or smudgy the way old screens can get. One of those little clip on book lights would probably solve the "typing in dim light" problem just fine, and I'll see how it does in sunlight next time I'm out in it. =P
[hugs it] eeee! I have a typey thing! Just in time to work on my first english mini-essay for tomorrow. =P
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