I loved my Freewrite, until I didn’t.
Over the past few years, I think it’s fair to say that I’d been struggling with my writing. I put an awful lot of time and effort into the publishing side of things with Horrific Tales, putting my own work on the back burner. However, after a couple of debacles with the publishing side of things – great books like Wasteland Gods by Jonathan Woodrow, Deadside Revolution by Terry Grimwood, High Cross by Paul Melhuish and The House of Frozen Screams by Thana Niveau in particular failing to get any traction despite my best efforts – and me then throwing all of my eggs into a single basket with a book from a well known author that I had to pull mere weeks from publication because they went down a very public antivax conspiracy rabbit hole at the height of the pandemic, I really lost my enthusiasm for that side of the industry. I lost thousands of pounds and I was not doing right, I felt, by the authors I was publishing, so I gave everyone the option to have their rights revert, and got back to my own writing career.
I picked up a Freewrite Traveler in May 2021 and immediately fell in love with it. It had it’s quirks for sure, but having that little portable typewriter with an e-ink screen and next to no editing capability transformed the way I worked. For the High Moor novels, as well as the short stories I wrote, I tended to re-read what I’d done in my last session to get me up to speed on the story before starting the new days work, often editing and tweaking as I went. What that meant was that I tended to have fairly clean first drafts that took me an absolute age to produce. In addition, I found it quite easy to get distracted by social media popups on a laptop as I worked. The device simply did too much and plugged into every single thing I could use to procrastinate. What the Freewrite gave me was the ability to get into a flow state – to just get words down with no need or even the ability to tinker with them. It meant that, while subsequent drafts needed a lot more work, as a drafting tool it was fantastic. It was light, portable and the e-ink screen meant I could sit outside in direct sunlight and work in a way that I never could with a laptop.
I wrote Dark and Lonely Water almost entirely on the Freewrite and then got on with my current WIP, Night Bleeds Into Dawn on it. I got about 50,000 words of the new book written and then the unthinkable happened. My beloved Freewrite died on me.
It didn’t die outright, however. It started acting up. It messed with the formatting of the text as you can see above. I couldn’t even backspace past the bits that it mangled. And the resulting text file that was synced to my PC behaved strangely as well, as if there were hidden characters in there, screwing things up.
I contacted Astrohaus support and was told to factory reset the device and then bring the firmware back up to the latest version, which I did (it took 24 hours to get it there – not the fastest process). Unfortunately this did not sort the problem out and, infact, seemed to make it worse. The device was freezing up and became generally unusable. So, knowing that it would be out of guarantee (and then discovering that the warranty is only 90 days!) I asked about a repair. “Sure,” they said, just send it back – that will be $150 plus postage. That seemed fair enough, despite postage costs to the US being extortionate. However when they found out I was UK based, they instead tried to get me to buy a new device with a 25% discount. When I pushed on delivery costs, they quoted me $130 postage costs – more than double what I could send it for myself via UPS. And of course, even if I bought a new one, a good chunk of that discount would be eaten up by the delivery fee. In other words, I was stuck with it.
Now, I didn’t want to throw it away, so I looked into repairing it myself. I’m not skilled in these things by any means, but I can do some soldering. I discovered that this problem seems to be caused by the Lithium Ion battery swelling over time, putting pressure on the membrane keyboard from behind, causing the problematic behaviour. On examination, however, the battery is very long, very thin and glued rather solidly to the rear of the keyboard. It flexed and bent with even the slightest attempt to remove it and, given the way that LiOn batteries tend to burst into flames when stressed, I decided against this course of action. I missed my freewrite but was not about to burn my house down trying to fix it.
I was left with a quandry. My stepson is borrowing my laptop during his exams, so I tried heading to my favourite coffeeshop with my Samsung tablet and keyboard. Which was fine until it auto-hotspotted to my phone and I got a bunch of Facebook messenger popups that broke me out of my flow. And then I went and tinkered with the text I’d written and suddenly I was back in my old, bad way of working.
So, as a stopgap measure, I headed to Ebay and picked up an Alphasmart Neo for £80 to tide me over until I could decide what to do. No way I would go for another Freewrite until they made the batteries user replacable and apart from a Japanese device that had its own issues, there weren’t really many other options on the market.
When the Neo was delivered, I have to admit I was a little disappointed. Where the Freewrite Traveler was a sleek, streamlined piece of modern design, this was a big, ugly lump of green plastic. It looked every inch a two decade old piece of technology. In terms of looks, the Freewrite has it beaten, hands down.
Then I took it out and did a writing session on it. And rather quickly changed my mind.
The keyboard is far better. Infact that keyboard is gorgeous. An absolute joy to use. The Freewrite Traveler’s keys are unresponsive and spongy by comparison. I rattled off 1500 words in a coffeeshop in record time. A definite win for the Neo.
Then there is the battery, for which I’d had so many problems. The Freewrite has a bespoke Lithium Ion battery that lasts a good few weeks on a charge and, when it finally gives up the ghost, renders the £500 device largely useless. The Neo uses a couple of AA’s, lasts allegedly for about a year on those, and also has a standard coin battery in there to keep internal settings and the like. So that is another massive win for the Neo.
The Neo’s LCD screen seems fine in all but the most direct sunlight, so is a little worse than the Freewrite’s e-ink one, but its hardly noticable. What is noticable is that the Freewrite had some lag between the key being pressed and the character turning up on screen. Not something that was hugely noticable unless you are typing up a storm and then have to give the device a second to catch up. The Neo doesn’t have that lag, which is something inherent in e-ink screens. So I’d edge the Neo ahead on that score as well.
The last area for comparison is the file transfer. The Freewrite has come on in leaps and bounds with its firmware in recent years. It connects to your cloud storage – dropbox, google drive, onedrive etc, and uploads a text file to a postbox folder. Or you can email it to yourself with a send key. This used to be flaky as hell and would sometimes require a hard reboot to make the device send your files across. This is far better with the v2.0 firmware.
The Neo needs to be connected to a USB A port with a cable, which is less convenient. If you get the management tools from the net, it will download text files into a folder of your choice. You can also open the document you want to input and press the send button, at which point the device will update the document a character at a time. I kinda like watching this but also realise that I’m probably going to get bored of it and use the file upload module most of the time. It also, annoyingly, mixes up the @ and ” characters due to a keyboard layout mismatch that I’ve not sorted out yet. So a win for the Freewrite but by no means a deal breaker on the Neo.
The last thing, though is the cost. Alphasmart vanished back in 2013, so these devices have not been made for over a decade. But you can find them on ebay and the like for about £80. I also found a place in the UK with plenty of spares and who repair broken ones for £40. That means that the Alphasmart Neo I bought is six times cheaper than a Freewrite Traveler. And that is a number that is hard to ignore.
I have to say, when I picked up this archaic old typewriter, I was expecting to have it a few weeks or months at most. A stopgap before I caved in and bought another Freewrite. I was not expecting to actually prefer it.
I’m sure that either Astrohaus will address the issues with their Freewrites to make the batteries replacable, or someone else will bring out a cheaper and superior product at some point as there is a definite gap in the market.
But for now, I’m more than happy with my old Alphasmart Neo.
Graeme Reynolds's Blog 