AlphaSmart 3000

I was completely unaware of the AlphaSmart until friend and fellow writer, Russ Anderson, mentioned it in his blog. Apparently it's quite popular with NANOWRIMO, the members of which attempt to each write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. The reason for its popularity is that it is inexpensive (I bought mine used for $80.00 on Ebay), durable, very portable, and it can store up to 100 pages worth of text in its memory, and it runs on 3 AA batteries. My Alphasmart came with half-used batteries still in place. I kept on using them and put another 15 hours on them without any problem. Some people claim to have gotten up to 700 hours of use on one set of batteries. If I get half that I'll be very pleased.

This text is transferable via cable into a regular old word processing file on your regular old computer. This way a writer can avoid writing a story longhand and then having to transcribe it onto the computer. I'm a big fan of not doing the same work twice.

"So why not a standard laptop?" you might ask. I'm not a big fan of paying out 600 plus dollars for something with all the bells and whistles when I only need something to write on. I recently went on a family vacation and had the Alphasmart by the pool (yes it got splashed when my son did the cannonball), on the beach (some heavy gusts of wind ensured that it got sandy), and my six year old daughter got a hold of it, typed a few words, and then she tried to erase the words by jabbing the screen as hard as she could with the eraser end of a pencil--multiple times.

The Alphasmart is a lot sturdier than a laptop, so it survived. If it hadn't I'd have been out $80.00 and whatever story I had typed on the machine. If a laptop falls in a pool or if my daughter stabs a pencil through the screen I'm out a heck of a lot more money.