CNET has the most informative review of the AlphaSmart 3000 portable word processor that I’ve read (wish it had been available when I bought mine — I wouldn’t have waited so long). Overall, for only $230 the AlphaSmart is a great product. As CNET says, “Businesspeople and writers who just need to crunch a lot of words or students composing e-mails and essays may find that the AlphaSmart is a simple and cheap complement to their regular desktop computer, giving them a fully functional, wireless keyboard with just enough word processing power to let them work on the road as well.”
Here’s some more quotes from the CNET review with my comments:
Use the AlphaSmart for standard keyboarding on your computer, then disconnect it and use it as a mobile word processor.
Nobody in their right mind would use the AlphaSmart for a standard keyboard. It is a lot better than most laptop keyboards I’ve used, but the space bar is only half-size in order to accommodate a couple command keys which makes it much less desirable to use for desk-bound keyboarding.
When you return to your desk and plug the keyboard back into your desktop computer, just open your word processing program and upload your work to the application with one keystroke.
I haven’t used my AlphaSmart with a Macintosh, but at least with Windows one nice feature is that you don’t need to carry around a driver disk. Plug it into a USB port and Windows automatically recognizes it as a keyboard.
The AlphaSmart runs on three AA batteries (the first set is included) for up to 500 hours. We didn’t have time to test this assertion, but users we queried reported battery lives of anywhere from 200 hours to 500 hours.
I have no idea what the battery life is with my machine, but it is so long that it doesn’t really matter. I’ve had mine for 5 or 6 months now, and have changed the batteries only once with moderate usage.
When you hit the road, the optional ($29) Get Utility software lets you download text from your word processor into the AlphaSmart’s memory for another round of mobile word processing.
I really can’t imagine using the AlphaSmart for this sort of text editing. It excels at being a lightweight tool I can pull out of my briefcase and type out a letter or draft article if I’m stuck waiting somewhere for 10 or 15 minutes (or longer), and then edit that copy back on my desktop machine.
The main limitation of the keyboard is the four-line, 40-character LCD display (no backlighting). That’s room for 25 or 26 words at a time which doesn’t lend itself well to editing longer documents.
It is, however, great for exactly those situations where you might want to take time to work on an article, but you don’t want to lug around a traditional laptop (and aren’t willing to spring for the $3,000 necessary for a top-of-the-line Sony Vaio). Not to mention that the AlphaSmart hasn’t crashed on me yet, unlike my laptop.