2/6/02 update
So: I’ve had the Neo for a few months now, love it, and stick to my four star rating. There are, however, some annoying issues I think could be fixed in an OS update or new model.

• Backlight, really. For the price, there should really be a backlight.
• Hitting the down arrow somewhere in the last line of a document does not take you to the end of that line. You can hit the end key, but still, arrowing down is natural.
• No undo. The first time I tried to command-Z and it didn’t work I sort of flipped out.
• No italics or underlining. I’ve taken to using BOLD for underline and *blah* for italics, which is stupid and a pain on the other end.

So noted, I still love the thing. It’s so elegant. I anticipate never having to charge it fully again - it sucks power from USB when it’s connected to my iBook to transfer files for editing, and so the battery hasn’t dropped below 90% since I’ve had it. That’s amazing. I get tons of questions when I take it out in public, which is kind of fun. People have trouble wrapping their heads around contextual devices - “All I want to do is write,” I tell them, “and this thing has 100-hour battery life.” “But don’t you have a real computer?” they ask, and I’m always like sure, but the battery life is three hours and I’m always surfing the web instead of doing work. Then they get it.

Why does the Neo cost so much?
It’s a keyboard with a screen the size of a Snickers bar built in and a nice word processor in BIOS, with 512k of memory. 512k. And the version with the rechargeable battery costs $270 with no educational discount. By the end of this year Wal-Mart is going to be selling a $200 color laptop running Linux. I haven’t opened it up, but the Neo looks like $25 in parts. So why buy it?

Because you’re paying for a near-perfect device. The keyboard response is instantly addictive - not too clicky, not too mushy and certainly better than my iBook. There’s nothing to distract you from the task at hand - no web, no Tetris, no Freecell, nothing. The battery life rechargeable is something like 60 hours of continuo The case is really tough and the unit weighs two pounds. It feels like nothing.

It fits the hell out of my needs
I’ve been wanting a writing device that would make me focus on just writing for some time. My first cut was creating a separate Mac OS X user account with program access limited to just Pages. But I found out that Dashboard still worked, and I’d play with the tile puzzle. Or I’d stare at the screen for two minutes and Fast User Switch back to my other account. It didn’t work. The AlphaSmart provides no distractions and

I intend on taking it everywhere I go
It’s virtually indestructible, I’m told, the battery lasts forever, and it weighs nothing. So I’m taking it everywhere. This brings me to my list of niggling problems.

It can still be better
1. There’s no hold switch. The on/off button is a regular keyboard button in the upper-right hand corner, where the escape key should be. (The escape key is to the immediate right of the spacebar - crazy!) It should be a hard switch on the bottom, slightly recessed - I’m paranoid that I might throw it into a bag, it could be turned on by accident, and fucked up shit could happen - tons of garbage chars in one of my work files or something. In the control panel, you can change the on/off to a two-button startup. Perfect.

2. The display doesn’t have a backlight. I don’t know why the hell not. The reflectivity of the screen is fine, but it really needs a backlight.

3. File synching is kind of dumb. You can either connect the Neo to your Mac or PC via USB and dump text from a file on the Neo raw into an open text document, or you can use the Neo file manager thing, which is a separate application. In an ideal world, the Neo would mount like a memory card and you’d just drag RTF files off it.

4. A “N E O - By AlphaSmart” logo is tattooed in white under the screen. It breaks the purity of my trance, and I’m going to remove it.

5. I find the green color of the case ugly. Black might have been nice.

6. When the cursor is on the final line of a document, and I press the down arrow, I expect it to jump to the end of the sentence. It doesn’t work on the Neo; command-down-arrow does it, but that’s shoddy thinking.

7. There doesn’t seem to be an undo. No command-Z!

Should I buy a Neo?
If you’re not insane, the best thing about the Neo is the battery life. However, if you’re not insane, you’d prefer something more laptop-y, in which case you should get an AlphaSmart Dana, which runs an old version of the Palm OS. If you are insane, like me, distractions >1 = distraction. Paul Ford called the Neo Quaker computing. I disagree - it’s Shaker computing. There’s hardly anything unnecessary, and if they fixed the little things I outlined above, it would be perfect.

It’s weird, though
It’s weird to compute without a mouse. The maximum number of lines you can see on the screen is six. That’s weird. It’s weird that everything’s auto-saved - my muscle memory tells me to hit command-S always, and you don’t have to. It’s weird to use this thing outside, like in a cafe. You get looks. It looks like you’re writing on a Speak-N-Spell. I don’t care, but maybe you have social anxiety disorder or something.

In conclusion: ★★★★
I give it four stars out of five. If the screen were backlit that would go up to four and a half stars. AlphaSmart offers a 30-day money back guarantee, so you don’t really have anything to lose. If you’re the kind of person who would use a Neo, you don’t need to be told, or convinced. You already know, basically - that your computer is a funnel for your brain, and you need one with fewer holes.

Because funnels aren’t fun.
Baking is fun.