Patience Rewarded
Around the time I turned 30, I began writing on a computer. Prior to that, I wrote in spiral notebooks because there was no other option. As soon as one came along, I grabbed it, because my handwriting was nearly illegible. And almost as soon as I embraced that new technology, my quest for the perfect “writing-on-the-go” gadget began because, marvellous as they were, early computers were anything but portable.
I knew I’d have to wait for the technology to catch up to my vision, but I didn’t expect to wait forty years.
During my 30s, I experimented with laptops I borrowed from work. Early results were disappointing, however, because early laptops were as rudimentary as early PCs were sedentary. During that decade, I bought gadget after gadget in my quest for sustainable and secure mobile computing, becoming increasingly disappointed until, as I hit 40, I found the Brother WP.
The Brother Word Processor was a laptop-like device that was more robust than a laptop and had better battery life. I thought my quest for mobile computing was at an end, but deficits soon began to appear: it was clunky and slow and, in daylight, the screen all but disappeared. I tinkered with it for just over a year, then sold it.
Three years later, still on my quest and still coming up empty-handed, I bought the Brother WP II, hoping the technology had improved. It hadn’t.
Then I stumbled onto something that changed the game: the Alpha Smart.
It was brilliant. Instead of trying to look like a laptop—which is what made the Brother II clunky—or imitate laptop processing—which gave it a shorter than ideal battery life—the Alpha Smart was completely redesigned. It did not pretend to be anything other than a keyboard with a small but adequate screen. You typed, the Alpha Smart saved, and the text could be easily transferred to your PC. It was small, light, incredibly robust, and ran for 200 hours on three AA batteries. As soon as I began using it, I knew my quest had finally been realized, though the journey was not yet over.
Despite its reputation for being indestructible, I managed to ruin my first Alpha Smart by cleaning the keyboard with WD-40. This was while I was still living in the States. I was, however, expecting to move to Britain soon, so I put off buying another one until we moved into our first flat. I remained content with that until they brought out an Alpha Smart on steroids called the NEO.
Featuring more font types, a bigger screen, expanded storage, and unlimited files, it was, if anything, more robust than the original Alpha Smart, and still ran for 200 hours on three AA batteries. It remained my go-to device for mobile computing until laptops finally turned the corner.
My current laptop does not have a Hard Disk Drive, which is what made laptops cumbersome and battery hungry. Instead, it has a Solid-State Drive, that runs on—as near as I can tell—magic. It is unbelievably faster than my old laptop, smaller, and lighter, but with more processing power and a longer battery life. This means I can easily carry it with me and use it wherever I am—café, train, transcontinental jet, holding cell—without worrying about losing power. That said, all those places—with the exception of the holding cell—now come with power sockets. They also, mostly, come with WiFi, so there is no reason not to take my latest computer with me wherever I go.
Except: being so powerful and having so much storage space means it contains everything, and if I damage or lose it, I will lose everything. Therefore, the search for a smaller device with ample storage and long battery life began anew. Only this time, my quest was quickly fulfilled.
The Lenovo tablet PC ticks all the boxes and even allows me to seamlessly transfer files between devices.
And, ironically, it has an electronic pen that allows me to handwrite documents.
