BYOK – Bring Your Own Keyboard

100% agreed. Save your money. That's also my opinion after spending several thousand on a couple of these devices over the years, only to find that they don't solve my problems.

E-ink is slow and is hard to read because of the low contrast. And contrary to all the marketing it actually increased eyestrain for me because it's so dark.

Not to mention the software on all the tablets I had was severely lacking, slow and buggy, and the subscriptions tacked on top felt outright offensive to me.

1. I'd go one further and say the nice paper notebooks and pens haven't worked for me either. Instead I just use a free A5 paper notepad and pen I have laying around.

2. Agreed with iPad + keyboard as an actual alternative. The retina 120Hz screens of the Pro models really help. Reading PDFs is a joy, even when compared to a large A4 e-ink device I had. It's just so much faster on the iPad.

Although I use it with Wifi on, I don't have many apps installed on it and basically all notifications disabled. I'm in the iOS ecosystem so everything just syncs, which means less work and mental overhead organizing my notes and reminders.

I'd recommend the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard though, it's expensive but snaps in place and feels great.

1. Fountain pen and a nice notebook with nice paper (Mnemosyne, or Rhodia)

Spending money is overrated. The pen at the back of your junk drawer from a hotel you don’t remember staying at will do just fine. There’s a notebook in there too that’s as good as new if you just rip out the first page.

> so they can indefinitely bilk money from you

Or just stop supporting altogether, a la Spotify Car Thing.

I once wrote a ~2,000 word draft,on an alpha-smart ($6 at a goodwill) and then couldn't get the transfer to computer function to work correctly, so I had to rewrite the whole thing because I wasn't gonna sit there and manually re-type three lines at a time from the grayscale LCD. The subsequent draft was actually better though, so for this reason I would recommend such a device. It's also a fun novelty thing. Really though, if you keep getting distracted from your writing, maybe consider if it's because you don't actually have anything to say?

its a toy for techies. i see crap like this on youtube all the time. useless and impractical tech that people gobble up because were all children at heart and we like toys even if we're grown ups now. but it annoys me nonetheless because i always can't help but think "when would i ever use this...?"

Where do you see 15 lines?

In the video they show the 3 text size modes. The smallest text size only shows 8 lines, even though the text on the screen claims it goes to 11: https://youtu.be/5hV8xfhdk7c?t=208 (3:28) I can't imagine 15 lines of text on a low resolution screen like that.

I like the concept of the device, but I must not be the target audience at all. I can't imagine spending time writing on a low-resolution, tiny LCD display like that for any extended period of time.

Even the response time of the LCD looks painfully slow in the video. The letters slowly fade into view as they're being typed. They only show the typing for a couple seconds so if you blink you'll miss it in the demo video. This is in contrast to the campaign's claims of zero latency and high responsiveness

Apparently there's a market for it, though, because they have a lot of Kickstarter backers.

Yea for me having lots of vertical real estate is important while writing. iPad Mini (or Daylight Computer if you care about working outdoors) in portrait orientation combined with any number of writing apps seems like a great solution.

Agreed... even as someone I consider much more curious than the average consumer, the fact that there were no pictures or easy description of what this is, made me close the tab right away.

I'd like to see that collection of keyboards

Do you have any interesting layout and language variations?

Wanting to DIY is one of the distractions BYOK is seeking to combat

Or an Eink phone/tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard.

This is already relatively large for this type of display. There is no market for these types of screens at a larger size. (They are mostly used in products that are not connected to a computer such as a controller panel for a factory, or mechanical device.)

I think they aimed for a very portable format. I think it's a bit took much especially considering that you will be already carrying a keyboard anyway.