Freewrite Alpha Review: For People Who Just Want to Get Stuff Done Leave a comment

4 clean traces and a cursor. After getting by way of the setup pleasantries, that is all you are left with if you begin a brand new draft on the Freewrite Alpha.

No spell verify, no AI-powered notes in your grammar, and most actually no different browser tabs to distract you from the last word aim of getting phrases down on the web page.

As a substitute, Freewrite has taken its already distraction-free writing expertise and shrunk the worth tag some by chopping the Alpha’s display right down to nearly nothing.

I won’t be a novelist, however between information posts and opinions, I write someplace within the area of 20,000 phrases per week. So, I believed, what higher option to take a look at a writing machine than to make use of it solely for a full week, to see the way it holds as much as the pains of the web journalist’s grind?

Freewrite, in equity to it, would not declare that that is the best plan for the Alpha—it is a author’s instrument, certain, however it appears pretty clearly geared toward longer-term initiatives, on a grander scale. We’re speaking novels, memoirs, manifestos.

Nonetheless, with cloud-storage syncing, I may have the Alpha instantly add something I write to Google Drive (or Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote, or simply its proprietary system known as Postbox), so if I positioned it on a desk in entrance of a pc monitor that I would use to ship drafts by way of to editors, there was nothing technically standing in my manner.

So, one work week later, right here I’m, impressed by how the Alpha held up, but in addition wishing I had been a novelist, since this gadget would so clearly swimsuit that calling.

Writing Reformed

The Alpha is an easy plastic slab, with a small kickstand on the again that may’t be adjusted, and a mechanical keyboard on the entrance. It has a purple energy button, a couple of perform keys on that keyboard, and a four-line LCD show.

It is a phrase processor within the old-school Nineteen Eighties sense of the phrase, able to storing a big stash of drafts and syncing them over Wi-Fi if you’re related.

Transferring between these drafts, altering your settings, and signing out and in could be a fiddly annoyance as a result of lack of a contact interface or trackpad, however most individuals would discover themselves doing that much more hardly ever than me, as a result of, once more, most individuals would not write eight information tales on it in a day.