I lost my Alpha, in a rather stupid way!
Actually, I lost my backpack with quite some stuff inside,
because I left it in the train and it did not turn up after the
notice I sent to the railway operator.
Since that's been over a month now, I assume it's gone for good.
As I really like the Freewrite Alpha, I considered to order a
replacement, and because there was a special edition available
("WSB": with white speckled cover and backlight), I already did
it. So I'm typing this now on the new Alpha.
It does have some advantages over the previous one!
The most important thing to me actually is not the backlight, but
the different mechanics of the space bar: it now sounds similar
to the other keys, i.e it does no longer make a high-pitched,
aggressive noise, but a darker and softer one, which is a big
plus for me -- and a nice surprise, because it was totally
unexpected.
The backlight is helpful, even with low ambient light, because
the receded liquid-crystal display often is partly shadowed,
making it difficult to read at times. The backlight solves that
issue.
One additional thing I found out, but which may have been
available on the old version already: pressing new+shift+B brings
up an information page with some internals, like the MAC address
of the WiFi, the serial number of the device, and the storage
space.
In this case, it displays "OS space available: 258K" (I assume
that's the entirety of the OS) and "Data space available: 7M",
which I interpret as 7 MB available for texts (unclear whether
total or still free), which is actually plenty for pure text:
it would correspond to roughly 1 million of words, or over three
thousand pages of text -- or 20 complete NaNoWriMo novels.
However, when connected via USB, the memory is still reported as
2 MB (same as for the previous Alpha), so the meaning of that
value is not fully clear.
But even "only" 6 novels would still be a lot of text, obviously.
So far, I'm really happy with my new Alpha.
Of course, direct transfer via USB still works, which is how this
post got out of the device.
