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AlphaSmarts are certainly intriguing devices - but flawed in many ways. Most notably, all models' internal storage was non-persistent. If your batteries died, p

AlphaSmarts are certainly intriguing devices - but flawed in many ways. Most notably, all models' internal storage was non-persistent. If your batteries died, poof, everything gone. The LCDs simply do not lend themselves to the same amazing outdoor visibility as modern e-ink displays. The only way to get your words off is to connect the device over USB to a receiving computer and "send" the text one letter at a time. To be fair it's fairly cool to see the AlphaSmart emulate itself as a keyboard device to Windows and shoot text over faster than any human could ever type, but it's still incredibly slow, can take minutes at a time to transfer single documents. I own an AlphaSmart Dana - one of the last devices they ever made - and it suffers from many of these issues far worse. It ran a slightly customized version of PalmOS, so it slurped up batteries like nothing, still had non-persistent internal storage, did include an SD card slot but its own writing software saved files in a proprietary format you couldn't open on any computer, so you still had to use the USB keyboard method... The AlphaSmart devices were made to teach little kids how to type, and not much more. And that is very clear.

II2II 5y ago
I have an AlphaSmart 3000 and it's not all that bad if you think of it as a keyboard that you can use away from your computer. Yes, the transfer speeds are slow. On the other hand you can pull up any program that accepts keyboard input on your computer, plug it in, and hit send. You are not messing around with files are proprietary software to transfer those files. It also takes a lot more than the batteries to die to lose your data. Like many older devices, it has a backup battery to maintain the contents of memory. Both the main batteries and the backup batteries have to be dead to lose data, which is tricky to do since the device will only run from the main batteries. That said, the editor is very primitive and it is awkward to navigate by word and line alone while editing documents.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > Yes, the transfer speeds are slow. On the other hand you can pull up any program that accepts keyboard input on your computer, plug it in, and hit send. You are not messing around with files are proprietary software to transfer those files. USB mass storage would have been a good idea then, and today either MTP or mass storage are much better options.
  - II2II 5y ago
    One of the interesting features of the AlphaSmart 3000 is the ability to connect to a fairly broad range of personal computers. This includes computers from the IBM AT onward, Macintosh Plus onward, and Apple IIgs. In other words, it supports the ADB, AT, PS/2, and USB interfaces. On top of that, USB Mass Storage support was first built into Mac OS 9 and Windows 2000. The former was about 3 months prior to the AlphaSmart 3000 release and the latter was around the time of AlphaSmart 3000 release. In other words, short of providing their own driver or software to transfer data, the only means transferring data was by pushing it through a keyboard interface. This may have been acceptable, but undesirable, for home users. Keep in mind, it would have traded ease of use for speed. It would have been less desirable in the education market since it would have meant managing additional software on classroom computers while being more difficult to use. On top of that, there may have been technical reasons. It looks like it is using a PDIUSBD11D USB controller, connected to a DragonBall EZ microcontroller via an I2C bus. Perhaps someone with more knowledge in this domain can comment on that aspect.

II2II 5y ago

I have an AlphaSmart 3000 and it's not all that bad if you think of it as a keyboard that you can use away from your computer. Yes, the transfer speeds are slow. On the other hand you can pull up any program that accepts keyboard input on your computer, plug it in, and hit send. You are not messing around with files are proprietary software to transfer those files. It also takes a lot more than the batteries to die to lose your data. Like many older devices, it has a backup battery to maintain the contents of memory. Both the main batteries and the backup batteries have to be dead to lose data, which is tricky to do since the device will only run from the main batteries. That said, the editor is very primitive and it is awkward to navigate by word and line alone while editing documents.

Dylan16807 5y ago
> Yes, the transfer speeds are slow. On the other hand you can pull up any program that accepts keyboard input on your computer, plug it in, and hit send. You are not messing around with files are proprietary software to transfer those files. USB mass storage would have been a good idea then, and today either MTP or mass storage are much better options.
- II2II 5y ago
  One of the interesting features of the AlphaSmart 3000 is the ability to connect to a fairly broad range of personal computers. This includes computers from the IBM AT onward, Macintosh Plus onward, and Apple IIgs. In other words, it supports the ADB, AT, PS/2, and USB interfaces. On top of that, USB Mass Storage support was first built into Mac OS 9 and Windows 2000. The former was about 3 months prior to the AlphaSmart 3000 release and the latter was around the time of AlphaSmart 3000 release. In other words, short of providing their own driver or software to transfer data, the only means transferring data was by pushing it through a keyboard interface. This may have been acceptable, but undesirable, for home users. Keep in mind, it would have traded ease of use for speed. It would have been less desirable in the education market since it would have meant managing additional software on classroom computers while being more difficult to use. On top of that, there may have been technical reasons. It looks like it is using a PDIUSBD11D USB controller, connected to a DragonBall EZ microcontroller via an I2C bus. Perhaps someone with more knowledge in this domain can comment on that aspect.