I dig the $450 Pomera DM250 English. I'm writing this review on it. For a certain type of writer, it is the perfect travel, coffee shop, and writing-while-you-poop companion. I am one of those writers. Its small size and light weight make it a piece of kit that you'll want to take with you, everywhere.
Its long battery life — I've gone a month of daily use without charging it, so far — makes it an ideal tool to leave in a backpack, compact and out of the way, until you feel the need to churn out a few thousand words. It comes with enough onboard storage to store thousands of pages of text. However, if necessary, its memory can be expanded with an inexpensive SD card. Pomera has been around, making note-taking devices, like the DM250, for years (along with a ton of stationery products that are extremely popular overseas.) Up until now, their hardware has been built with the Japanese market in mind. However, the company recently tested the waters by offering an English version of their latest compact writing dynamo on Indiegogo.
This isn't my first Pomera rodeo. For years, I rolled with their awesome DM30. It boasted a fold-out keyboard and a wee e-ink display that was easy to see in direct sunlight. It was a great tool for when I was living and working under the Mexican sun, or it would have been if I ever got comfortable with its Japanese Romaji/English keyboard layout. The keyboard's letters were exactly where I expected them to be — but damned if I could ever score the muscle memory to find punctuation and the like in places other than where I'd expect them on an English QWERTY keyboard. I don't have this issue with the DM250. Except for its navigation keys, everything is in the correct location for Canadian and American typists. But man, those nav keys are a whole thing, especially with the keyboard's angle brackets placed right above them.
The keyboard is perhaps a quarter smaller than a typical 65% model, but I was able to get up to speed, touch-typing, in very short order. What's more, the keys are responsive and a little bouncy. It's a surprising pleasure to type on.
This is not a tool for editing. It won't offer you any templates or integration with Grammarly. It's as basic a word processor as you'll ever get. There are a few extras. I love that its calendar allows for long entries, making it ideal for journaling. And, as I mentioned earlier, there's no need for cloud connectivity to use this thing. You can transfer your content to a computer via USB-C, on an SD card, or, my personal favorite, using Pomera's free Android/iOS app. When you want to transfer your copy to your smartphone, the DM250 creates a QR Code for the app to read. Within seconds, the .txt file you created on the device appears in the app. From here, you can do whatever you want with it. Just copy and paste your words into an app like Scrivener or fire it off to your editor via email. It's an insanely basic way of managing files that keeps control in a user's hands, where it belongs.
There are, however, some things I dislike about it. I wish that its keyboard were backlit. It'd make working on it at night, or say, on a redeye flight, a lot easier. However, that would consume a significant portion of this little powerhouse's battery. As much as I would love to type on it in the dark at three in the morning, not having to charge it like a frigging Apple Watch, every stinking day has its charms. When I do type at night, I've taken to clamping a rechargeable book light to its display bezel. Problem solved. I do like its crisp, backlit 1280×600 LCD, most of the time but the screen's finish is hella glossy. I'm currently looking for a matte screen protector that'll fit. Finally, and this is a weird one, Pomera's operating system will highlight words that you've misspelled, a la Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. But it doesn't have the capacity to correct those words. Obviously, the dictionary is baked into the software if the DM250 can tell you that you screwed up. Why they didn't make it possible to take action on your boo boos is beyond me.
But that isn't going to stop me from using it. It's light, compact, and a pleasure to use. In any situation where I can't bring along a laptop, it's a crazy good alternative, provided you can get past the fact that it costs more than many of the Chromebooks out there today.
If you work in the wordmines, you'll want to check it out.
