... Look, I get it, this device was funded over Kickstarter, it's incredibly niche with small production runs and a lot of custom designed pieces, and it simply can't benefit from the economies of scale that devices from bigger companies get...

But there is just no way on this earth I could ever justify paying $600 USD for what amounts to an e-ink display strapped to a Cherry MX keyboard.

It's really too bad that (last I checked) the Freewrite is permanently shackled to their weird proprietary cloud service. I guess there is a way to pull documents off it with USB, but you (apparently) can't add, remove, or generally organize files that way.

I got a Pomera DM30 instead, which just appears as a USB drive mirroring the device's filesystem. It's a Japanese keyboard layout, but the English support is fine, and overall I love it.

Another adoring Pomera DM30 owner here. I use git worktree to sync writing projects with my laptop.

I could not bare needing to go through Freewrite's cloud.

Wow Pomera looks very interesting. Is it the only one of its kind? And is it actually that small that you can put it in your pocket?

Which document formats does it save to?

> Is it the only one of its kind?

I'm not aware of any directly comparable non-DIY devices. There are a few other "electronic typewriter" devices that usually come up in these discussions, like the Alphasmart range and the Freewrite, but the DM30 checks more of my boxes.

> And is it actually that small that you can put it in your pocket?

I (a man who wears men's clothes with generally usable pockets) can fit it in a pocket, but not very comfortably. It has a footprint similar to a basic e-reader, but it's thicker, I'd guess an inch and change.

> Which document formats does it save to?

It just saves to plain text, which is perfect for me since I write in Markdown. The editor uses a (sort of ugly) monospace font and has some simple but useful navigation commands.

Thank you, I actually went ahead and bought a DM30 last night. Seems like it could be the perfect thing to take for an outside writing. session. Yes the screen could have been somewhat bigger, but then it would absolutely require an iPad-sized bag.

I just hope the screen is not tooo small :)

Hi, sorry to bother you, but I got the Pomera DM30 and can't seem to figure how to disable the Japanese substitution for the text. Every time I enter English text and add a punctuation mark everything changes to Japanese. I have switched the interface to English, that was pretty straightforward.