Dedicated Word Processor

Ray mailed me the story below.
It's a thing which has been puzzling me for a couple decades now: why isn't there a decent dedicated word processor? Especially a portable one. It would be easy to make a wonderful one, since the screen and power requirements would be much less than for a web-surfing machine.
(Of course I know why. I think. I guess the market is perceived as too small.)

Some products, like the Dana, have a good start. But I bought the Dana, and the screen is simply lousy. It's too small and the contrast is way too low. A pity, since the keyboard is great.

But for heaven's sake, if they can make that $200 third-world portable Xo thingy, somebody can make a good dedicated portable word processor.

Update: I guess I should mention that I mean a machine for writing on. As soon as you get into formatting and all that jazz (basically desktop publishing), a PC/Mac is much better. But a real writer, novelist or journalist, can really use something which is just great for typing on, has several lines of text on a high-contrast screen, and weighs less than a kilo.

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Ray wrote:
Away back in the early nineties, I had a little Canon word-processor, and back then, those only had a viewing screen big enough to show about three words of the active line of typing. But otherwise, it was a marvel of technology, and had features not found in the more famous IBM Selectric, or the others of that day, now all extinct. One rainy weekend, I sat down to it and let my imagination go wild on the topic of the perfect word-processor. It ran to two or three pages, single-spaced.

When I sent that missive off to 'Dear Mr. Canon' at their Canadian headquarters, I thought they'd all have a good laugh and forget it. A couple or three weeks later, though, I got a letter from their Manager of Customer Service, saying that they liked my ideas so much, they'd sent them on to Tokyo headquarters for consideration by their engineers. That was all I heard about it until one day many months later, when I walked into the nearby mall's office supply shop, to get more ribbons for the word-processor which prompted all that.

There on the display table by the front doorway sat the new model Starwriter 30, with all the features I'd been day-dreaming about, plus many others. I looked it over, and asked the manager if he had one in its box in the back. He said, "Yes, but don't you want to try it out first?" I replied, "Hell no! This little beauty has some of my own ideas in it, and I already know it's going to really kick ass, so just bring me one, please." I bought it on the spot, and I've still got it, and Canon is still supplying me with the IR-100 ribbons for it, even though all the others are now probably in the junk. Mine's still working just as perfectly as it did the first day I unpacked it. Unfortunately, Windows 95 came out at almost the same time as this Canon word-processor, and the great little Canon machine had one glaring flaw - its computer language is different from the standard used by the world's real computers, so the disks I use in it aren't readable on my computer. The result was predictable - it quickly faded from the scene. But it's a hell of a word processor, and it does things that no other one in history has ever been able to do - like holding ten pages of single-spaced typing in memory before needing to download onto a floppy disk. And being able to hold 108 separate text files on one of those 1.44 DD floppies. And that viewing screen? It has one that holds six full lines of typing plus a toolbar on top, and it tilts on hinges to avoid overhead glare. Like I said - it's a really marvelous little machine. And I may have the last one in captivity at the moment....and I'm keeping it :)

TTL said:
Your specs sound much like the Eee PC. I'm not sure if it's an improvement over the Psion Netbook, though. Or, for an even lighter (pocket size) writing tool, the Psion 5mx is still unmatched.
I'm not sure if any of these portable gadgets help much in actually getting stuff written, though. To complete anything of length it seems the cushion of your chair plays a much bigger role.

Eolake:
As it turns out, Flickr has a good Alphasmart community, and they informed me that the Alphasmart Neo has higher screen contrast than the Dana, so I'm getting one of those.

I like writing in cafes, it helps me concentrate.

Neither the Eee PC nor the Psion have full sized keyboards, unlike the Alphasmart machines. And those have good keyboards even, better than any keyboard on a laptop I've tried.

Update: search this blog for more on the Alphasmart Neo. (Search field is upper left.)