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Comment by chunkyks | Hacker News Reader

My wife bought one of these: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler

Reviews are wildly polarised. * Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions] * While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]

You can find a selection of alternatives, and homebrewed options, here: https://www.writerdeck.org/

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That looks really cool, but that price point. I could get a Steam Deck + travel keyboard and still come out ahead.

Is that the true price for a low volume, niche product? Eink monopoly continues to make the world worse?

Looked it up, and the original One Laptop per Child came in around $200

I was gifted a Traveler several years ago. It is overpriced and bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality. You can read and write off of it via USB, but it doesn't actually use a true filesystem for your text files, it writes them into the main app's sqlite DB, which in the past has had data loss issues.

My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow.

I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.

> bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality.

This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.

It would be a better device if I could install cfw and make it somewhat more versatile. But I haven't found anyone doing that, and haven't even found enough specs online to get started.

I ought to do a write up, but If you open it up the UART pads are available to get a U-Boot console. U-boot is in HAB mode, with a custom signed debian buster kernel. This was my first time dealing wit u-boot, but it was otherwise pretty open and was able to write to ENV and FS from the u-boot console, which let me stop the Freewrite app from starting, boot into root shell, turn on SSH, etc. So you can get into userspace and replace the UI and whole app. When I dropped this project I had it booting shell onto the e-ink, with a command to drop back into the Freewrite app if I wanted.

Then they released the new app, which looked like it was also just in userspace (not a kernel or fw update) so I wanted to start over with the update, but never got back to it.

Looks great but the price is pretty insane, and really the eink should be a lot bigger. So much wasted space on the bezels.

For some reason writerdecks almost all insist on having tiny little screens.

I think it's more a supply chain issue. There aren't any very stretched rectangular eInk panels from what I've been seeing. I've seen some for price tags but I mean nothing like 8-10 inches or so.

And they're such a niche phenomenon that they have to do with the scraps left by other industries like ereaders.

That homebrew page is pure gold. Thank you for the suggestion!

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