Freewrite Alpha Review: For those who just want to get work done
Four blank lines and a pointer. Once you’ve completed the installation, that’s all you have left when starting a new draft on Freewrite Alpha.
No spell checking, no AI-powered notes about your grammar, and most certainly no other browser tabs to distract you from the ultimate goal of getting words down the page.
Instead, Freewrite took it The writing was not distracting experience and reduce the price in part by cutting the Alpha’s screen down to almost nothing.
I may not be a novelist, but between news posts and reviews, I write about 20,000 words a week. So I thought, what better way to test a writing machine than to just use it for a weekto see how it holds up to the rigors of online journalist work?
To be fair, Freewrite wouldn’t claim that this is the ideal plan for Alpha – it’s a writer’s tool, certainly, but it seems quite clearly aimed at large-scale, long-term projects than. We’re talking novels, memoirs, manifestos.
However, with cloud storage syncing, I can have Alpha instantly upload anything I write Google Drive (or Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernoteor just its proprietary system called Postbox), so if I put it on my desk in front of the computer screen that I’ll be using to send drafts to editors, there’s technically no What’s stopping me?
So, a week of work later, here I am, impressed with how Alpha works but also wishing I was used to a novelist, as this device clearly fits that calling.
Writing reform
The Alpha is a simple slab of plastic, with a small non-adjustable kickstand on the back and a mechanical keyboard on the front. It has a red power button, a few function keys on that keyboard, and a four-line LCD display.
It’s a word processor in the old 1980s sense of the word, capable of storing large amounts of drafts and syncing them over Wi-Fi when you’re connected.
Photo: Freewrite
Moving between those drafts, changing your settings, and logging in and out can be frustratingly frustrating due to the lack of a touch interface or trackpad, but most people will find themselves doing it. That’s rarer than me, because, again, most people wouldn’t write eight news stories about it in one day.
