Post #3567199

Yeah...I'm afraid this evolve is almost certainly going back. I'm going to keep it for another couple weeks, see if I change my mind and how well it holds up on a trip, but this is...I'll just say that I agree with any reviewer who called this product rushed. Pressing the home button to bring up the main menu can take up to 10 seconds and focuses you on the taskbar before it does so, in most text fields, but not all, hitting an arrow key while you have a word of untranslated braille dots written will *delete* the untranslated word entirely! Multiple times during the Windows setup it told me that it lost wi-fi connection and that I had to retry, despite me sitting less than 10 feat from my gateway it likes to sometimes drop packets, pressing on the edges of the arrow keys doesn't actually register as a press, making you think your buttons are broken when in fact you just didn't press in the middle of them, the input handling seems very laggy, I have to hold down space with e for at least 300 ms or it won't register as alt+f4, whether or not you have to include the space bar with NVDA braille commands is inconsistent: in input help and browse mode, enter with t, for example, requires the spacebar, but out of those modes it doesn't. This feels incredibly counterintuitive, especially for an input help mode! Like I mentioned on my timeline earlier I installed a single development dependency and then tried to install an acapella voice and now my brailleNote won't start the add-on to drive my braille display and keyboard. Even worse is, if I disable the add-on, they keep working without many issues, so the failure mode of this add-on could be much cleaner for the end user. I've also literally never gotten their BrailleIME to do anything different, at all. That's not to say there aren't good things. I love having a windows laptop literally around my neck with hardware that feels like it was built for me. The braille display is super chrisp and all the buttons feel nice, HumanWare always makes nice displays. The speakres are actually way better than I expected, it has one of my favorite keyboards of any BrailleNote, and I did most of my paid software development work on it today. That is undeniably impressive. But is it what I want out of my notetaker? I think not. I want my notetaker to be a device I pull out at the end of the workday, throw onto my lap, and casually scroll around on YouTube with, or check and respond to emails when I'm not at my computer. I basically want my notetaker to be my phone, but with a braille display and buttons. I absolutely see the value in having your notetaker be your computer, but I don't think that's what I want, and that experience definitely has a long way to go if that's what HumanWare is going for here. Most of it is software, though, so here's hoping it'll get there.