Hiya,
Well, I’m interested in the capabilities of the BrailleNote Touch, certainly,
but I don’t think it's for me, at least as it now stands.
My biggest reasons: basic, fundamental requirements that are not accommodated
at all, like Braille Terminal (this is a braille display, after all) and
free-form editing of braille (because it’s like a Perkins Brailler, after all).
It can’t even edit plain text files, for heaven’s sake!
Indeed, to expand on this and generalise it a bit, I think it’s fair to say
that KeySoft is exquisite as it now stands, as long as you exclude any function
that touches the network, either directly or indirectly. The book reader,
calculator, games, and dictionary/thesaurus are also wonderful, for example,
and are very easy to use. The only network function of KeySoft I use is the
automatic time-setting that is done at startup (even though the clock drift is
still too great for it to be useful). Leave out Chat, Planner, Email,
Navigation, Internet and Address List, and the Apex is still a very useful
device that rivals, say, the Baum note-taking functions handily. I appreciate
that for some people, interoperability with Microsoft Word is
important—unfortunate, but important—and so I will concede that the Apex could
do better, but to have a choice about it, I’d continue to edit in plain text
and/or braille. So really, if I had any gripe at all, it’s the unfixed Apex
bugs that will now, I imagine, never get fixed. And you know what they say
about sticking with the devil you know. :)
I’ve also expressed concern about the Touch somewhere that, yes, being two
Android releases behind is a problem. If we’re not careful, we’ll be left
behind, just as we were with the Apex. Sure, it’ll be more mainstream, but we
won’t be getting the benefits of the newer features in a timely manner. One
feature we are already bound to miss out on—and I think this is a terrible
shame—is permissions management in Android Marshmallow. You can forget about
having meaningful privacy with many Play Store apps, and I’m not exactly madly
in love with Google’s approach to privacy in Android as it is.
So yeah, I’m afraid it’s beyond me that HW missed out these capabilities.
Sure, Windows CE is limited, more so with KeySoft running on it, but I think
this is just a push too far toward “Mainstream” and away from what are, after
all, fundamental features for a braille note-taker, which is what the Apex and
its predecessors are. And, as we know, many of the issues with the Apex were
entirely self-inflicted, by Humanware’s closed and unbending nature. Is
perhaps now the time to release the Apex SDK as well as the Touch’s? It’s long
overdue as it is.
Or perhaps I should just accept the inevitability of using a separate braille
display. I wouldn’t be as nice, but it’s bound to work.
still, I will get a demo of the Touch, and take a proper look, just to be sure.
I intend to be objective.
I look forward to further discussion. My opinions are my own, etc, etc. :)
Cheers,
Sabahattin-------------------------------
BNU: BrailleNote Users - a forum for users of BrailleNote family of products
from Humanware.
Website: www.braillenoteusers.info
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