For the primary time since 2018, King Jim, a Japanese stationery firm, is making one in every of its distraction-free writing instruments out there within the US. The Pomera D250 launched in Japan in 2022 and whereas it seems to be like a compact laptop computer, its performance is restricted to being a digital typewriter. There’s no e-mail, no social media, and no net browser. King Jim’s new Pomera D250US is equally centered on that singular job, however with a keyboard that includes a US format and an English dictionary for spell checking.
King Jim is making the Pomera D250US out there by means of an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has already surpassed its modest $10,000 funding purpose. Early backers can preorder one for $374, whereas full retail pricing will probably be nearer to $499, with transport anticipated as early as March 2025. That’s dearer than the $349 Freewrite Alpha which additionally minimizes distractions, and pricier than even many Chromebooks. However for these you’ll have to BYOD — Carry Your Personal Self-discipline.
The final Americanized Pomera system, the DM30, featured a six-inch E Ink display screen and a compact folding design with a keyboard that cut up into three sections. The ten.3-inch vast clamshell Pomera D250US doesn’t fold fairly as small, but it surely trades E Ink for a barely bigger seven-inch 1024 x 600 black-and-white LCD show that received’t undergo from gradual refresh speeds or ghosting.
Battery life is claimed to be as much as 20 hours, and the D250US will probably be totally booted and prepared so that you can pound away on its scissor-switch keyboard a couple of moments after you open its display screen.
Though built-in storage is restricted to 1.3GB, that’s nonetheless sufficient to retailer a variety of textual content. Ought to you end up needing extra, storage may be expanded with SD playing cards as much as 32GB in dimension. Paperwork may be transferred to a PC over USB-C, or Wi-Fi and Bluetooth utilizing the Pomera Hyperlink cell app out there for iOS and Android. For those who don’t have entry to a wi-fi community, the DM250US may convert paperwork to a collection of QR codes (as much as 999 of them in succession) providing an alternate and tedious method to switch textual content to the cell app utilizing your smartphone’s digital camera.