Welp, I have spent the morning playing with/exploring my Pomona DM250, and I have to say, it's proving a LOT friendlier as a distraction-free writing sidecar for #scrivenerapp than I'd expected! Makes the advertised features of the Freewrite Traveller look weaksauce, and it's only half the price.
https://artvsentropy.wordpress.com/2023/08/12/retro-writing-15-pomera-dm250/
At some point I should probably write up a comparison between the DM250 and my first portable writing deck computer, 1989's Cambridge Z88 (from Sir Clive Sinclair). 35 years on, the DM250 is half the weight, 120% greater battery life, 1000x the built-in storage, CPU is about 1000x faster, screen is infinitely better ...
And less than half the price (adjusted for inflation).
@pdcawley The Z88's devastating weak spot was that everything in its RAM was lost if you swapped AA cells without plugging it in to the wall wart first. The EPROMs were a poor substitute for non-volatile storage. But since about 2000 you can buy FLASH memory and OS 4 lets you selectively erase/write to them in any slot. So up to 2.5Mb of non-volatile working storage is now A Thing, plus 512Kb of RAM (there's a 512K RAM/512K flash card).
That would have been amazing in 1989.
@cstross It's a rare product that so spectacularly hits the sweet spot of its uneconomically small target market, isn't it?
Delighted to hear that it's being kept alive.
Charlie Stross
Piers Cawley