# Freewrite Alpha, reviewed // 25-1-20

I lost my Alpha, in a rather stupid way!
Actually, I lost my backpack with quite some stuff inside, 
because I left it in the train and it did not turn up after the 
notice I sent to the railway operator.
Since that's been over a month now, I assume it's gone for good.
As I really like the Freewrite Alpha, I considered to order a 
replacement, and because there was a special edition available 
("WSB": with white speckled cover and backlight), I already did 
it. So I'm typing this now on the new Alpha.
It does have some advantages over the previous one!

The most important thing to me actually is not the backlight, but 
the different mechanics of the space bar: it now sounds similar 
to the other keys, i.e it does no longer make a high-pitched, 
aggressive noise, but a darker and softer one, which is a big 
plus for me -- and a nice surprise, because it was totally 
unexpected.

The backlight is helpful, even with low ambient light, because 
the receded liquid-crystal display often is partly shadowed, 
making it difficult to read at times. The backlight solves that 
issue.

One additional thing I found out, but which may have been 
available on the old version already: pressing new+shift+B brings 
up an information page with some internals, like the MAC address 
of the WiFi, the serial number of the device, and the storage 
space.
In this case, it displays "OS space available: 258K" (I assume 
that's the entirety of the OS) and "Data space available: 7M", 
which I interpret as 7 MB available for texts (unclear whether 
total or still free), which is actually plenty for pure text:
it would correspond to roughly 1 million of words, or over three 
thousand pages of text -- or 20 complete NaNoWriMo novels.
However, when connected via USB, the memory is still reported as 
2 MB (same as for the previous Alpha), so the meaning of that 
value is not fully clear.
But even "only" 6 novels would still be a lot of text, obviously.

So far, I'm really happy with my new Alpha.
Of course, direct transfer via USB still works, which is how this 
post got out of the device.

.:.