AlphaSmart Dana Wireless
Hi everyone! For 2022’s first entry in my never-ending “Zscaler Logo On A Weird, Old or Otherwise Oddball Gadget” series, I’m skewing deep into “oddball” territory: the AlphaSmart Dana Wireless from 2003. This was the final model in a long series of AlphaSmart devices, which were mostly (though not exclusively) sold to schools in the era when the benefits of students having a laptop were clear, but the cost of every student having a laptop was unrealistic for many school districts. To solve this problem, AlphaSmart made a line of these “slab-tops” - small, rugged, relatively-inexpensive, low-powered computers which were great for word processing, scheduling and other basic tasks.
One of the challenges in this pre-Cloud era was getting data from a portable device to sync to a desktop computer - desktop syncing was often buggy, required special docking stations, etc. To solve this problem, the Dana has a clever feature: the user can type hundreds of pages of text into the device, and then just plug it into a desktop via USB. When connected this way, the Dana appears to the desktop as a USB keyboard, and then the Dana will “type” whatever text the user previously entered into the Dana directly into their desktop's word processor. It’s quite a sight to see line after line of text being ‘typed’ onto the desktop at slightly-faster-than-human speed!
As one of the final models in the AlphaSmart line, the Dana Wireless has some impressive specs. First, the Dana actually runs a version of PalmOS which had been modified for its highly-unusual 560x160 pixel super-wide, pressure-sensitive (note the stylus sticking out) greyscale display. As a full-fledged PalmOS 4.1 device, it is completely compatible with the tens of thousands of Palm apps that were available during that platforms heyday, but only a handful of those apps were ever updated to support the Dana’s unusual display - most Palm apps run on the Dana at their native 320x320 resolution in the center of the screen. On the hardware side, the Dana Wireless has (as its name suggests) 802.11b WiFi, along with a pair of SD card slots, Infrared beaming capability, dual USB ports (one for doing the ghost-typing trick noted above, and the other for direct connection to a few supported printers), 16 megs of RAM, and a Motorola “Dragonball” CPU running at 33Mhz. Despite these impressive-for-the-time specs, the Dana will run for around 30 hours on 3 “AA” batteries! I should also note that the keyboard is *great* - full size, responsive and easy to touch-type on, which wasn’t always the case even with much-more-expensive laptops 20 years ago.
Of course, the emergence of iPads and ChromeBooks plus the collapse of PalmOS as a viable platform upended the entire market for inexpensive student-oriented devices like this, and AlphaSmart faded out of existence a few years later.
Anyway, that’s it for today - have a great weekend, everyone!
