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This concludes this series on the Alphasmart Neo, a nifty minimalist word processing keyboard with amazing battery life and portability I recently purchased.

Syncing

I tested infrared printing and USB syncing to the computer, and I'm pleased to report that both work really well. The printing aspect didn't interest me much prior to trying it. I figured I'd sync to my Mac and print from there. But it so happens that the Neo supports wireless printing via IR (Infrared) and I just happen to have an HP 990cs inkjet that has an IR port. Years ago I got my Palm OS-based Handspring Visor to print to it, but I had to install a special driver on the handheld. With the Neo, the feature's built-in. I just pressed the Print button and pointed the keyboard at the printer. I expected complications or a delay, but before I could even tell if there was a problem or not, the Neo displayed "Printing to HP Deskjet 990c" on the screen and suddenly my printer was spewing out pages. It's just plain text -- double-spaced Courier font with no page numbers or formatting -- but it was remarkably quick and cool. I decided it would be quite useful, actually, to do hardcopies for editing (editing on paper is still worlds easier than onscreen editing). The default format is perfectly readable and useful -- not appropriate for a final draft, of course, but perfect for proofreading editing.

The other feature I tested was syncing the Neo to my Mac. There are two ways to do this. (Actually, there's a third, if you count IR transfer, but since Macs no longer include IR ports, I didn't test that.) Both of the main methods require you connect the Neo to the computer (PC or Mac) via a standard USB cable. (You can also print via USB to supported printers.)