[blindkid] PacMate or BrailleNote?

[Richard Holloway]

PacMates and BrailleNotes both seem to be fairly reliable in our experience.

Our daughter is only 8 but an extremely active user of a roughly one-month-old BrailleNote Apex. This replaced the BrailleNote mPower she had been using for about a year-and-a-half. We actually had a couple of different mPowers over that timeframe. Each started off used through the school system. The Apex design is new enough that I doubt many people have used them long enough to have problems with them. (I think they came our no more than about a year ago.) So far I can only tell you that apart from a rather flimsy case design, the Apex appears to be outstanding. Kendra managed to pull the strap (the leather binding of the D-ring for the strap on the case actually) off of the case the first day she had this unit. (I suspect this was a defective case.)

In short, I would buy an Apex. It is FAR thinner and lighter than an mPower or PacMate and unless Freedom Scientific has snuck something out recently that I have not seen, the PacMate Omni is still their current release and it is several years old. We own an Omni as well and it has been completely reliable. It is, however, not only older technology as compared to the Apex, but even larger and heavier than even the mPower, let alone the Apex. (Our Omni is coming up on three years old this summer.)

Before I completely talk you out of a PacMate, I should mention that a really cool feature of the Omni is that it comes as a no-display, 20-character, or 40-character unit and the keyboard will detach. 
That means several things--
-You can start with no keyboard and add one when budget allows.
-You can upgrade from a 20-character to a 40-character at a later time.
-If you ever decide to switch from a braille-style keyboard to a qwerty (or vice-versa) you can keep your display and possibly save some money.
-And most importantly, if your display ever breaks, you can have it serviced or exchanged without sending away the actual PacMate.
-It is worth noting that the braille display is the most likely part to fail on most of these Braille Note Takes-- 6 moving pins per cell

Again, our Apex is virtually brand new so having no problems may not be terribly meaningful.

We did have some mPower issues, including:
-The CF card reader allowed pins to slip-- pins in the actual reader pushed back inside the unit, rendering the CF reader inoperable and hanging up the unit until a technician physically opened the unit and pushed them back into place.
-The power supply failed due to poor strain relief design leading to broken internal wiring (supply was then replaced)
-After the power supply failed, the power jack in the mPower unit ultimately failed too. Just like with laptops, bumping the power connection or tripping on the power wire can cause failures. (Expect this with any machine until someone adopts a Macintosh-like magnetic connection that cannot hang or tug on the logic board.)

The mPower battery also got frustratingly week (became prone to short charge life) after a time on both mPowers. All batteries will do this (just like with a laptop computer) so it is a problem for all the units, HOWEVER, the Omni and mPower have built-in batteries. (You must open the case and presumably void the warranty or else send this in to access the battery and at least the mPower has a very unique battery setup so that you'd have to have a custom battery prepared to replace it )I've not seen inside an Omni yet). In other words, batteries  are not generally a user-replacable item.

The APEX, however now has a user-replacable design, just like most laptops it pops right out of the bottom of the machine with a latch. (Long overdue!)

The Apex also has several noteworthy features including:
-plug and play VGA output (you only need to enable one option in the menus) to help sighted parents keep up with their blind kids on these machines
-built-in ethernet (wired) as well as
-built-in wifi (wireless ethernet)
We've had some problems with the ethernet setup but I understand the new v.9.1 software is supposed to address that (now shipping)
-SD support for SD-high capacity (SD-HC) cards offers up to 32GB of SD storage per card vs. 2 GB max on the mPower (sizes off the top of my head)

The Apex also has more ways for input control with the little multi-direction input device in the center of the keyboard (braille model) as well as several USB connections plus bluetooth.

Note that the mPower requires extra hardware to add wired or wireless ethernet. I think the Omni does too.

Oh, and the removable display (on the PacMate) can also be used as a braille computer display if you have JAWS on a laptop. Kendra's PacMate display is now generally used stand-alone as a display on her desktop computer and the actual Omni doesn't get a lot of use. The Apex can also be used as a braille display on a computer, but then it is not available to use as BrailleNote. As much as Kendra uses her PacMate, we would never bother using that as a display for a computer-- she'd want it back before we had the computer display even up-and-running.

So what about the PMA's? Long term, you may save some money but companies calculate the probable expense on their end to price these things. If you actually banked all you'd spend on a contract over several years you'd probably come out cheaper but if the unit breaks, expect a huge bill unless you're pretty skilled with self-repair of electronics. Also, over time, used machines show up that could be bought to replace a broken machine, especially as newer model get released a few years down the road. I suspect mPowers will be showing up used in larger and larger numbers pretty soon, for example. (There is an mPower on ebay right now for $800 buy it now [32 char display] but be careful, seller has zero feedback...)

Sorry for the long post. Feel free to contact me off-list if you have more specific questions. (I'll help if I'm able.)