Thoughts on the upcoming braille sense 7

the average person can't afford this technology; a sighted person wouldn't pay over £3000 when ipads cost £599 sorry, but true. they are ripping us off.

I was hoping they'd have went away from Android and did a windows or linux device like the rest of the industry. Would make it way more useful. And honestly why don't they update the 6 to android 14 or 15? It can run it. But meh. They really should've made it an arm headless laptop like the new BrailleNote or Blazie BT Braille. Honestly I hate that I'm saying this but if I was to buy a new notetaker I'd get the BrailleNote evolve sense it's built on windows and will be far more capable. One thing that would've made the android devices especially the mini BrailleSense way more useful is to have cellular ability so you could use it as a phone. But meh.

this device, like most braille devices is so pointless, the only one i would ever consider using is an orbit reader, the breef time i had my orbit reader 20 it worked well till it just stopped charging one day, it was so easy to pair and just go, no messing around in confusing menus just to get it paired like the mantis or other braille displays

Dude, the orbit was good in its simplicity, but for long reading, doing presentations and such, the refresh rate slowed me down and made it harder to concentrate instead of easier, and after about 30 minutes of reading, my fingers couldn't take any more of those dots. Way to firm for my liking, and for what I mostly use Braille for, show notes for an online radio show, the Orbit was just too loud. Now, I have both a Focus 40 (as part of my ElBraille) and one of the NLS e-readers. That tiny nls e-reader is awesome. I don't really need much more than that. The ElBraille is underpowered for today's computers, but for just browsing, documents, the occasional radio work, it works pretty well. I think I would enjoy a play with some of the newer stuff coming out, just to see how they implement stuff, but can't say I really need it. Between my phone and laptop, plus stuff like the meta glasses, I'm pretty set. Plus like others have already said, these devices are way too expensive for most people to ever afford on their own. I would have never gotten the ElBraille had I not known someone who had it sitting around, didn't care for it, didn't use it, and was able to make a trade for it. Otherwise, nope.

The only thing I can add is that the book sense reader is very nice!

I'm not that stoked. Just another notetaker that will go unnoticed. People really gotta start making this s**t cheaper if they want the average blind braille reader to care. And I buy my own phones directly, no contracted pay as I go nonsense where I'm locked into something. The fact notetakers are still being developed at all is staggering, especially at current prices. Would rather have a dumb braille display that interfaces with anything and go from there.
Basically, if prices were not ridiculous I might give habbf a thought to buying one. Otherwise, nah. Would rather go on a swanky vacation or buy a custom guitar, something that'll outlast me.

Notetakers should really be called an agency industry. Nobody else can take them seriously. Most people, I should say. There's always someone who can drop 5 g's on something and not feel the burn.

But small size note taker (in terms of software).
Humanware BI 40x is the best braille display I've ever had from both a material but also software POV. It does just enough things but not ever pretend to replace x or y, just to be a standalone complementary device when needed. I am at my 5th year in college and would have loved to have this earlier.
IMO the focus 5 from vispero is too limitted plus I don't like the focus (coming from a 4th).
When you do presentation, the worse thing that can happen is bluetooth randomly disconnecting... During said presentation. A minimum note taker is good.
In terms of software orbit do the best, their update files are less than 1mb, it's actually good craft low level code that's rarer nowadays. A friend of mine was able to load a 15-20m characters integral pure .txt file in the orbit in seconds and it was able to go to the beginning / end without any delay. While the stream 3 from hw is a downgrade over the stream 2 it can't even load a 1m file while the vrstream2 was able to load a 6m without issues.

I had a BrailleSense 6 and traded it for a brailliant BI-40-X. The BrailleSense 6 always lagged no matter what I did. This was when using the word processor, a custom app made by Selvas. It also lagged in every single edit field I typed in, to the point where it was basically unusable for serious work.
On speaking to my distributer, Sight and Sound, I was told if I wanted someone to look at it it would have to be sent to Korea . With due understanding, I sent it off. Eight weeks later, on receiving the device again, nothing what so ever had changed. I was told to keep the device updated. When the software version 3.0 came out, I updated. This time, surely, the bug had been fixed. Others online had been talking about this, it wasn't just me. The bug had not, in fact been fixed. It was as laggy as ever.
I had payed around £4000 for the privilege of having a device that was not fit for purpose and any time I wanted to get it looked at or repaired in any way, I would be waiting for weeks before I got it back.
Ever since I've switched to using the Brailliant, I've not looked back. A braille display and laptop / phone / iPad / whatever is for me a far more flexible combination. It's also nice knowing that humanware actually fix bugs and are, in my experience, very responsive to feedback. They also have offices and repair centres across continents rather than insisting devices are sent to Korea no matter what the problem is.

I think the BrailleNote Evolve is a significantly better deal. They seem to be around the same price with the BrailleSense being more expensive. First, if you want to do something beyond the BrailleSense-specific applications, you can use Android apps, but on the Evolve you can use Windows programs. In the situations notetakers are often used, in school or work, for creating and working with documents, email, web applications, etc, Windows programs seem better than Android apps. For example, Microsoft Word is very accessible and efficient to use, while Google Docs or Word on Android are harder to use and less accessible for complex documents. Also, a lot of complex web applications probably work better on Windows than Android. Regarding the built-in applications, the BrailleSense 7 comes with custom applications written by Selvas, while the Evolve uses mostly standard Microsoft applications with add-ons written by HumanWare to make them easier to use. I think if you are creating or editing advanced documents with a lot of formatting, Microsoft Word is more likely to support what you need than the Selvas word processor, and the Selvas email program will be less responsive to breaking changes, such as the change to Gmail authentication that broke Gmail on the BrailleNote Touch for a while, than Outlook would be. I am not sure the BrailleSense 7 supports creating PowerPoint presentations at all with the custom Selvas software, and if not Microsoft PowerPoint on the Evolve would be much easier to use than Google Slides or PowerPoint on the BrailleSense 7. In addition, in five years or more if both devices stop being updated, at least on the Evolve you can install Linux or just keep using Windows 11 since usually software continues supporting old Windows for a while, while the BrailleSense 7 would probably become very slow and support much less software.

I have the SensePlayer and I really like it, so Android is not always bad for assistive technology devices, but I think for a device that is supposed to act as your main computer, Windows or Linux is much better. I think I would also choose the BT Braille over the BrailleSense 7, because if the Blazie software does not do what you need, you can use a Linux GUI program, a web app, or even the command line, and an Android device is much less flexible. You can also write your own software for the BT Braille and they encourage it, while Selvas will probably not publish their SDK allowing direct Braille, speech, and keyboard access, meaning the software you write for it will be limited to the interface their Android screen reader provides. The BT Braille also has many of the same benefits over the BrailleSense 7 as the Evolve, like it will run web apps better, and LibreOffice is better than Google Docs on Android although not as good as Microsoft Office on Windows.