What do people think about the braille note evolve?

I have to agree with Justin, while the GeekCalm seems like an interesting setup, I don't see very many people doing this. That sounds quite literally like a niche market, for the true geeks out there. I think most people would rather just have a laptop, that they can fold in store away when not needed, take out and unfold to use, rinse and repeat. Granted, you are correct, that screens are expensive. The GeekCome, including taxes, is just shy of $1300, and the accessories plus taxes, bring the price up to just a touch over $1600 (USD). From your post above, just shy of $400 get you less storage, but a dedicated screen.
Hats off to you for coming up with an alternative portable computing method, I just don't think I would ever want to do this, but to each their own... 🤠

I've used the Braille Note mpower in 5th grade until7th grade, then used the apex at the tail end of 7th grade until I graduated high school in 2018. There were numerous times where the word processor would crash on me because it couldn't keep up with me typing fast. Seeing how the evolve is just plain old windows with presumably some modified menus or whatever, I assume with Word as the word processor, that it doesn't crash. As a bonus, if I am thinking of this correctly, you can get the voices from the apex on the evolve through the Best Speech NVDA addon, or the Eloquence voices you can buy for windows. As another bonus, if you have an interactive fiction interpreter, you could basicly play those old games you would have played on the old Windows CE braille notes. There is one concern, and someone I was talking to hopes that windows isn't locked down to the point where the end user can't update it. Overall, it would be cool to own, and if I can't do that, it would be cool to have some time to where I can look at it.

There will be a webinar about the BrailleNote Evolve on April 7 at 8:00 PM EST. https://bits.groups.io/g/events/message/479

My thoughts on the BrailleNote Evolve are probably the same from others on this forum, so here it goes.

I just received a promotional email this morning from Humanware regarding their BrailleNote Evolve. It is great they've integrated their braille notetaker experience into Windows 11 and the Keysoft experience is still around. However there are some things I am concerned about with this device. Yes there's NVDA support, however they heavily emphasize the fact that It comes with JAWS, the most expensive screen reading package to date. According to Humanware, your new device comes with six months of JAWS, and that's it. From my understanding, the user will continue to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, to keep their JAWS / braille first experience up-to-date. This was not an issue with the BrailleNote mPower or Apex, or any other braille notetaker I've used over the years before finally using my laptop and phone to do everything. For instance, I didn't have to pay thousands just to keep my Braille Sens U2 functioning normally. Regarding the BrailleNote Evolve, even though I said earlier it has NVDA support, how well will that work? I cannot efficiently navigate my computer with a Braille keyboard alone as opposed to using a standard QWERTY keyboard, which in my opinion would make this braille first experience useless to me. In addition, has Humanware restricted the use of Keysoft to those who use JAWS? If so, if I wanted to buy a notetaker for myself for some kind of reason I definitely wouldn't be going with that option. In that case I'd rather go with an Android approach such as the Braille Sense 7 or the Orbit Speak.

So, what I can say about a Braille first approach is that it's not too bad. What I'm wondering is if there will be some sort of NVDA addon made for it, to increase compatibility? If so, what would stop me from just throwing that same addon on to my ElBraille?
I was able to get a pretty good Braille first setup going using the ElBraille with NVDA instead of JAWS, but it took a lot of work, and would have not been possible at all without an external keyboard, be it bluetooth or corded. If they made an addon, and with that addon, added in a bunch of Braille shortcuts, or were to override the default NVDA Braille shortcuts for the same ones used with JAWS, this could make the switch a little less hard for a lot of users. I made it happen due to sheer stubbornness, and because I didn't really care for JAWS in the first place, but a lot of people probably would have decided it wasn't worth it.

JAWS will be completely optional. It sounds like they're using a heavily customized version of NVDA to power the experience, but you'll also have full access to the power of a real Windows environment to do anything you want. Hopefully you'll be able to install the upstream version of NVDA to work in Windows, as I have a suspicion the version they use to power Keysoft will always be slightly behind.

Interesting thought. Would end up making it like samsung talkback vs google talkback if they did it that way, in which case, it would not be ideal. Think they'd do better releasing an addon, but doubt they would, for that very reason, wanting to keep it closed source and inaccessible to people with other similar products, because rather than help you get the best out of stuff you already have, they want you to buy the new latest and greatest. Now granted, if I had those kind of funds, I'd love to, but when I already have a perfectly good laptop, plus the ElBraille, that's gunna be a Nope.

On the latest webinar, they said that their version of NVDA is just standard NVDA plus a few NVDA add-ons. They seemed to imply that you can just update NVDA yourself to the latest version since it’s just a standard NVDA install. They would need to keep their add-ons up to date, but since NVDA only breaks add-on compatibility once per year on .1 updates, this should not be too difficult to do especially since NVDA has betas they can test against before the official release. They also said the Evolve will get standard Windows updates like any other PC. Also the Evolve will ship with 2026.1 of NVDA and they are already testing with that version I think, so when it comes out it will have a version of NVDA that has barely been released.

If that's the case, and they have addons, wonder how hard it would be to get those and put them on another device like I said earlier. I was hoping that was the route they would go.

On today's webinar, they said the battery life will be 5 to 7 hours. I think on the very first webinar they did, they said it would be 8 hours so this is lower than I expected and lower than most other notetakers. Although I suppose for Windows laptops this isn't too bad, although ARM laptops and MacBooks get a lot more.

I honestly don't understand why they didn't just use a snapdragon x elete or other arm x64 processor. It would've given the device more battery life, better thermal efficiency, allowed for a lighter design, and would still be able to run x86 apps. So going with arm would've been the obvious choice in my book. I get that x86 is still the dominant architecture but it won't be for much longer. I'd say most windows users will be on arm64 devices by 2040 assuming the world hasn't ended before then lol

Most Intel laptops get more than 5 hours. And this device is powering a Braille display, not a big visual screen. It says to me they're skimping on battery capacity. Whether it is de to some space limitation, saving cost, or both. I agree I would probably have also chosen Arm. This device was possibly laid out on paper before Arm was truly relevant though, and Windows has a big nearly 20 year stigma of not living up to hype of running on Arm to overcome. So if this was initially conceptualized in 2022 or 2023 I can understand why Intel seemed the safer choice.

Not ARM for this will be a mistake IMO.

I agree it would have been better for them to use ARM processors for battery life. During the webinar, they said that they could not get access to the highest performance Snapdragon X Elite processors, and the ones that they did have access to were lower performance. I'm not sure why this is though because many laptop makers can use Snapdragon processors, not just a small set of companies. Also the Evolve most likely uses a first generation Intel Ultra, not a second or third generation, so maybe they chose the processor early and took a while to design the device after that?