When I told him I was writing The Great American Novel, Uncle P. gave me NTS's DreamWriter T400. This smaller sibling of the DreamWriter 200 weighs only 2.2 pounds (with battery pack), and fits next to my pile of notes and cup of cider on even the smallest table in Expresso Corner. The lithium battery lasts up to 8 hours which is more time than I usually have.

There's only one problem with using this thing in a cafe: it's too ugly to be seen in public! The neon blue and green function keys and their corresponding strips across the top all but beg someone to beat you up and take your lunch money. But I want a word processor not a date.

DreamWriter has some nice features. The eight-line screen is not too unreadable even though it isn't backlit. It saves as you go. I'm in an area where the power company is an angry god who's mission is to vaporize data, so this feature is much appreciated. The 80 pages of memory can be upgraded to 500 with a PCMCIA memory card (or so saith the manual). To save the battery, it shuts off if you ignore it for more than three minutes. Text is recalled from working memory just by turning the thing back on, but looking down at a blank screen annoys me. Storing, retrieving, and deleting files is so simple even I can do it without the manual. Which is a good thing because the manual is even worse than most (and that's saying a lot). It isn't so easy to cut and paste but it's do-able in a round about sort of way. What do you expect when you're mouseless? Printing directly from the DreamWriter is gracefully simple.

Like I said, in most ways, it's a friendly little critter. Unfortunately, it commits two unpardonable sins. First it has a wonky insert line feature which makes the word wrap take a nap every time you insert text mid-line. The edited line dangles outside the margins. You can fix this problem, sort of, by using a manual return. Of course, then, you have to correct the rest of the paragraph. It took me two days to figure this out because, for reasons apparent only to the designers, you can only perform this work around operation when the insert function is on. Uncle P. tells me that this machine's predecessor, Tandy's WP2, didn't do anything nearly this stupid. But they improved the system. Thanks guys. If I can't edit one line easily, I really don't care if I can move four of them around. If it weren't such a pain to upload to a PC, the word wrap problem wouldn't be such a big deal. Loading DreamLink, the conversion disk, is not a self evident procedure nor did it come with directions. Once installed, it failed to transfer the first three lines of a 7KB file. A "smart" keyboard difficult to upload or edit just doesn't cut it.

The organizer functions are also a mixed bag. They include a calculator, calendar, scheduler, world clock and address book. All of these are easily accessible except the scheduler which took me half an hour to even think about programming and is generally clunky. The world clock has a cute, but gimmicky interface.

The DreamWriter was designed to be an educational tool, making it possible to minimize the cost of providing each child in the classroom with word processing capabilities. I applaud the sentiment, but I find it difficult to perform even the most basic functions (editing and uploading) and I have a little more patience than your average nine-year-old. Besides, the nine-year-old I showed it to thinks it's real ugly. If you're looking for a gift for your favorite niece, skip the DreamWriter and go for the boxing nuns.

- Lee Ann Kinkade [12/12/97]