Well, I now have the touch. It's only been a day, and I can say it's more worth the money than any braille device on the market. The case is durable. The cover is nylon, with the keyboard magnetically attaching to the screen if you wish to use it. The unit is very responsive. Here's the deal with the Braillenote Touch version of Acapela. You'll have Heather by default, and you can have one secondary voice. However, that secondary voice can be any of the Acapela voices available, except for the special effect voices. So the Braillenote Touch is basically your free license to almost any voice available, with the only tradeoff being that only one second voice can be downloaded. You can always replace that voice, though. You aren't stuck to it once you get it. Of course, you can get the normal Acapela and access your purchased voices from there, and the two will get along.

I've only had this thing for two days now, and already know I'll be using this for years to come, which is more than can be said of your traditional notetaker. The Apex came out, still with the same obsolete pocket-pc operating system windows ce, just months before voiceover on the iphones improved, and Android accessibility on the horizon. Yeah, it was quick to fall behind. Braille note Touch is so streamlined, that really keeping Android up and running is half the battle.

Chriss, firstly. 10gb isn't true, wherever that came from. You get 16gb of internal, removable storage. The unit's hard drive is an sd card. No custom shape, just an sd card, located in the battery cavity. I will ask Humanware tech support to make sure of this, though, but I believe this may actually be the first device with expandable storage! They say don't place the Touch's card in the pc, but first of all, that's because you shouldn't make files with the pc then save it to the card. Second, they say it can cause irreparable damage if you do so, but any android user knows that that's because you could technically have root access with that card in anything but the Touch. The average user could be inadvertantly trying to save a file with their computer on the card, but miscalculate, ending up messing up some of the firmware, thus bricking the device. As there's no downloadable firmware of the device unless you count software updates, unless they've done a complete backup of the card, then, true, it would be irreparable, at least until they got a fresh copy of the firmware. Because, after all, it's only a software brick. But what I'm wondering, is what if you imaged the card, then copied it over to another , larger card, making sure it was formatted under the same filesystem as the Touch's sd card, maybe you could potentially get more storage. I"m not taking any chances till Humanware has beeen contacted on this one, because the last thing I want is to do it all for nothing. As for running talkback, talkback does not work. I tried, and it said unfortunately, talkback has stopped. However I really don't think you'd get far with it. There'd be no braille translation, no keyboard support, nothing like that. When you use explore by touch, you're pretty much getting talkback functions inside keysoft. You can still assign two-part vertical gestures. But there are also some extras, like screen describer, a feature sort of like item chooser on the iphone, where you can list all the items on the display and go to a particular item.

Actually it seems like I do only have 10 or so gb. First time I checked. Well, if Humanware does confirm my theory on storage, then we'll have even more available.

And while I do agree that it doesn't make sense why talkback doesn't work, let's also take into account that this screen was made completely from scratch by Humanware, was never designed for talkback to begin with, and was never tested with talkback. So let's take that into account.

Google worked on this whole thing with Humanware. Some of the sounds are talkback ones. Edit mode sounds are new, and the move sound is the nicer, traditional android keyboard move sound.

The question, though, is would a Linux installation accept the sd card, or would that also result in the formatting of the card? And if that's the case, then a mac may even accept it, though I'm not willing to do that as mac can do some things to storage drives behind the scenes if it believes there's a problem with the drive, or it can't read the drive.

I think its sad though how Humanware will probably toss the Apex by the wayside when it still is a good working device. I am not going to trade mine in because it does everything I need it to but it is sad that givin Hunanware's history that soon the Apex will no longer be supported.

Finnturner, that's what I thought. Question is, would it work on a mac system as well, being unix based? And as for the old version of Android, that's something I'm dealing with personally. Security patches will still come in for Kitkat. Google is not Microsoft, they don't toss old operating systems, if they did well then would you still see every single version of android is the sdk? Probably not. That's why a lot of common apps still work on Kitkat. Responsible android developers will test the app on many versions of Android and many different configurations if they can, because, for the record, there are still *some* devices around that are still running outdated versions of Android. If Google themselves thought that Kitkat was a bad idea, they would've made it clear to Humanware that it would be. Kitkat is still a very stable platform to build on. Cyanogen Mod was at its peak in Kitkat, especially with features. Now it seems like just added fluff apart from a few nice features that I still find value in.

also update: KeyTerm, a new terminal application, for the BNTouch has been written by me. anyone want it?

it doesn't have a multi-page list. type command into the box, press E to execute or press the menu button to repeat the last output or exit the app. it'll soon have a proper KeyTerm menu with new terminal, open terminal, print terminal, and setup options. yes, setup options. like keysoft of old