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## I bought the new Pomera DM250
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Posted by Pixelpunker
Oct 13, 2022 at 01:37 PM
# I bought the new Pomera DM250
The Kingjim Pomera is a line of dedicated word processors mainly for the Japanese market. But the Pomera DM250 (and it‘s predecessor the DM200) can switch the UI and keyboard layout to English. (If you happen to enter underlined characters hit Alt+Space to turn off Japanese input. )
I’ve been intrigued by the Freewrite Traveler but found it too expensive and limited. The Pomera on the other hand allows for full editing of your drafts. Until now there was a total show stopper though, as it only supported Japanese and ASCII encodings. The DM250 finally supports Unicode (all text files are saved in UTF-8 with BOM). While the keyboard layout is English only you can enter your French accent marks and German umlauts with a character palette accessible by the hotkey combination Alt+F4.
With half the height of a typical notebook the Pomera looks a bit like the Psion and Windows CE palmtops of old. The keyboard is full-size and can also be used as a Bluetooth keyboard for your phone. It is very quiet to type on. The display is very readable and features 10 levels of brightness and an optional dark mode. I haven‘t tested this but the web site claims a battery life of 24 hours while in use. The official soft case also functions as a wrist wrest which is a nice touch.
You open up the Pomera or push the power button, and in exactly 4 seconds a blank page appears (faster if it was in sleep mode) and you simply start writing (or continue writing as it has auto-saved your last draft). This is about the same time it takes to launch iA Writer on my Windows computer. The software is as snappy as a command line based text editor but without the learning curve. In fact, there is no visible UI unless you press the menu key. All menu commands can also be executed with configurable shortcut keys. These mostly adhere to established standards, like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V etc.
## The outliner
Pomera features a built-in two-pane outliner for longer documents. Any heading marked with one or more # characters up to 10 levels deep becomes part of your outline. To navigate or manipulate the outline press Ctrl+Tab. Outline items can then be expanded or collapsed with the cursor keys, moving up or down moves to different headings in your outline and the main text. To indent or outdent items choose Ctrl+Left or Ctrl+Right, moving a heading up or down with Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down will move all subheadings as well as any text paragraphs belonging to that heading with it. The same logic applies when cutting / pasting headings in the Outline view. Finally, there are Collapse All and Expand All commands in the edit menu.
You can also split the display into a left and right pane either to compare two documents or to give you two views into a longer document. This is useful when referring to something in your text mentioned earlier or when copying and pasting between two sections. There is also a scenario mode for screenplays but this only works in Japanese.
There are other word processing basics covered, like search and replace across files. Within one document you can also search with regular expressions. You can also save text snippets or phrases. A unique feature is the calendar with a monthly or weekly view to use the Pomera for journaling. There are a couple of dictionaries installed as well.
You can set up an email account for sending any text file via email with one button press. After sending the email the WiFi connection is automatically turned off to save battery. So technically and psychologically you are disconnected from the Web and it’s distractions once again. This functionality also opens up the road to setting up workflows like printing if your printer has an email functionality or triggering the conversion of Markdown to PDF.
You can sync your files via WiFi (you connect TO the Pomera Wifi access point for this, no direct internet access), USB or swapping SD cards. Shorter texts can also be sent via QR code.
Even without an internet connection a typical PC invites endless tinkering and needs maintenance. The Pomera on the other hand can be completely understood in one or two hours. After that you can simply focus on your writing.
Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 13, 2022 at 03:26 PM
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this! Its e-ink predecessor also had the outliner mode, but few people knew it was there. This looks like a great little device.
Posted by Darren McDonald
Oct 19, 2022 at 08:53 AM
Also, with the DM250, you can send files via email using a gmail account. There is a security setting in gmail that you have to change in order for this method to work. Here is a link to a (Japanese) website that takes you through how to change the setting. (The Japanese manual that comes with the DM250 does not explain this.):
Follow the 10 slides in the middle of the this blog. In summary, ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on in the gmail settings (Slide 5). Beneath the toggle for two-factor authentication is the “Application Password” (Slide 6). Select this and after you have signed in (Slide 7), select the final option the pull-down menu (Other: input name) (Slide 8) and type in a name, “Pomera” for example (Slide 9), and you get the final screen (Slide 10) which gives you a password. This is the password you use on the DM250 for the gmail account. (I am translating from Japanese, so some of the terminology may be different. But you should be able to follow the instructions.)
Hope this helps anyone who was having trouble trying to set up the email-file feature like I did.
Pixelpunker wrote:
# I bought the new Pomera DM250
>
>You can sync your files via WiFi (you connect TO the Pomera Wifi access
>point for this, no direct internet access), USB or swapping SD
>cards. Shorter texts can also be sent via QR code.
>
Posted by Pixelpunker
Oct 21, 2022 at 07:38 AM
I’d like to add something I found out about the character palette for all those non-english speakers.
The first thing I did was change the shortcut for the character palette from Alt+F4 to F1. While the character palette is open you can simply type two or three hexadecimal digits and then return to enter a specific character. Most european languages only need two digits.
E.g: to enter the Trademark character ® : F1, A, D, Enter
I can do that blindly so I am almost as fast as if the keyboard layout included the letter. In case the same character is needed multiple times simply type F1, Enter.
Posted by Reder
Dec 15, 2022 at 02:00 AM
I just want to say “thank you” to Pixelpunker for sharing that Pomera DM250 supports English UI and keyboard. I was always interested in Pomera but the Japanese UI scared me away.
After reading your post, I decided to get one. I have only been using it for 3 days but I can claim it’s a dream device to me.