The Hemingwrite cloud-synced typewriter now has a real Kickstarter campaign

The Hemingwrite cloud-synced typewriter now has a real Kickstarter campaign ,

The Hemingwrite word processing machine is a dubious beast in some ways: it's got a terrible name, for one thing, and its creators initially promised a rock-solid piece of hardware that can last decades but will also connect seamlessly to cloud services, a high bar for any piece of electronics. But as we spend more and more of our lives communicating in text, it's worth thinking about how the things we write on determine how we write. On that note, the Hemingwrite (conceived as an experimental prototype) is now officially on Kickstarter, with plans to release it in September of 2015.

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A 4-pound distraction elimination system

The Hemingwrite is an updated typewriter: a slightly chunky keyboard housed in 4 pounds of plastic and aluminum, with a small e-paper screen. Like a typewriter, it's designed to minimize endless edits, eliminate distractions, and let users write whenever and wherever they want without worrying about saving battery life or damaging a fragile device. Unlike a typewriter, it's designed to then sync that writing via Wi-Fi to a variety of online platforms, primarily Dropbox, Google Docs, Evernote, Apple's iCloud, and Microsoft's OneDrive. The battery is supposed to last for a month or more with "typical usage," although we're not sure what most people's typical use time on an electronic typewriter is.

For a device that's meant to strip out as many features as possible, the Hemingwrite includes a few very nice little additions. A status bar below the main screen will show you your word count or let you set a timer for writing, and if you happen to use Markdown, it can automatically convert it to normal formatting during syncing. A software development kit could let people add custom plugins, like integration with other popular services like Scrivener. The keys use Cherry MX switches, the gold standard for most modern mechanical keyboards. And reassuringly, the developers show off an actual working prototype, though they say they're "early in the manufacturing process."

The major catch is cost. The cheapest possible price for the Hemingwrite is $349 on Kickstarter, and only 25 people can get it; the standard pledge for one is $399, and the retail price (if it reaches that point) will be $499. You could buy a real computer or a selection of vintage typewriters with that money. The Kickstarter, meanwhile, has backed off an earlier pitch: that the Hemingwrite would be built well enough to "last generations." This was always going to be a hard claim to deliver on, so dropping it is a good move, but it does make the project a bit less ambitious.

Hemingwrite's Kickstarter is asking for $250,000, which will go towards polishing the design and getting it manufactured on a larger scale. It will run through January 23rd.