For the first time since 2018, King Jim, a Japanese stationery company, is making one of its distraction-free writing tools available in the US. The Pomera D250 launched in Japan in 2022 and while it looks like a compact laptop, its functionality is limited to being a digital typewriter. There’s no email, no social media, and no web browser. King Jim’s new Pomera D250US is similarly focused on that singular task, but with a keyboard featuring a US layout and an English dictionary for spell checking.
King Jim is making the Pomera D250US available through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has already surpassed its modest $10,000 funding goal. Early backers can preorder one for $374, while full retail pricing will be closer to $499, with shipping expected as early as March 2025. That’s more expensive than the $349 Freewrite Alpha which also minimizes distractions, and pricier than even many Chromebooks. But for those you’ll need to BYOD — Bring Your Own Discipline.
The last Americanized Pomera device, the DM30, featured a six-inch E Ink screen and a compact folding design with a keyboard that split into three sections. The 10.3-inch wide clamshell Pomera D250US doesn’t fold quite as small, but it trades E Ink for a slightly larger seven-inch 1024 x 600 black-and-white LCD display that won’t suffer from slow refresh speeds or ghosting.
Battery life is claimed to be up to 20 hours, and the D250US will be fully booted and ready for you to pound away on its scissor-switch keyboard a few moments after you open its screen.
Although built-in storage is limited to 1.3GB, that’s still enough to store a lot of text. Should you find yourself needing more, storage can be expanded with SD cards up to 32GB in size. Documents can be transferred to a PC over USB-C, or Wi-Fi and Bluetooth using the Pomera Link mobile app available for iOS and Android. If you don’t have access to a wireless network, the DM250US can also convert documents to a series of QR codes (up to 999 of them in succession) offering an alternate and tedious way to transfer text to the mobile app using your smartphone’s camera.
