I bought a stylish Pomera ‘writer deck’ and came away disappointed

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Tiny and portable
Incredibly focused writing
Easy-to-read screen

Cons

Far too expensive
Cramped, cheap keyboard
Transferring text is cumbersome
SD card slot is picky

Our Verdict

While the Pomera is stylish, portable, and extremely focused for writers, it’s dragged down by a poor keyboard and cumbersome text transfer options. It’s simply far too expensive for what you get.

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I wrote a novel ten years ago. I’ve been trying to write a second one ever since. I started about half a dozen times, and never got much further than halfway through the first draft.

Obviously things are a lot different in 2025 than in 2015. Both for me personally and [gestures at everything]. Like a lot of you reading this, my attention span has been absolutely shattered by modern video and social media. Even when I’m not on my massive, triple-screen desktop, I’m parallel processing between work, media, and personal stuff. I often find myself playing video games and watching videos at the same time, and I know that I’m not alone — there’s a whole range of videos out there that are now designed to be “second screen content,” and I don’t just mean music with those little visualizers thrown on top of them.

KingJim

In an attempt to kick myself in the ass and actually get back to fiction writing, I’ve been looking for something that will facilitate more focused, long-form text input. My first idea was a super minimal laptop. Something like ye olde netbooks, where the smaller size and limited capability would minimize my trips to YouTube or email checking. The problem is that even a cheap laptop can run a browser these days, and a handful of browser tabs is all I need to get off on a mental tangent. I needed something like netbooks used to be, designed for doing one thing at a time, and that one thing couldn’t be particularly taxing from a technical standpoint.

Logitech Keys-to-Go 2 liegt geöffnet auf einem blauen Tisch

Foundry

A tablet plus a Bluetooth keyboard is closer. I’ve tried this before, but found it less than ideal, if only because that setup has a lot of stuff to carry and wasn’t particularly easy to use unless there was a standard chair and table around — it was hard to use in a laptop form factor. Ditto for the keyboard plus a phone; my Galaxy Fold is better for portability, but even the super-tiny Logitech Keys to Go 2 doesn’t solve the usability issues, and, if anything, my intense familiarity with my phone makes me even more likely to multitask on it than on a tablet.

I thought back to some of the devices I’ve used in the past, and those I merely admired from afar. The

">Sony Vaio P, a teeny, tiny netbook design that skewed a little more premium while remaining super-portable, kept popping up in my head. This 2009 design was super-portable, stylish, and its footprint was barely bigger than its keyboard thanks to a shrunken-down pointer mechanism and a super-wide screen.

It wasn’t amazing by the standards of the day, perhaps because it had a less-than-optimal combination of a premium price and low power. People wanted it to be a lot more capable than it was, especially considering that it ran Windows Vista, and perhaps that made it seem like a poor value. But in terms of form factor, it seemed retroactively perfect for my needs: laptop-shaped with a hinge for using on, well, a lap, and with a small screen that could only really handle one window at a time.

Pondering on these devices made me go even further back in my memory. I recalled that in the group writing sessions for NaNoWriMo I attended in Colorado Springs, a couple of people had unique little gadgets, bridging the gap between a full laptop and ">something like an old-fashioned word processor. Word processor in the hardware sense, not the software sense — essentially electronic keyboards with a tiny screen and a bit of memory for storing text files, and that was it. The spirit of these gadgets lives on in the “focused writer,” which you might have seen from Freewrite. These gadgets are interesting, and theoretically exactly what I’m looking for.

But I haven’t bought any of the Freewrite models. Something about them feels so performative to me, to say nothing of the huge price for the hardware. The purposefully tiny screens and retro embellishments don’t appeal, nor does the relatively large size — if I’m lugging around something that big I’d feel really dumb for not just using a laptop.

To summarize months of vague poking around the internet, especially on places like Reddit’s /r/writerdeck community, I found a little digital typewriter called the Pomera. More specifically, the KingJim Pomera DM250.

This thing looked like exactly what I had been craving: a tiny, portable form factor essentially the same size as a small keyboard, and a super-focused custom software setup that does anything you want to, as long as you only want to write text. The screen is a little small, and I feel like a much wider one could easily fit in there, but it makes more sense in the legacy of this device family from the Japanese design company. A previous version of the Pomera looks like an evolution of the old Palm Pilot keyboards. I imagine that at least some of the parts in this most recent model are the same, explaining the large bezels around the 7-inch LCD screen.

And yes, it is LCD, not e-ink as you might think from the photos, and is the case for the Freewrite. That gives it a little distinction. One, it’s much faster than a typical e-ink screen, which is advantageous for writing, if only because you don’t need to wait for a slow refresh for each letter to appear. It’s also a color screen, though so far the only color I’ve seen is the Word-style red squiggly lines under any word that the built-in dictionary doesn’t recognize.

Michael Crider/Foundry

It also has some downsides. The screen is a little more reflective than I’d expect from e-ink, though with high contrast and a bright backlight, it’s not that big of a deal in regular use. The battery life is also a lot lower than I’d expect from a device using an e-ink screen… though at 20 hours, and with easy USB-C recharging, you’re unlikely to get range anxiety unless you’re using this thing on a multi-day camping trip.

The screen isn’t the most crucial hardware component of the Pomera. In fact, I’d say for the highly specialized target audience, it might be the least important. Pride of place must go to the keyboard for something where typing and writing is the main focus. And I have to say, it could be a lot better.