HumanWare is still selling their “perfect braille note taker to connect and engage with your world” — the BrailleNote Touch Plus. Why? I cannot understand how they can still justify selling this product. Is it consumer ignorance? Or is it simply because it’s one of basically three options — which we’ll get to below?
It’s seven years old. It has a 2.2 GHz processor, which is, let’s say, on the low end for 2025. It ships with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage, with no customization options. You can insert an SD card, but that’s not the same as having fast internal SSD storage.
Basically, people have three options for an accessible tablet with Braille:
I’m not going to go as far as to say the third option is better than the Touch Plus. Any modern tablet over $400 will be faster, with more storage and RAM, but the Touch Plus probably still beats any Android tablet in terms of software. But pair the cheap tablet with a Brailliant BI 20X (around $2,300), and you’ll still be up to $1,500 cheaper than the BrailleNote Touch Plus 18. If you prefer a larger display, a BI 40X (about $3,300) can be roughly $2,000 cheaper than the 32-cell Touch Plus.
The BrailleSense 6 is slightly more expensive (about $100 more for the 32-cell and $300 more for the 20-cell compared to the 18-cell Touch Plus), but from what I’ve seen, it’s worth the price difference.
The Touch Plus launched with a Snapdragon 820 processor, which was already a generation or two behind at the time, depending on how you frame it. For a device intended to remain relevant for years, that’s a serious flaw. It shipped with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage — decent for 2018, but not future-proof.
Mind you, it was a huge improvement over the original Touch, which had much older hardware and sluggish performance with a chip from 2011. But selling a $4,000+ tablet in 2025 with the specs of the Touch Plus is hard to justify. I don’t expect users to run local reasoning LLMs on it, but even for basic tasks, performance can lag: near the end of my BrailleNote usage journey, I sometimes saw up to a full second delay between pressing a key and getting a response.
At launch, HumanWare loudly promoted Play Store access — that was the big reason to choose Android. But over time, more apps stopped supporting Android 8.1 (the latest version at the time of launch, surprisingly). A prime example is BARD Mobile, which requires Android 9 or later. Yes, you can sideload older APKs, but that’s not a practical long-term solution for most users.
“*Please note that some third-party applications available on the Play Store may not work due to the Android operating system.”
HumanWare has acknowledged technical reasons for not updating Android. What’s frustrating is the complete lack of a new BrailleNote generation. By choosing Android, they accepted the need to update hardware periodically — yet the gap between the Touch Plus and now is the longest in BrailleNote history.
To make matters worse, HumanWare reportedly lost Google certification for the Touch Plus, which removes Play Store access. Sideloading remains possible, but no average user will be comfortable downloading APKs, enabling Developer Options, and installing apps manually.
If you haven’t figured out my opinion by now: you should probably seek medical attention. (Please don't take this seriously—you never know with people nowadays). Your money is better spent on a modern tablet plus a quality Braille display (e.g. Orbit, Brailliant, or Mantis). HumanWare makes some excellent products, but their notetaker line isn’t one of them.
Please share your comments — I’d love to hear your thoughts on this whole shabang.