At their exhibit booth, Orbit Research told me that the Optima should be coming out about a year from now. I asked if they were certain and they said they were pretty confident about it this time. Also the Optima should have twice the battery life of the BrailleNote Evolve (8 to 12 hours). And it will always have the latest processors Framework offers in their mainboards, unlike the BrailleNote Evolve which will be stuck on the Intel Ultra 125U. The Optima will have a custom editor and book reader but I think that was it for the custom applications. Everything else will be standard Windows. All of this is much better than the Evolve in my opinion. They said they are considering a Perkins model but they will release the QWERTY one first before thinking about that. #NFB26

@emassey0135 All of this is absolutely true, and you may ask me questions also, especially about the software. If you ask me about hardware, it doesn't mean I won't answer, it just means I'll probably need some time to ask people who know more. thanks for your interest!

@menelion Okay, thank you! For the software, what will the editor be like? Is it going to be something like notepad, or a Braille editor with QWERTY Braille entry and contracted Braille editing? What formats will the book reader support, and will it support downloading from libraries like Bookshare? What else beyond standard Windows will the Optima have, besides the Vocalizer voices?