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

Also the Orbit Flow is really cool. Its a 40 cell display with three buttons on each side, with maybe half an inch of blank metal above it. It has no battery or keyboard and connects with USB C. I could see putting this in front of my keyboard and having a very comfortable setup, a lot better than putting a display with a Perkins keyboard in front of a QWERTY keyboard because the Braille is a lot closer to the keyboard with the Flow. It also has cursor routing keys of course. #NFB26

@emassey0135 Wish it had bluetooth since that is expected on a braille display in 2026. Or some kind of wireless dongle or wireless anything for connection. That is the only issue I have, otherwise I thin k it is definitely needed in the blindness tech space.