I was indirectly introduced recently to the Pomera DM250, a Japanese ‘mobile typewriter’. I quite liked the look of it and, as a writer, its utility. It’s now being made available to a global audience officially rather than via eBay importers.

So the question is, can this NC100 survive Pomera’s arrival?

As I mentioned before, the NC100 is Amstrad’s 1992 attempt to make a portable computer. It was a time when the few laptops on sale had microscopic LCD screens and colossal price tags. The £199 NC100 was branded a ‘computer’ but was actually a personal productivity appliance majoring on word processing.

Enter the Pomera from Japanese stationery brand King Jim. Just like the NC100, it’s a compact portable computer sold as a word processing device. 2025’s answer to the Amstrad has a backlit 7in TFT LCD, notebook-style keys, WiFi connectivity and a USB-C rechargeable battery. It has been designed to be small and light enough to slip into your satchel so you can whip it out and work any time, any place.

The Pomera is a 26x12cm clamshell, but opened out flat it’s 26x24cm, not so very much smaller than the Amstrad, but two-thirds the weight: 620g to 930g.

Although I like my secondhand NC100 very much, and have grown accustomed to its stubborn mechanical keyboard and quirks, the Pomera is so much better. The NC100’s one great weakness is its screen. The number of characters shown but more specifically the lack of a backlight limit its utility considerably. It could be no other way — that’s what LCDs were like in the 90s — and you expect to make sacrifices working with retro tech. With the NC100 it’s a trade off you have to make. I can and do use the NC100 as a word processor — I’m writing this post on it. Scrolling to a different part of the document is a pain, but not an insufferable one. No, the single key issues is the lack of a backlight, which makes the machine virtually impossible to use in medium to low lighting conditions.

I manage, of course, by carefully positioning myself so there’s the best possible light coming over my shoulders, but that’s not always possible, and I find myself often squinting to see the writing in front of me.

To be fair, this may prove an issue for the Pomera, but the other way round: backlit screens to not work well in very bright conditions. But I suspect I’m more likely to encounter lighting issues with the NC100 than the Pomera.

Size matters too. The NC100 display is approximately one fifth of the face of the device; for the Pomera it’s half.

I can’t yet compare the WP software on the two devices, but the NC100’s is pretty good, with formatting showing up on screen and a decent mechanism to mark and move blocks of text. Cut and paste it isn’t, but that’s not surprising given its era. The only bugbear is the cursor keys (no mouse here, of course) that don’t move the cursor the way I expect it do, specifically try to go beyond the start or end of a line and the cursor stays put; it doesn’t move to the next or previous line.

But it’ll do me a word count and a basic spelling check, which for this kind of work — I’ll pull content across to another machine for final editing and uploading — is sufficient. Even the archaic PCMCIA SRAM storage expansion isn’t really a problem because it’s so easy to transfer what you’ve written by serial link — and USB-to-serial cables are so much cheaper than PCMCIA SRAM cards on eBay.

For text work, speed is not a concern. A 4.6MHz Z80 is quite sufficient I have found.

No, as fond as I am of the NC100, its screen is just a mite too weak in comparison with that of a modern display. And this is why — assuming a reasonable price; it’s TBD but likely around £250 — I shall give the Pomera a try.