It has been a long time since we ve welcomed back Earl Harrison, and HIMS, to our BBQ convention coverage microphones. A lot has happened since ATIA20, and a lot has happened to Earl specifically. JJ chats with Earl Harrison, National Account Manager for HIMS, about his return to the company after a scary bout with the virus in November of 2020. The pair then move along to a deep dive of the newly announced BrailleSense 6 notetaker. Topics discussed cover a wide range of questions that were sent in by our fans on Twitter. Tune in, or read below, to learn a physical description of the product and some of the general menu structure. Earl provides some insight into the new approach with the BS6, how this device differs from the Polaris, and he addresses the Android update elephant in the room directly. To learn more about the new BrailleSense 6, including transplant and trade-in options, visit the BS6 product page. Additionally, check out the HIMS YouTube channel as well for up-to-date information about the various lines of HIMS products.
Blind Bargains Virtual Exhibit Hall coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit <www.afb.org/aw>.
Transcript
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Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Orlando, Florida; St. Louis; Las Vegas; Dallas; Sparks, Nevada – everywhere – it’s Blindbargains.com virtual Exhibit Hall coverage brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology; book reviews; and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free monthly online technology magazine. www.AFB.org/AW.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: Welcome to Blind Bargains virtual Exhibit Hall coverage. Not from CSUN, from our homes around the country. If we did have a CSUN though, I’m guessing we would have gathered around the HIMS booth because of a big product announcement that was made – well, of course, it was made over Zoom like everything else this spring. The BrailleSense 6, for lack of a better name, which is the successor to the BrailleSense Polaris.
We’re here to learn all about it with Earl Harrison, National Account Manager for HIMS. Welcome back to the podcast, Earle.
EARLE HARRISON: Hey. Hey. Thanks, J.J. It’s great to be here.
JM: Yeah. And first, before we even get to the 6, I just want to say it is really – so glad to be talking to you after everything that you’ve been through over the past year. Just tell us a little bit about your journey.
EH: My journey started on November 14th when I received a phone call from the hospital where my brother was staying, indicating that he would – had a high likelihood of passing away in the next couple of hours. And he did pass away that day. And three days later, I was in the hospital myself with COVID-19, where I stayed for about ten weeks. Three of those were on a vent and in an induced comma in the intensive care unit, and then -- well, delirium is where the journey really began for me because I don’t remember a thing – anything before that. So it was eight weeks in the hospital, actually, and two weeks in an acute rehab unit, where the geniuses – first of all, you know, the geniuses in the ICU who saved my life. They were the first geniuses. And then I encountered many, many nurses along the way on my way to the acute care unit where I – within three weeks, I went from completely dependent on a mechanical lift to move me around – as simple -- from getting from my bed to a chair to walking independently with my guide dog. So that happened in three weeks’ time.
JM: Wow. That’s an amazing recovery and, again, so glad just to be speaking to you just about regular product stuff again, and – you know – so –
EH: Yeah. It’s great to be here. Actually, I just – I – before I was hospitalized, I actually left HIMS to become a rehab technology instructor at one of the rehab centers here in Minneapolis. And after I returned to work with them, I was extended an opportunity to come back to work for HIMS, and my new boss said, darn it, just to make it – nice – nicer for your listening audience. And I – because I accepted the position with HIMS -- and I’m glad I did because, you know, I – I just wanted to try something new because we weren’t able to go anywhere anyways as, you know, regional manager at the time. And I just thought, well, I just want to do something different.
And then, you know, everything transpired that did, and here I am back again and so happy to be working with HIMS.
JM: And you get to talk about and sell a brand new product. So the BrailleSense 6 is the latest –
EH: Mm-hmm.
JM: -- notetaker from HIMS. I’ll let you go ahead and describe it. Let’s start maybe with the physical layout of things, and then we can kind of –
EH: Yeah.
JM: -- delve into some of the software and other things.
EH: So if you’re familiar with the previous iterations of the BrailleSense line, you’ll be familiar with the BrailleSense 6 because it looks almost the same as the Polaris, almost the same as the U2. That is, it has the Perkins-style keyboard on the top, you got stereo speakers on the upper left and right corners, an LCD display in the middle, your 32-cell Braille Display with the scrolling buttons on either end of the display. The front panel, again, looks very similar to those devices you’re already familiar with. It has the five media buttons that can be assigned to either multimedia Daisy books reader or third-party applications, called App Mode. And of course, we’ve got a lock switch, which allows you to either lock the top panel on the display or on the notetaker, or lock all the keys on the device in case you’re doing something you don’t want to be interrupted.
So it’s really – if you’ve seen a Polaris, it’s thinner than the Polaris, and some of the ports have moved around. We’ve got, on the left side, an SD card slot. And we’ve got –
JM: Is that HC or XC for SD?
EH: Well, I think it’s HC. That’s a good question I don’t know the answer to offhand, but I – I know that people are using all kinds of devices.
JM: Okay.
EH: And the – we’ve got the headphone jack and the microphone jack on the side. On the front, we also have stereo microphones, which sound wonderful. And you can record, of course, with the BrailleSense. On the back, we’ve got one port. This is actually a type A host port. On the side, we’ve got two –
JM: USBA –
EH: Yeah.
JM: -- just to clarify. Yeah.
EH: Did I say – what did I say?
JM: You just said type A, which is –
EH: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
JM: -- correct. I just wanted to clarify.
EH: Okay.
JM: You’re good.
EH: Type A USB port. On the side – on the right side, we’ve got two USBC ports. The back one is for AC and connectivity to your computer, and the front one is for whatever peripherals you want to plug into it. And between those two, we have yet another USB type A port. And – let’s see. What am I forgetting? No. I think that’s just about everything for the physical characteristics.
Now –
JM: There’s a lot more guts on the inside as well.
EH: Yeah. So internally, we’re boasting an octa-core processor. So we got, basically – I don’t know -- double the speed. I don’t know how those things work, but it’s faster. You know, we had a quad-core processor, I believe, in the Polaris. So octa-core processor, and it is snappy. We’ve got 128 gig of internal storage and 6 gig of RAM. So it’s basically twice everything that the Polaris had, and it really shows in its performance. We’re also using Android version 10 at the moment. You know, we know that 11’s out, and actually, has 12 come out yet?
JM: This fall, yes.
EH: This fall. Okay. So that’s about to come out. So whether we update – when we can do the update to 11 or 12 -- remains to be seen, but we had to start somewhere, so we started with 10.
JM: We’ll definitely come back to the Android version thing because that’s a – definitely a hot topic with all the notetakers. But to finish up the hardware discussion, what’s the battery life like?
EH: You know what? It’s – the battery life is amazing. I’m getting probably 20 hours of use.
JM: Wow.
EH: The battery – it really is – you know, I treat it like my phone. At the end of every day, I plug in my phone, I plug in my notetaker. And I do some pretty processor-intensive stuff throughout the day with it, so – in the testing of it and everything. So it’s impressive.
The initial upgrade that the U.S. office offered for – you know, existing users of the Polaris included a second battery. But really, I mean, you don’t need a second battery.
JM: 13 megapixel camera as well.
EH: 13 megapixel. Mm-hmm.
JM: So you can use that for, I assume – do you have any – do you use OCR apps with that or other stuff with the camera?
EH: Yeah. I’ve actually very successfully used KNFB Reader with it. I’ve used Be my Eyes. I’ve tested Envision AI with the camera. The only thing I wish we could do – and believe me, I think this is on the horizon – is be able to assign a second camera to those apps so you – when using those applications, the assumption is that you’re using a phone, so your – you only need the one camera. And I think we need to approach some of these developers and say, hey. You know, with our product, you can actually plug in a USB camera and use it as a secondary camera, in which case, it could be mounted on a stand, and you can use it as your OCR solution.
JM: So you do have the thing plugged into your board there so we can kind of hear how it sounds? I’m assuming it has some similarity to the Polaris, but I’ll just give you a moment or two, if you want to highlight a feature or two or just how it sounds --
EH: Yeah.
JM: -- on the unit.
EH: Yeah. We could do – I mean, the – of course, I was bragging about the speed that the – if you’ve got a Polaris, you notice when you press enter on, say, the word processor and the notepad, it’s usually a couple -- few seconds before it actually gets into the app –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Notepad: N.
EH: Here I am on the notepad, and I’m going to press the enter key right now.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Top of document.
JM: Oh, okay.
EH: And there I am, already at the top of the document.
JM: So that’s one of your built-in apps; correct?
EH: That is one of the HIMS developed apps. We have also got a word processor. And people ask what is the – what are the differences? The notepad is intended for creation, so taking notes on the fly as you’re going, and you can actually open anything. Like, you can open the DOCX file into notepad, and you can open all the same files in both applications. But the word processor is actually reserved for using things like -- you’re running PowerPoint slide show presentations, maintaining the format of documents that people gave you. You can use it as an editor, but the word processor as an editor is not without problems, so we recommend that people use the notepad to take notes.
JM: So you have those built-in apps, but people could also use Google Docs for editing; correct?
EH: They could. It’s accessible. You can certainly make your way around there, but we think that we’ve got a better solution by – you know, if you don’t have to collaborate on a document –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: File manager: F.
EH: I can go back into the file manager.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Flashdisk, 1-3 list item.
EH: And you’ll see that we’ve got – of course, the Flashdisk.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: SD, 2-3 list item.
EH: SD card.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Google Drive, 3-3 list item.
EH: And Google Drive. So you can conceivably just go ahead and go up to your Google Drive –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Backup folder, 1-20 list item.
EH: I’m already in it. I’ve got a backup folder.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Bible folder, 2-20 list item.
EH: This is the Bible folder.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Classroom folder, 3-20 – select -- Daisy folder, 4-20 list item.
EH: So Classroom – so you can go in and if you’ve got a shared folder, you can, you know, download a document, make modifications, and just upload it. You can actually edit – you don’t even have to be in the file manager, you can just do it right from within the word processor or the notepad.
JM: So would that work if you went into one of those folders and got a GDOC file out of there? Would it handle that?
EH: Yes. It’ll – you’ll have to download it first and then work on it on a local machine and then upload it again.
JM: Okay. So is Google Drive the only drive integration, or can you also work with Dropbox as well?
EH: You can, but you would have to use those apps.
JM: Okay. Well, actually, that kind of brings us back full circle, talking about apps and Android. So could – just talk for a minute – the experience – I know a lot of this is similar to the Polaris, but the delineation between the apps that you have built in –
EH: Mm-hmm.
JM: -- and the Android apps that are available, how is that the same or different versus the Polaris?
EH: Okay. So the – well, the Polaris has a lot of applications already built in. If I go back to the main menu –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: File manager: F.
EH: And I’m going to go back into the file manager.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Word processor: W.
EH: Now let’s just go down –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Notepad: N.
EH: -- and highlight some things here.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Email: E.
EH: This is the Email app. If I go into here, I can actually create accounts for POP 3, IMAP, and Exchange. It is now integrated into one application versus the Polaris, which is still -- you know, you’ve got an Exchange app and you’ve got an Email app.
JM: Mm-hmm.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Media: M.
EH: And media – let’s go in here.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Media player: M.
EH: We’ve got the media player that we’ve already had previously –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: FM radio: On.
EH: -- on the Polaris. FM radio, which, of course, you’ve got to have a headphone set plugged in to, you know, serve as your antenna. A lot of people don’t know that.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Podcasts: P.
EH: And we’ve got a podcasts app. So if I go in here –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Creating feed list. Feed list creation complete. Feed: Music on the run: 7-17 list item.
EH: So I’ve got a bunch of podcasts in here.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: KEXP, song of the day: 6-17 list item.
EH: And if I press, you know – of course, first-letter navigation is supported throughout the –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Blind Bargains audio featuring the BB –
JM: Hey.
EH: There’s the –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: -- technology news, interviews, and more: 4-17 list item.
EH: So I can actually go in and listen to all these things and navigate through it. It’s super easy to use. That’s something that is not on the units that are shipping now, but it’ll be in the next release for sure.
JM: The podcast app.
EH: The podcast app, yep. So that’s something that HIMS has done. Oops. Let me go back out to the main menu here. If I can remember how to use –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: File manager: F.
EH: -- my device. Okay. So I’m going to go down to –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Word – note – Email – media: M. Books: K.
EH: So there’s media, there’s books.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Organizer: O.
EH: Let’s go into books.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Books: K. Daisy player: D.
EH: So we got Daisy player.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Document reader: K. Online Daisy: O.
EH: Document reader, which is – which was a popular request from the YouTube users, and Daisy books.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Bookshare download: B.
EH: And there’s an app called Bookshare download, which works like a dream. So you basically log onto Bookshare. You don’t even have to – you know, once you log into the app here, you can just go search through your book and you can set it so it downloads and extracts or downloads, extracts, and opens the book into the HIMS Daisy book reader, then you can read it with either speech or Braille or both. But it’s really just a – really, it is a dream to use.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Task name: Podcast. Feed: Blind Bargains audio featuring the BB – Bookshare download: B.
EH: I’m just closing out of these things here --
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Task name: File manager. Daisy folder: 4-20 list item.
EH: -- one app at a time.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Bookshare download: B. Task name: Notepad. File manager: F.
EH: So I’m going to go back down.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Word – note – E – book -- organizer: O. Web tools: B.
EH: The organizer –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Organizer.
EH: -- now has –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Address manager: A. Schedule manager: S.
EH: Of course, the schedule manager, the address manager, which I synchronize with my Google account, so I can always keep it up to update. So when – I’m on my phone, I have an iPhone, and somebody asks me for somebody’s phone number, I can easily go and look in my address book and come up with that information right on the BrailleSense because it’s already been synchronized.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Data base manager: D.
EH: And we now have, again, another popular request from people, a data base manager that you can – so you can actually set up your own data base app –
JM: That was on the U2 as well, wasn’t it?
EH: That was on the U2 as well. Mm-hmm.
JM: I suppose you get a lot of that – I’ve talked to some customers. This is not a unique to HIMS thing. It’s happened with the other companies as well, where people have been asking for, or they didn’t want to upgrade to the latest model because there was something on the older one that, you know, still worked or worked better or didn’t exist on the new model.
EH: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
JM: It sounds like you’re trying to reconcile at least as much of that as possible –
EH: That’s true.
JM: -- while also keeping it open for the Android apps.
EH: Yeah. It’s true. I mean, we have – we still sell a fair number of U2’s. People just flat out love it as a notetaker, and they don’t really care about the outlying stuff that you can’t do anymore. I care. So I’ve got my Polaris -- at some point, once we fill all these customer orders, will be updated to a 6. I just haven’t had the good fortune of using one from the company at the moment.
Okay. So I’m going to go ahead and jump back out to my main menu –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: File manager: F.
EH: -- and I’m going to go into programs.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Sense Bible: B.
EH: And we’ve also got an option called the Sense Bible. So it’s something that you can actually download and use. If you’re in a congregation and the pastor says – or the priest says turn to such and such page, you know, book, chapter, verse, you can be there faster than your fellow worshipers.
JM: Nice.
EH: It’s really nice. And what else do we have? Oh, my gosh. This – it keeps changing. We’ve got a hotkey for the Google search, which is a text-based Google search. Every search brings up the top 64. I don’t know about you, but I generally don’t, you know – have –
JM: That’s about enough.
EH: -- dig down – yeah. That’s enough. It’s text-based. So you don’t have to deal with the scrolling banners or advertising marquees that you have to deal with in a browser.
JM: And these are all built-in apps that you’ve mentioned. We haven’t even delved into the Android.
EH: These are all built-in apps that HIMS has actually developed as – and there’s obviously going to be a Wiki search built into the next firmware version for the BrailleSense 6.
JM: So you have this, and then if you want to come over to other Android apps, how do you achieve that?
EH: Yeah. It’s actually just a simple matter of –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: File manager: F.
EH: -- going back to the main menu and pressing the letter A for all apps because that’s where all the Google apps and third-party apps live.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: APK Pure.
EH: I’ve got an app called APK Pure for those few apps that I might not be able to download from the Play Store that I can go and kind of sideload through APK Pure.
JM: Oh.
EH: One example of that –
JM: You’re speaking to the geeks. They’ll like that.
EH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one example of that – you know, APK stands for Android package resource. And – is that right? Yeah. I think so. One example is Disney Plus. I can’t use the version that I can get from the Play Store, and I think it’s because we don’t have a screen on this thing. And it knows. So I can just get the APK version. It works just as well for me. If I down arrow through these – this list – and this is just to give you an example of some things that I’ve already downloaded here.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Assistant.
EH: There’s the Google assistant. Don’t bleep at me, please.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Audible.
EH: There’s Audible.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Audio Labs.
EH: Audio Labs, which is an audio editing program that I haven’t successfully been able to use yet, but heard it’s somewhat accessible.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Babble.
EH: Babble, which is – I wanted to improve my Spanish –
JM: Ah.
EH: -- so I got that, but I discovered that that’s not a real good option for accessibility.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: BARD Mobile.
EH: And there’s BARD Mobile.
JM: And that’s because it’s a non-accessible Android app it has nothing to do with the 6 specifically?
EH: Right. So, again, first-letter navigation is supported here. I’ve got BARD Mobile. And if I want to go watch Netflix, I can just press the letter N --
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Netflix.
EH: -- and there I am. I can go and watch movies with audio description, by the way. And if you want to watch it with your family, you can connect it to an HDMI – you know, a smart TV or an HDMI monitor, and they can see it visually while you’re getting the audio description and have full access to the app.
JM: Can you pin these apps to your home screen or some other way, or do you have to go through all apps to get to it?
EH: Well, I mean, really, all that stuff would be from the main menu, pressing the letter A and the letter N –
JM: That’s true.
EH: -- followed by enter.
JM: I mean, that is pretty close. It’s only two keys.
EH: You know. But what you could do – and I actually demonstrated this on one of the tutorials. We developed a lot of short videos for – people have asked for various topics to be covered, and we’re – I think I’ve created like 20 of them so far that are posted on the HIMS YouTube channel. And one of the things that I love is the ability to create macros. So in my sample macro, I said if I want to start my day, I might want to have some background music going, open my Email, open my notepad, and maybe do a Google search, you know, have all those -- those are the most frequently apps that I use on the BrailleSense. So in the morning, I can just press the keystroke to execute a macro followed by the one letter that I got assigned to it, the letter A, and it just launches all those programs, and I’m ready to go and flip back and forth between the different apps.
JM: Very cool. We’ll get a link to some of that up on the show notes at blindbargains.com as well.
I do want to come back to Android versions, since you mentioned it. Android 10 is what this is running. The previous Polaris was running Android 5, which is, you know, a several-year-old version.
EH: Yeah.
JM: And versioning becomes a challenge, not just for HIMS, but for the other notetaker companies as well because –
EH: Hmm.
JM: -- you know, of a few things. The product life cycle of a Braille notetaker, you know, is four years, five years, where most people are getting new phones every, you know, one, two, or three –
EH: Six months.
JM: -- yeah. Six months.
EH: I know guys who are – they got to have it.
JM: So it becomes a challenge. And despite any potential promises or rumors from any company, the Polaris came out and had one version of Android. It wasn’t updated. Same with your competitors --
EH: Right.
JM: -- you know. So, you know, while, right now, you’re on Android 10, and that should be good, we kind of ran into the situation where there’s a lot of apps right now that are targeting, say, Android 6 or 7 is the minimum version, it wouldn’t run on the Polaris. So how do you mitigate that going forward, knowing that, you know, you might be good for now, but – and especially in another year or two, you might end up in this exact same situation? It’s really kind of like, you know, just, you’re chasing this elusive goal of always trying to be current, but because you’re, you know, not able to upgrade hardware every year, you might be more stuck.
EH: Yeah.
JM: So how does HIMS, or how do you see the trend going in the future?
EH: Mm-hmm. ‘Course, as you know, this stuff is not inexpensive, so, you know, I mean, phones might cost you, you know, the Apple stuff’s a thousand bucks or whatever it is, and these are almost 6 thousand dollars. I think that they’re on the right track. They – you know, at HIMS International, where they’ve done a lot of research, and they really feel like when the next versions of Android come out, they’re going to be able to jump to those, to port to those later versions. So that’s going to keep us current. I think we’re going to be current for a couple years anyways. As far as that where version 10 goes. Who knows when they’re going to come up with the updated, you know, the version that allows you to upgrade your Android version, but the hardware, supposedly, is set for that now. When the Polaris hit the wall – boom – I could no longer use my banking app --
JM: Hmm.
EH: -- because they – I got a message saying that, oh, in two months, you’re no longer going to be able to use Android 5, so that bummed me out a lot. And because it, like you said, everything was – you know, everybody’s on the Android 10 or 11 and backwards compatible to 6 or 7, so that should give us an idea of how long we have before we have to really worry about those things. I think it’ll be a couple of years, don’t you?
JM: You know, I guess it really depends on the future market. It’s always hard to look forward now.
EH: Mm-hmm.
JM: There is still the Polaris Mini, which is on Android 5 and kind of –
EH: True.
JM: -- stuck in that same fate at the moment. Is there a road map –
EH: But they won’t be because it has been made public that there will be a mini version of the 6 coming out with the same specs under the hood.
JM: Okay. What’s the timeline for that?
EH: We’re hoping to announce it in the fall when it starts shipping, we’ll – you know, probably more likely be in the beginning of next year.
JM: Sure. Had a couple specific questions that came in from users, and I’m not sure if you’ll know the answers to this, but one regarding writing long messages in Gmail specifically, which was causing the unit to act sluggishly or hang. I’m not sure if you have a specific answer for that –
EH: Oh. Is that a 6 thing, or is that a Polaris thing?
JM: No. It was a Polaris thing.
EH: Well, you know, everything’s working better now. Everything’s fast, so you can – you’d be pretty hard-pressed to out-type the 6 like you can the Polaris now. Some people can. I can’t out-type the Polaris. I’m not a fast Braillist, but people who are very fast are not able to out-type the 6, so the responsiveness is much better. Of course, the, you know, processors, you know, double the speed, double the memory, double the storage capacity. If they’re trying to use the app, I don’t know if they’re using, like, the Gmail app or they’re trying – we find that people try to use the Gmail app, which – it’s okay, you can do that, but we think it’s better that you use the HIMS app because, you know, there is an option when you set up an account to select Gmail as your account. And then all of the incoming ports, the outgoing SMTP and all that stuff is already populated, already filled in. All you have – you might have to do is go on the PC or something and check the checkbox that says allow or enable less secure devices; or maybe you’ve got two-factor authentication turned on, you might have to come up with an app-specific password. Those are all things that are Google things and kind of out of our control, but once you figure it out, it’s wonderful.
JM: Sure. Makes a lot of sense. We had a question also just regarding voices. Are you looking at adding additional voices, or are these the same ones as the Polaris? Of course, we have someone asking for Eloquence, which I know Code Factory discontinued at this point, so there’s no real way for someone to get it new.
EH: Yeah. So Eloquence -- unless you have it in your Play Store library, it should still be there. If you’ve had it previously. But as far as new downloads of Eloquence, I guess it’s not going to happen. It was really a big disappointment to me. So that’s really unfortunate. We’ve got the Vocalizer voices, which I like. I mean, I like Tom as my go-to voice. And of course, we’ve got the Vocalizer voices for multiple languages. In fact, you can actually assign multiple languages and go back between, you know, language profiles. So you can have one set up for English for both the speech and the Braille table and one set up for Spanish, for example, for both speech and the Braille table. And if you really want to, you can – there was an option that allows you to change the entire user interface to your language of choice, those available languages, which are mostly Latin languages.
JM: Right. Very cool. Also just want to kind of refresh as well, talking about the current Polaris mini and the previous Polaris, how much of the newer apps that you’re adding to the 6, as far as the internal apps, are getting ported back to those machines, or are they pretty much done with updates at this point?
EH: No, they – I think there’s – it’s still good for some updates for Polaris users. I can’t really say specifically what apps because it hasn’t happened yet, and you know, programming can be a house of cards; right? You fix one thing, and you break a bunch of other stuff. So it wouldn’t be fair for me to, you know, put the developers on the hook for that stuff. But they’re working on that. They’re not stopping. In fact, I see that there’s a very active Polaris beta cycle going on right now.
JM: Are those betas open to the public, or is that a private thing?
EH: They are not.
JM: That’s internal.
EH: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. I knew someone would ask us as soon as you mentioned that. That’s, you know, obvious. Speaking of things that are still active, you know, just maybe were forgotten because of Covid and anything else, you’re still doing well with the QBraille.
EH: QBraille rocks. You know, it’s just a really solid product, the only one like it. In fact, when we were able to get together with people face to face, I had a major player in the AT industry walk up to me and pick it up, and he’s just like, Earle, what took somebody so long to come up with this concept? For those of you who may have never seen a QBraille before, imagine a laptop keyboard, for example. And you take away all the letters and the numbers in the main keyboard area, and in its place, you put a Perkins-style keyboard. And that’s what it is. You’ve got a Perkins-style keyboard for input, and you have all the extended QWERTY keys that you would have on a regular laptop keyboard: the function keys, the escape key, shift, caps lock, tab. Yeah. Control, windows, whatever. Windows – it even has an application key. And if you’re a Mac user, you can switch that keyboard layout for Mac. So it’s just a very unique idea. It just seems to us if you’re going to learn how to read Braille, if you’re learning how to read Braille, this is a wonderful way to support that learning because you’ve got the Braille keyboard there to help, you know, re-enforce the typing of Braille as well.
JM: And how much is that?
EH: Thirty-one ninety-five is the retail cost of the QBraille.
JM: Awesome. And just to double back to the BrailleSense 6 and – we kind of skipped over the pricing there, so –
EH: Oh yeah.
JM: -- what’s the pricing for the 6, and is there still an upgrade path available?
EH: There is still an upgrade path. I would encourage those of you who are thinking about it to make that move pretty soon because it’s not going to be around forever. We don’t know exactly when it’s going to end, but it will end eventually. The upgrade path is for those of you who have a Polaris 32. You can be placed on a list to have your Polaris updated to a BrailleSense 6. And what we do is we transplant the Braille cells, assuming that they’re in good working condition, into a brand new BrailleSense 6 and send it back to you. And basically, what you have is everything warrantied except for the Braille cells, you know, the Braille array for twenty-two ninety-five. And no, if you give me a 20 and a 10, you can’t get change back. No. It’s two thousand two hundred ninety-five dollars for the update.
JM: So about a third of the cost of a new one.
EH: Yeah. Yeah. That’s about right. And otherwise, it’s fifty-seven ninety-five for a new one. We also have some trade-in options, you know, some competitive trade-in options as well as if you’ve got a Polaris. Right now, if you go to the website, you’ll see that a Polaris will get you $1200 in trade-in value towards the cost of a BrailleSense 6 with a brand new Braille Display.
JM: So I guess it’s a matter of whether you want to spend that extra thousand or so to – or a state.
EH: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
EH: Yeah. Yeah, and –
JM: Or – I’m sorry. No. I did that math entirely wrong.
EH: Yeah. I was going to say –
JM: Yeah. Never mind. Yeah. Okay. Just don’t mind my math; okay? I guess you need to decide. Do the math yourself, folks, and then figure out what makes the most sense.
EH: Do the math and make your –
JM: Don’t let me do the math for you because somehow, I messed that up entirely. Great.
If people want to get more information about HIMS and everything that you’re up to – are you going – doing -- going to be anywhere in person? Is that happening yet?
EH: God, I hope so. I mean, it hasn’t happened yet, and people are actually still scheduling conferences and conventions virtually --
JM: Yeah.
EH: -- into the foreseeable future. But I think my first, like, in-person one is going to be February of 2022.
JM: Oh, my. Two years.
EH: Well, February; right? It’s 2021 now, J.J. Speaking of math –
JM: No. I’m saying, like, two years since we’ve pretty – you know, we had the CSUN in 2020 –
EH: Oh, yeah, yeah.
JM: -- that barely happened.
EH: I seen what you mean. I see what you’re saying.
JM: Yeah. Almost two years of –
EH: I’m walking with you.
JM: Yeah. Okay. Got you. Anyway, people want to get – so in the meantime, if people want to get in contact and at least get a virtual tour or demo.
EH: Oh, absolutely. You know, anybody who wants to give me a call and talk about it, I’m usually the guy answering the phone when you call the main number, which, by the way, is (512) 837-2000. It’s either myself or my coworker, Thomas answering the phones. And we do it all the time. We schedule virtual demonstrations over Zoom -- by the way, Zoom works like a dream on the BrailleSense 6, and so does Teams and so does Google Meet. Yeah.
JM: Great. And what’s the website?
EH: So it’s hims-inc.com.
JM: Perfect. Thank you so much. I hope we do this in person next time, but it’s so good to be talking to you again, and excited for the new product.
EH: All right. Thanks, J.J.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
