Don't Believe the Hype
Although I am going through a return problem with the seller I am going to try and keep this review as product oriented as possible.<br /><br />First of all HumanWare boasts about their super crisp braille display that users rave about.  To be honest here I didn't notice much difference between this and the Smart Beetle 14 cell braille display by HIMS.  The price between the two is significant though, the Smart Beetle (which I've also reviewed) is around $1300 USD however the 14 cell display does make it a more cumbersome job to read much of anything.<br /><br />When I got my HumanWare Brailliant BI 32 I was excited, like a kid at Christmas time for sure.  The unit came in some pretty sturdy packaging and it came with a bunch of goodies.  The carrying case that it comes with is a let down in my book, it's just a neoprene thing with a zipper at the side of it, honestly I felt more like I was going to drop it putting the Brailliant into or taking it out of the carrying case.  For something I'm spending nearly $3000 on you should either not mention the free carrying case or get a better one like with the other braille displays.<br /><br />The box also comes with a USB cable and it's one of the high end shielded ones, which as the manufacturer reccommends you should only use that one.  You can also just go down to any store that sells USB cables and get another shielded one for not much money.  It's not like there's a magical stone inside that thick part of the cable or anything.  It also had a pretty huge and awkward DC power converter/charger thing.  I didn't verify this but I assume it's got a power condition inside of it so in the event of a power surge the charging unit itself will burn out instead of the braille display.  I hope that's the case anywahs.<br /><br />As for the Brailliant BI 32 itself I did not get a chance to test it with my iPhone since the bluetooth didn't work, but I did get to play with a few different screen readers and PC's.  It's performance was really quite responsive and the button layout was really very easy to figure out.  The one thing HumanWare figured out was their thumb keys, those things do rock pretty hard core in my humble opinion!  The perkins style braille keyboard was pretty standard issue honestly, but it had a nice and fluid motion.  Some braille keyboards are so stiff and noisy and clanky you just give up on typing because it sounds like a crappy techno song or something LoL.<br /><br />For me personally I feel like HumanWare has spent more money making up marketing material for these than they have in R&D for them.  If I'm going to pay almost $3000 for an electronic device it better be fully functional and it better knock my socks off.  This is just a braille display, it only has 32 cells and it takes an act of congress to switch between USB and bluetooth - or so it seemed that way, I never could connect via bluetooth.  I ended up finding another braille display for about the same amount that has an SD slot for braille books, 40 cells and a switch that moves between USB and bluetooth - and the bluetooth works too!
Rating: 3 stars