I think I'd rather either have qwerty input, because BRLTTY can only do computer Braille anyway, or like, qwerty but with a Braille mode where you can use the home row as Braille input. If that makes sense. One of the main issues I found when using the BT Speak is that it's portable, but when I take it places, I don't want the TTS being all loud and distracting others. I guess a headphone jack or really good Bluetooth support would help. Or, the ability to drive the whole thing from a Braille display.

I definitely think using the RK3588 would be a good idea for performance and power efficiency, although I wonder if a device as small as the BT Speak could be made with it since when people have asked Blazie about making a BT Speak based on the Raspberry Pi CM5 the BT Braille uses instead of the CM4, they said that they would need to make the device bigger for better cooling and battery I think it was. By the way the speed and robustness of the software update process has been improved with the September BT Speak update, and I would think you could boot from a micro SD card (although not full-sized and the Raspberry Pi 4 SD card reader is pretty slow), although I haven't tried doing that. But the RK3588 seems like the fastest ARM CPU that has been put on an SBC right now and is significantly better than the CM4 and even the CM5, so that would be nice. Price is hard to judge for me because for a while I was convinced I wouldn't buy a BT Speak because it was too expensive and then when I went to the convention the prospect of an open Linux computer in a small device with a Braille keyboard was so tempting for me that I got it. But if this device was more expensive than the BT Speak it would become even harder to justify considering the price of getting a mainstream SBC, a USB battery, and a Braille keyboard like the Orbit Writer. The form factor of everything in one device is definitely appealing though but there is a point when it’s not worth it anymore; where that point is is hard to judge though.

Regarding a QWERTY device, I think the bigger you make it, the more comparable it gets to a full laptop. And if you have a QWERTY device based on the RK3588, and the Optima comes out which will be based on the Framework and be a laptop without a screen and a Braille display below the keyboard, I would definitely go for the Optima because at that point the Optima probably wouldn't be any less portable and the Intel Core or Ryzen processors would be significantly more powerful but still have good battery life. So I think a Braille keyboard is best for something like this because you can make it small and portable but still powerful for its size without competing with laptops.

An idea I've had is to make a Linux environment based on NixOS that could run on the BT Speak, the BT Braille, the Optima, and probably mainstream devices too like laptops and SBCs. Then I could write my own applications for something like a traditional mode (I haven't planned exactly how that would work yet but I would definitely want it to synchronize things like the clipboard with other environments), and provide easy access to other environments like the desktop, the shell, Emacs, Android apps on Waydroid, Windows in a VM on the more powerful devices, etc, which each environment having its screen reader set up for easy control with a Braille keyboard, common speech and Braille output through Speech Dispatcher or Spiel and BRLTTY, etc. Maybe you could focus on the software first and create something that can run on the BT Speak and then make a hardware board that could also run your Linux environment.

It's been a long time since I've really used a Braille keyboard for anything, so I probably wouldn't be the best person to ask.