I have one, not in love with it. I think that is the thing with ultraportables, they have to sacrifice lots of features of a medium size typewriter in order to make a flat typewriter. And besides having less feature they also type horrible (in general). Besides that they are nice to look at  

Yeah, they type well if you are writing a paragraph, or they look like they type well because you don't know any better. But as soon as you use it for more than a couple of paragraphs, you will start suffering the missing the features that make typing easier, essential things like a proper carriage return lever for example. Is not that they are bad typewriters, they are designed to do their work, which is to be a "travel typewriter".

steini wrote:

Yeah, they type well if you are writing a paragraph...

Exactly. Ultra-portables, and to a lesser degree portables, really don't compare to a standard typewriter when it comes to performance. There's a reason why typewriters being used daily in an office were standard models. I'll use a portable in the backyard to type out a few pages, but when it comes to serious work I'll always use a standard.

The strange exception to that rule seems to be some authors who exclusively used portables or ultra-portables. It could be argued that the main reason for this was they moved around a lot and coveted portability over performance. There were of course a lot of other writers who owned both; I've seen as many photos of Burroughs, for example, using an Olympia SG1 as I have an Antares Prava or a Hermes Baby.

I hope you get the money back, but I wont be so sad, there are plenty of typewriters out there, and more than what you might think seem that have barely been used. Good luck with the next, and check for Lettera 22 those, (ultra)portables are probably the best ones in this range of size.