Well, that was very quick delivery indeed! Thanks, Dave! 
A few days ago, I was contacted by a fellow who had built a small batch of brand new replacement rechargeable batteries for the Alphasmart Dana/Neo – offering to send a demo unit of the new battery to me for review. He had left his message on one of my blog articles on solving the battery drain issue with my Alphasmart Dana, and solving that problem has been a continuing quest for me. I’ve come up with a couple of workable solutions, including doing a battery compartment modification to allow regular AA rechargeables to be recharged while in the machine. That solution does work very well, assuming you don’t mind taking the machine apart and mucking about in there with a soldering iron – but suppose that you just aren’t that adventurous?
Battery Modding an Alphasmart Dana
You might think “Well, the battery compartment is there so you can use Alkaline batteries, right?” and you’d be correct, but while that is a great solution for the power-sipping Neo, doing that with the Dana will frustrate you by forcing you to buy new batteries any time you take out the machine. The Dana will drain them fast, and will drain them even while the machine is shut off. Feeding a Dana regular Alkaline batteries will put you in the poor house and probably cause you to lose work that isn’t saved to an SD card (assuming you are depending on the Dana’s internal memory for file storage – I NEVER do that.) So no Alkalines. 
So, if you don’t want to mess with a soldering iron and screwdriver and don’t want to go poor buying alkalines for your Alphasmart Dana, what are the remaining alternatives? Well, one is to use a rechargeable USB power brick to power the Dana, and that is a really good way to run the Dana for really long periods of time, or to top off the internal rechargeables. However, the downside to that is you have a power brick tethered to your Dana, and that’s not especially portable. So, a USB power brick is a great accessory, but not the best solution for the main internal power issue.
Using a USB Power Brick with the Alphasmart Dana
Ideally, we’d be able to order a pre-made rechargeable battery that is a drop-in replacement for that 20+ year old internal battery in your Dana or Neo, but that hasn’t been something you could do *until now*. Yes, a small company has manufactured a batch of batteries with the connector plug required to fit and work in the Dana or Neo. Dave, the fellow who’s manufactured these packs, even has plans for a model coming soon that has an adapter to work with the Alphasmart 3000. This is the least hacky solution and preserves the machine’s original configuration, and gives you more than *twice* the original recharge capacity of the factory battery pack when it was new (2,760mAh versus 1,200mAh.) 
So I have now installed this battery into Dana 1 (Alphasmart Dana Wireless) which previously had an original battery pack that still held a charge, but not much of one. Upon installation I found the battery already had an 80% charge according to the battery meter on the Dana. This may not be accurate, as this Lithium-Ion battery has a different discharge curve than the original battery, we’ll see. 
The new battery pack is almost an inch shorter than the original one, which is good because it has a comically long connector wire, which needs to be coiled up and stuffed somewhere. That extra open inch in the battery compartment gets used for that. Even so, it *fills up* the space, and it’s a little hard to get the battery cover back on. I’d hope that later revisions have a cable about half this length. 
So here we are – the first 30 minutes with the new pack and I’m already got a blog post done, and I haven’t even put it on the charger yet. Dave notes that some wall wart chargers won’t work to charge the battery due to lack of charge rate negotiation circuitry, so I’ll be testing out which methods do and do not work to charge the battery in the coming weeks along with my use testing. In the meantime, if you’re itchin’ to get one of these replacement battery packs (he says he only has 30 in stock now) you can order one here. 
First test: charging the AlphaAverage battery using USB Power brick. Success! This is excellent, because I use the USB brick to top off the battery in the field and to extend battery life for long typing sessions away from a charging solution. More test results upcoming in the next few weeks as I put this AlphaAverage battery through the paces.