E-ink tablets

[touchingcloth]

I was just swinging back in here to post an update, but I realise I never actually said that I had actually bought a thing anyway. I did it at some point between saying I probably would and goading Ferris about "my thing", so towards the end of January.

Onyx Boox Nova Air, and I'm fucking loving it still, it ranks alongside a smartphone in terms of being a device I've used for large chunks of time pretty much every day since I've had it.

Really the only things it is bad at are videos and - as I noted upthread - Wordle.

It's great for writing. The OS is actually really good (though I can see why it might not be to everyone's taste), and to my mind is far better than stock Android.

Great for taking notes, the reader beats the shit out of a Kindle, though is harder than Kindle to store your entire library in the cloud. The only reason I really used the cloud with my Kindle was so I could download a book on my laptop, convert it in Calibre, and then sync it to my Kindle without a cable. The Boox cuts out the Calibre step cos it handles every format going, and it cuts out the need for a laptop as I can download stuff direct from its browser. There's a tool which lets you push files over Wi-Fi to it, which I've used a few times for sending non-book files over from my laptop, like images to use for the cover and templates for the note taking app.

Hard recommend.

Which cock at Amazon decided that putting the power button on the bottom of the Kindle, where there's more likelihood of it being pressed accidentally, was a good idea?

The Boox's power button is on the top. However. I run mine in upside down mode because I bought a fólio case for it, and the magnet for the stylus is on the right edge. I figured the lesser or two evils was to flip the screen so that the stylus was store inside the case rather than on the outside edge, over having it so that the case had its "spine" on the right. Being larger, thinner, and shinier than the Kindle and with a flush rather than recessed screen, a case really isn't optional for this thing.

The only really area the Kindle has it beat is battery life. I could charge the Kindle and know that it would last me a two week holiday without needing to be plugged in, whereas with heavy use this thing can be done in two days. If I was using it like a Kindle - e-books only, Wi-Fi very rarely enabled - it'd go further.

[QDRPHNC]

Oh good choice. Boox has a great line - I sort of covet the Note Air 2 (the big blue one) and I'm not sure why, it's just very appealing to me. But I can't justify the cost of owning two different sizes of e-ink tablets.

Like yourself, I'm loving my Mobiscribe Origin, one of those few technology purchases where I really feel like it was money well spent. It's made writing in bed a pleasure, scribbling directly on a nice glowing screen. One thing I love about the Mobiscribe is that it has a physical light on/off button, which sounds like a small thing, but it's incredibly handy.

[touchingcloth]

The Boox's only physical button is the power one. I was a little disappointed about this when I ordered it because that's one thing that annoyed me about my Kindle - if I wake up and want to do some reading with the light on very dimly so as not to disturb my partner I had to remember to turn the light right down before powering it off so that it didn't nuke the room when I woke it up.

The Boox has a nice feature in the OS where you can configure what swipes on the edges of the screen do, so I've got it set to increase and dim the light if I rub one edge, which is even better than a straight on/off key. Quite a few taps on the Kindle to change the light levels.

[QDRPHNC]

My Deep Guide has done a review of the Boox Nova Air C:

Personally, the colour screen doesn't do it for me. The closer an e-ink tablet tries to resemble an iPad, the less I like it. Lovely looking build quality - although I prefer the beige non-C version.

[touchingcloth]

Yeah, I don't miss colour on my version at all. If I were into comics then I can see that being a nice alternative to an iPad for reading, but I also think it needs something more like 10" than 7" for reading that sort of thing - I can just about manage some A4-sized PDFs on the smaller screen, but it's more use for smaller formats and dedicated e-books unless you're particularly fond of squinting. None of the colour e-ink readers I've seen look like they particularly pop when you see video reviews, and the colours are very wishy-washy compared to something like an OLED display, so I might revise my opinion if they start to have the benefits of an e-ink display but with colours that can compare to a physical magazine.

[Famous Mortimer]

One of the professors at my place has just bought a reMarkable 2 tablet, and it looks pretty swish. It's definitely more a replacement for a pad of paper / pdf editor than it is a thing for reading on though.

[touchingcloth]

Yeah, when I decided on the Boox all of the reviews suggested reMarkable for writing, Boox for reading, but that both devices are usable for both of those tasks to some extent.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I've got a nook, it cost £30 in 2013 and fills the page when viewing pdfs which is more than some of the modern ones do seemingly.

The general navigation is woeful, but that doesn't matter much once you've got the book open. More annoyingly its concept of a page bears no relationship to a screen's worth of text (so if you change the text size this gets even worse). Might need to replace the battery soon though, that's another £12.

Thread made me install AIReader on it which gives much better page indication, new lease of life on the thing really.

[touchingcloth]

Thread made me install AIReader on it which gives much better page indication, new lease of life on the thing really.

How much did you save? My cut is usually 12%.

[QDRPHNC]

One of the professors at my place has just bought a reMarkable 2 tablet, and it looks pretty swish. It's definitely more a replacement for a pad of paper / pdf editor than it is a thing for reading on though.

I had the RM2 for a brief time, but I returned it because of their nonsense about everything, from OCR to an email to yourself, needing to go through their proprietary cloud.

Absolutely beautiful hardware - in a way almost too nice, because when I took it out with me, I was very, very aware I was carrying a $1000 glass slab in my bag.

[QDRPHNC]

Question for @touchingcloth - do you need to set up an account with Boox or subscribe / login to use the device? They just released the Note Air2 Plus and it looks gorgeous, I'm so tempted. But I dislike having to sign in / always being connected in order to use something.

To expand the scope of the thread somewhat, does anyone have experience with Freewrite? Their core product looks like over-engineered hipster wank, but the Traveler is sort of lovely.

[touchingcloth]

Question for @touchingcloth - do you need to set up an account with Boox or subscribe / login to use the device? They just released the Note Air2 Plus and it looks gorgeous, I'm so tempted. But I dislike having to sign in / always being connected in order to use something.

Nothing like you described for the reMarkable. I had to (not sure if I could have opted out) give a working email address to get it started, but things like OCR happen offline, and I only connect mine to wifi when I want to download something.

The email address I signed up with is used for accessing notes made online in a web browser, as in I can login to the account on my laptop to view and download my scribbles made on the device. What's slightly odd about this is I don't have a password for the account, it just emails me a 6 digit code to be able to login and see my notes in a browser. Not sure if I could have avoided giving an email at all, but I created a free account for it that I only use for this purpose so it doesn't bother me for the way I use it.

It was bundled with an email client (they include their own apps for email, browsing, picture editing, and other things), but I haven't used it and I could download something like Thunderbird from the Play Store if I wanted to. I suspect the bundled mail app is just POP/IMAP and won't be channeled through their servers, as it's just an Onyx-made Android app which is optimised for an e-ink screen.

Happy to answer any more specific questions about it if I've missed the point with the above.

[QDRPHNC]

Thanks @touchingcloth that's exactly the information I needed. I don't mind making an account and using it for some things, but I don't like my entire device being locked behind it.

As far as I know from the RM2 subscription model these days, your ability to do things while not online and logged in are very, very limited.

[touchingcloth]

Weird, especially if you'd end up significantly limited in what you could do while, say, on a plane.

[QDRPHNC]

I may have been overstating it, seems like you can read and write all you want locally, but if you want anything beyond that (cloud storage, OCR) you need to start coughing up a monthly fee.

[touchingcloth]

Cloud storage is fair enough, to an extent, but OCR is gouging.

[touchingcloth]

Mine picked up a dead pixel, and surprisingly I was allowed to return it for a full refund.

I've just ordered a colour version of the same. Less contrast for black and white, but hopefully the added benefits for some of the types of stuff I read which doesn't work as well in monochrome (a porn, for example) will make the trade off worth it...

[QDRPHNC]

Bummer about the dead pixel, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the colour screen, when you get it.

Been eyeing up a Supernote, but my Mobiscribe hasn't broken yet.

[touchingcloth]

The dead pixel was weird - only affected the frontlight, and appeared out of nowhere after months of careful use, always keeping it in a case, never dropping it.

The colour screen is exactly as I had imagined it would be. Washed out and low resolution, like reading something on low quality magazine paper. I read a lot of stuff about data visualisation, and I would typically bookmark things and look at them later on the laptop if what I was reading made no sense in black and white. The colours are perfectly fine for avoiding that sort of thing in what I've looked at so far. I'm not big into comics, but it looks like those and magazines will be a lot more useable on this screen than on the monochrome panel, but I don't think it would match an OLED tablet for reading anything that in print would be best as a glossy coffee table thing, like a nice photography book.

[QDRPHNC]

That's a real a shame about the colour screen, but I suppose it's early days yet - hopefully there's a nice crisp black and white mode available.

Yesterday, I was all set to pull the trigger on the Supernote A6X, and then at the last moment realized it doesn't have a backlight, which is an absolute must for me. It's a pity, as the more I look into the Supernote UI, the more I like it. Interested in see how the new Amazon tablet turns out, it's releasing at the end of the month. I'm sure with all their engineering resources behind it, it's going to be good, but I hate the idea of being tied to the Kindle ecosystem.

[touchingcloth]

I don't think I could go back to Kindle now. I dusted off my old Paperwhite while my Boox was being returned, and it's just too restrictive to be tied to their supported file formats (life's too short for converting everything and transferring everything via Caliber, and waiting for their servers to get your transfers through their queuing system). Their UI is shit for anything other than epub-/mobi-type formats, but if they address that in their e-ink device that would make it a little bit more attractive, but not if it comes at the cost of being tied to their ecosystem rather than something more generic.

The Boox device lost out to Amazon slightly in the transfer process. It was a cinch to download my library and then add it again, and to sync my notes from where I left off, but the library was essentially from scratch - progress, bookmarks, highlights all gone. Not the biggest issue for me as I don't use those features heavily, but Kindle does a better job at syncing them to the cloud.

Like I say, the screen is totally what I expected. Black and white for e-books and note taking is more than adequate, and that's 95% of what I use it for. Colour makes web content that bit more usable - I use the Pocket for saving articles from my laptop ready for reading on the device, and I can now do Wordles on it!1121 If you want it for saturated, sharp colours you'd be very disappointed, but if you're after minimal function it's fine.

That rings a bell about the Supernotes now. I can't even comfortably use a Paperwhite without a backlight in more conditions than not, so it's not really an option unless you have the luxury of always working in daylight or are happy with a nuclear bedroom light.

My options were really between Onyx and ReMarkable, with the reviews suggesting the former for reading, the latter for writing, with both being acceptable for the thing they don't excel at. That's been my experience with the Boox so far.

I'll go and have a watch of My Deep Guide's Kindle Scribe review just in case I'm missing something, but I'm all about the colour now!

Have you ever come across Good e-Reader's site and YouTube channel? They seem dodgy as fuck, and have glowing reviews for TopJoy products which aren't reproduced in any other sources.

[touchingcloth]

The Kindle Scribe doesn't look like it for me. Too locked to their ecosystem (can make notes on PDFs, definitely not on DRMed epubs, definitely not on comic/manga/magazines formats, and it sounds like maybe not even on DRM-less epubs). Integrates with MS Office, though, so maybe they'll sell a ton to schools and universities.

[touchingcloth]

Like I say, the screen is totally what I expected. Black and white for e-books and note taking is more than adequate, and that's 95% of what I use it for. Colour makes web content that bit more usable - I use the Pocket for saving articles from my laptop ready for reading on the device, and I can now do Wordles on it!1121 If you want it for saturated, sharp colours you'd be very disappointed, but if you're after minimal function it's fine.

I'm going back on this, and reverting to my position in the OP

I'm not arsed about a colour display (I prefer e ink for ease of reading and battery life), nor the ability to install apps. I want something that does ebooks and note taking, and does them well. 

I've returned the colour model because the screen being less contrasty made it harder work for black and white content, and the minimal functionality didn't actually make up for that after the first week.

Once they crack the saturation and contrast problems for e-ink, though, I'll be all over it.

[QDRPHNC]

Ah well, worth giving it a go. I appreciate your report, I can say for sure a colour screen is not in my foreseeable future.

To answer your question from earlier that I missed - yes, I watched some of Good E-reader's videos way back, when I was still figuring out what to buy. Compared to My Deep Guide, I immediately got "paid-for fluff" vibes and avoided them from then on. Someone was just complaining about them on Reddit, as they (Good E-reader) declared all Supernotes "don't matter any more" since the Boox Tab Ultra came out, which is just silly.

Couple of other eink items that caught my eye were the Hisense mobile devices and the Freewrite Traveller, which is lovely, but staggeringly expensive for what it is. I'm also worried that it would be too simple - I'm all for focus, but I often need to switch between two or more documents at once.

[touchingcloth]

The HiSense phones have caught my eye as well, but I think it would get annoying when trying to do things like using the phone for satnav.

Those Freewrite things look really nice, but I can't see myself ever using one and they seem like they'd be most useful for people writing single documents at a time without needing to refer to any other digital documents. Niche!

[QDRPHNC]

MDG giving Good E-Reader a solid kicking in his latest video, love it.

[touchingcloth]

Ha, damn, Voja! Glad I trusted my instincts that something about the TopJoy pre-order information sounded too good to be true,  though it sucks that the hardware AND OS bout sound terrible from the reviews of people who have received their units. I think if I had pre-ordered I would have sucked up a bad OS that could have been improved over time, but for the whole thing to be a heap of junk is, well, I told me so.

I'm constantly refreshing my emails waiting for Amazon to confirm my refund at the moment so that I can order the Nova again, but they're reallllly dragging their feet.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Is there anything useful that can be done with a kindle if you don't really buy into the Amazon ecosystem?

I have a Nook and use calibre to convert stuff and put stuff on it so I'm used to that level of fiddlyness. But I was fiddling with my dad's now surpless-to-requirements Kindle and the screen is in better nick than mine (I broke the original screen in mine and replaced it with £10 aliexpress job, and the front layer is easy to scratch even in a case, and little marks and dents appear like dead black pixels even though I think it's just refraction, or lack of).

I think it's a gen 7 non-paperwhite.

[touchingcloth]

I'm currently using an old Kindle while I'm without my Onyx device. It's not nearly as friendly for getting stuff on, but if you're familiar with Calibre you can convert to AZW3 and transfer with a cable, or email things to your Amazon "send to device" email address, which is faffy, laggy, and sometimes just doesn't work for reasons which I haven't been able to diagnose (and I don't fancy starting a support call with Amazon to say "why aren't my pirated epubs reaching my device, please?"

But if you're used to wired rather than wireless transfers, it's easy to forget that your device is technically running via an Amazon account.

[QDRPHNC]

Looks like Mobiscribe have released the first waterproof e-ink tablet, with the colour version to follow in April.

https://mobiscribe.com/collections/all/products/mobiscribe-wave-black-white
https://mobiscribe.com/collections/all/products/mobiscribe-wave-color

I have a code for 10% off, if anyone wants it. Looks like the Wave also has speakers, Bluetooth and the ability to add layers to notes, so it has a lot going for it over the regular Origin, even though they look quite similar.