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In the realm of e-ink, I've been loving my Onyx tablet lately. It runs full Android, has an ePaper display, and has a Wacom stylus for note taking. Two things
by AlphaWeaver 7y ago
In the realm of e-ink, I've been loving my Onyx tablet lately. It runs full Android, has an ePaper display, and has a Wacom stylus for note taking.
Two things I think it's done really well- it has the ability to easily disable the touch screen so you can pass it around and work with it like it's a real piece of paper. Additionally, you can change the refresh rate to your preference, and set it per-app. Higher refresh rates lead to ghosting, but if I turn the refresh rate high enough, I can watch a YouTube video on ePaper (!!!) which is crazy to me.
- skuthus 7y agowhat model did you get?
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoI got the Boox Note 2, which is 10.3 inches. It's just large enough to be useful, but not so big to be unwieldy.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoVideo I saw looks cool, but 500 bones! I'd be concerned my handwriting would be too small or illegible to be an effective primary notepad. How do you use it?
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoAs far as dealing with legibility, it has pretty high resolution, so you can write small if you'd like. You can also zoom in and out to write larger if you'd like. I use it for reading and note taking. It's helpful to jot something down quickly or to take more in-depth notes. You can also install Android apps on there too, so I use Firefox to browse the web (reading articles on Wikipedia, doing research into software products) and sync that with my phone to easily pass data between them.
- skuthus 7y agoThanks for the info!
- Andrex 7y agoBeen looking at these for sheet music! (The larger models.) The ability to natively run Google Play Books is a huge bonus too, very few offer that compatibility and that's where most of my books are. I wish Movies Anywhere existed for ebooks but there's no way Amazon would go for it. :(
- minimalist 7y agoI own an onyx boox and I can't emphasize enough how much I don't recommend it for anyone. If I had known the company was a serial GPL violator, I would have never purchased it in the first place. My recommendation would be to wait for the refresh of the ReMarkable Tablet, as it runs GNU/Linux and there is a healthy community of people who have made a ton of applications and tools for it [0]. This will likely never occur with any Onyx products and you will be stuck with a device running an old version of Android with SELinux disabled, on a vulnerable kernel, that constantly phones home to Chinese cloud servers. I explain it all in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041543 [0]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
- ViViDboarder 7y agoI have an olde Barnes and Noble Nook that I rooted and installed Play Books. Used that for years to read public domain books that I got from Gutenberg and uploaded to Play to get position synced between my phone and Nook. Now I mostly read Libby. I also have the Kindle app on the Nook, so I need to see if the old version of the app still works and if I can send books from Libby to it.
- abraxas 7y ago> to easily disable the touch screen The one feature I wish existed in every smartphone and tablet yet it exists in none. Perhaps I'm particularly clumsy but the amount of inadvertent interactions I trigger with my devices is infuriating.
- abtinf 7y agoiOS supports this with "Guided Access" mode. It has to be enabled in settings, then a triple click will turn it off/on. It can have its own passcode as well. I use it when handing my phone to my kids--start a video, enable guided access, and not worry about who they might inadvertently call or photo they might delete.
- abraxas 7y agoDoesn't sound all that convenient. In truth I just want a hardware switch.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gen3 7y agoIt’s pressing a button three times to enable, three times to disable (with a passcode). I would say that’s better because it doesn’t take up more phone real-estate, and it can’t be disabled by a smart kiddo.
- politelemon 7y agoHow's the battery life, or to be inexact, how often do you recharge it?
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoI haven't managed to get the battery down below maybe 70%, but I only charge it like once or twice a week. It's impressive.
- chx 7y agoI personally love my Dasung not-eReader. Yes, the software is not the best, especially at very low power it becomes unusable but having my eReader serve emergency monitor duty is awesome. It has a mini HDMI input. It's also an Android tablet but i consider that a gimmick. With the One Mix Yoga 2S it forms my on call tech kit I lug everywhere. I wouldn't use this for full time work but I only need a tiny shoulder bag this way vs carrying the 14" ThinkPad everywhere just because once every half a year we have an emergency... You can see my loadout at https://imgur.com/a/xmRmYSn https://imgur.com/a/xmRmYSn
- diffeomorphism 7y agoThe newer Onyx models seem to have a monitor function as well: https://onyxboox.com/boox_max3 https://onyxboox.com/boox_max3 If I am reading reviews correctly it has micro(?) HDMI and a usb-C port. However, the usb port seems to only be for charging/keyboards/data etc., not for display port (next model maybe?).
- theodric 7y agoI had an original Onyx Boox and it was so terrible, inflexible, and softwarily out-of-date from the moment of shipping that I gave it away within about a month. It was also slower at even responding to page-flip commands on PDFs than my iPad 2. And I'm giving it a fairly wide berth for the slower refresh rate of e-ink-- talking push button 3 seconds elapse blanks and draws new page edit: I see that they're still shipping Android 6-based devices in 2020. Lovely stuff.
- diffeomorphism 7y agoDon't have one, but the review sounds like the max 3 is the complete opposite: https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/onyx-boox-max3-review https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/onyx-boox-max3-review Overpowered hardware, stock android 9, no restrictions.
- chx 7y agoIt's way too big and expensive for the purpose. And all the smaller one don't do it. I would consider a 10" screen for sure but 13.3"? That's too much.
- PeterStuer 7y agoI'd love something like the BOOX Max3 13.3 but sadly I'm locked into Amazon's Kindle with an extensive collection of books.
- sails 7y agoNot impossible to export them into an open format [0] I recently deleted my Amazon account and now use the kindle as plain e-reader as far as that is possible (ie buy and load books from other sources). [0] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=283371 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=283371
- lisnake 7y agoYou always can liberate your DRM-ed ebooks with something like Calibre + plugin.
- twodayslate 7y agoIf it runs Android why can't you install the Amazon Kindle app?
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoYou can do this!
- PeterStuer 7y agoThank you! I somehow completely forgot about that.