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I have a Boox Nova 2 and can mostly recommend it. It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloade

I have a Boox Nova 2 and can mostly recommend it. It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloader is unlocked by default and you can root the system fairly easily, allowing you to install a firewall restricting some of the phoning home (https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-air.html https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-...). I'm beginning to use it as a general purpose Android tablet. The low refresh rate takes a bit of time to get used to, but I find that it causes you to interact with the device more slowly and carefully at points, which reduces the chance for distractions a bit (it's not that low though, you can actually watch the occasional video, the ghosting isn't actually even that bad). I don't think the note capability is very good with the default app (I think it's unusable, in fact), but a new mode adds compatibility with OneNote (which I also don't like, but is probably less buggy). It's still a brilliant device for reading using Koreader, browsing the Web using Fennec/EinkBro and taking notes using a pen on GBoard's swipe input functionality. Just mind that the battery doesn't last as ridiculously long as you may be used to with this usage pattern. I get through about a day with fairly heavy usage. A color display would be a welcome addition, but the gigantic oversight the Nova 3 Color's developers have made is not adding a warm light. It's what I exclusively use on my device.

ineedasername 5y ago
not adding a warm light Yes that looks like a strange choice. In videos it looks like that distorts the colors, shifting toward blue. It looks like battery is reasonable on all the Onyx devices if you're not on wifi though, despite the overhead of Android. Probably some heavy throttling if background app activity too. Otherwise, backlights on Kindle ereaders still allow for very long battery life-- how does the Nova 2 fare? A week of battery would still be pretty great for a tablet note taking tablet w/ Android if it can manage that with occasional wifi use to sync notes or check email.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  It depends how you use it. I've gotten over 20 hours screen on time reading mainly comics with it set to refresh every page and WiFi on downloading issues along the way. I don't use the frontlight typically though. I don't charge mine more than once a week but I also don't really browse the web on my Nova 2.
salamandersauce 5y ago
Why do you say the Boox Note app is unusable? It works well in my experience, it can sync automatically to Dropbox and I can sync notebooks between my two Boox devices. The only thing that sucks is the text recognition IMO. But it's got templates, layers, different stroke types down. Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  > Why do you say the Boox Note app is unusable? It glitches more than I can list within the comment length limit. The highlights are: - Glitchy panning and zooming (they're extremely glitchy by themselves and can't be done together) - Ineffective palm rejection. No matter whether with or without a sleeve between hand and display, it always wants to zoom or pan, which takes forever to settle down. I am aware of the touch lock, but find it too cumbersome to be acceptable. Well, maybe if that was the only issue. - Slow eraser. You have to rub around forever for it to register all strokes you want to erase. I don't know what kind of galaxy brain shit they're doing to manage this because Squid, a different note app, registers it perfectly on the same device. - Limited canvas. You can have the canvas be something like 2x the height of the device. Well great. - All kinds of issues with rotation and zoom (kind of important on the smaller models, no?). The right half of the canvas not being usable, strokes being misaligned with strokes, rotation being wrong after switching apps ... I finally went all Bill O'Reilly ("Fuck it, fuckin' thing sucks") when it permanently misaligned my content from the template. There have also been instances in which it just wouldn't register any strokes until after restarting the app. The app also can't be started without using the official Onyx Launcher, which I don't (there's not only no icon for it, as far as I found there's no Activity you could call). What a disappointment. I have watched reviews and read opinions online and apparently nobody thought to mention how terrible that app is (thanks for the latency measurements, though). I've considered having a faulty device, but really, all the strokes register fine, all the other apps work perfectly. > Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use Hard to be worse than the Boox Note app :-) I dislike OneNote enough that I'm probably not going to use it (notebooks metaphor, weird cloud stuff), but wow, what a difference. At least it doesn't have any of these show-stopper bugs. It's like they've actually started it and used it once. The way Onyx implemented the scribble mode indeed looks a bit on the low-effort side regarding the stroke thickness and style, but for how much of a hack it is (I assume they can't actually properly hook into the app itself), how reliably it works is pretty impressive. Fun fact about that scribble mode (what enables the low-latency pen input): It keeps working until the app that enabled it also disables it again, so if you exit an app using it in the right way, it stays on and you can draw anywhere. The downside is that the screen doesn't refresh by itself anymore, so you better have a manual refresh gesture set up or you'll probably have to reboot to fix it. Apps can also enable and disable the mode from the background. This means that you can basically enable scribble mode for all apps without even needing any special privileges. The issue is, however, that the screen stops refreshing after a stroke after a few minutes (responsibility of the app controlling scribble mode. Presumably it eventually gets suspended ("allow running in background" is enabled). I would be happy about suggestions for how this could be solved (I haven't been able to transfer the logic to a background service presumably because of surface/context issues). If you've read this far, you may be interested in joining a Discord community of (more technical) Boox users: https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd
tyre 5y ago
What are you reading on it? I'm considering getting something for reading technical books. Do you think this would fit?
- solarkraft 5y ago
  I mostly read books in the epub format, which is a great experience. Things get a bit more complicated with PDFs on the 8" screen due to their fixed layout. KOReader has settings and accomodations to comfortably deal with many of them, but it usually requires a little tinkering. Typical A4 PDFs are just about readable with basic cropping in vertical mode and become quite easily readable in horizontally mode. There are some modes to navigate multi-column PDFs and reflow text blocks. But there can definitely be PDFs that are not comfortably readable. The situation is better the larger the screen is, so people tend to prefer 10" (Boox Note) or 13" (Boox Max) devices for heavy PDF consumption. I would personally prefer it if people stopped publishing great looking but hard to consume PDFs as the only way to consume content.
ant6n 5y ago
I dunno. I feel like I waited a long time for a good note taking device with a eink screen. I think I'll just get an iPad Mini and pen.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  I like the e-ink, but the iPad almost certainly comes with a much better software experience (huge selection of note apps, comfortable web browsing, fluid scrolling, video consumption, colors ...) at a similar price.

ineedasername 5y ago

not adding a warm light Yes that looks like a strange choice. In videos it looks like that distorts the colors, shifting toward blue. It looks like battery is reasonable on all the Onyx devices if you're not on wifi though, despite the overhead of Android. Probably some heavy throttling if background app activity too. Otherwise, backlights on Kindle ereaders still allow for very long battery life-- how does the Nova 2 fare? A week of battery would still be pretty great for a tablet note taking tablet w/ Android if it can manage that with occasional wifi use to sync notes or check email.

salamandersauce 5y ago
It depends how you use it. I've gotten over 20 hours screen on time reading mainly comics with it set to refresh every page and WiFi on downloading issues along the way. I don't use the frontlight typically though. I don't charge mine more than once a week but I also don't really browse the web on my Nova 2.

salamandersauce 5y ago

Why do you say the Boox Note app is unusable? It works well in my experience, it can sync automatically to Dropbox and I can sync notebooks between my two Boox devices. The only thing that sucks is the text recognition IMO. But it's got templates, layers, different stroke types down. Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use.

solarkraft 5y ago
> Why do you say the Boox Note app is unusable? It glitches more than I can list within the comment length limit. The highlights are: - Glitchy panning and zooming (they're extremely glitchy by themselves and can't be done together) - Ineffective palm rejection. No matter whether with or without a sleeve between hand and display, it always wants to zoom or pan, which takes forever to settle down. I am aware of the touch lock, but find it too cumbersome to be acceptable. Well, maybe if that was the only issue. - Slow eraser. You have to rub around forever for it to register all strokes you want to erase. I don't know what kind of galaxy brain shit they're doing to manage this because Squid, a different note app, registers it perfectly on the same device. - Limited canvas. You can have the canvas be something like 2x the height of the device. Well great. - All kinds of issues with rotation and zoom (kind of important on the smaller models, no?). The right half of the canvas not being usable, strokes being misaligned with strokes, rotation being wrong after switching apps ... I finally went all Bill O'Reilly ("Fuck it, fuckin' thing sucks") when it permanently misaligned my content from the template. There have also been instances in which it just wouldn't register any strokes until after restarting the app. The app also can't be started without using the official Onyx Launcher, which I don't (there's not only no icon for it, as far as I found there's no Activity you could call). What a disappointment. I have watched reviews and read opinions online and apparently nobody thought to mention how terrible that app is (thanks for the latency measurements, though). I've considered having a faulty device, but really, all the strokes register fine, all the other apps work perfectly. > Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use Hard to be worse than the Boox Note app :-) I dislike OneNote enough that I'm probably not going to use it (notebooks metaphor, weird cloud stuff), but wow, what a difference. At least it doesn't have any of these show-stopper bugs. It's like they've actually started it and used it once. The way Onyx implemented the scribble mode indeed looks a bit on the low-effort side regarding the stroke thickness and style, but for how much of a hack it is (I assume they can't actually properly hook into the app itself), how reliably it works is pretty impressive. Fun fact about that scribble mode (what enables the low-latency pen input): It keeps working until the app that enabled it also disables it again, so if you exit an app using it in the right way, it stays on and you can draw anywhere. The downside is that the screen doesn't refresh by itself anymore, so you better have a manual refresh gesture set up or you'll probably have to reboot to fix it. Apps can also enable and disable the mode from the background. This means that you can basically enable scribble mode for all apps without even needing any special privileges. The issue is, however, that the screen stops refreshing after a stroke after a few minutes (responsibility of the app controlling scribble mode. Presumably it eventually gets suspended ("allow running in background" is enabled). I would be happy about suggestions for how this could be solved (I haven't been able to transfer the logic to a background service presumably because of surface/context issues). If you've read this far, you may be interested in joining a Discord community of (more technical) Boox users: https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd

tyre 5y ago

What are you reading on it? I'm considering getting something for reading technical books. Do you think this would fit?

solarkraft 5y ago
I mostly read books in the epub format, which is a great experience. Things get a bit more complicated with PDFs on the 8" screen due to their fixed layout. KOReader has settings and accomodations to comfortably deal with many of them, but it usually requires a little tinkering. Typical A4 PDFs are just about readable with basic cropping in vertical mode and become quite easily readable in horizontally mode. There are some modes to navigate multi-column PDFs and reflow text blocks. But there can definitely be PDFs that are not comfortably readable. The situation is better the larger the screen is, so people tend to prefer 10" (Boox Note) or 13" (Boox Max) devices for heavy PDF consumption. I would personally prefer it if people stopped publishing great looking but hard to consume PDFs as the only way to consume content.

ant6n 5y ago

I dunno. I feel like I waited a long time for a good note taking device with a eink screen. I think I'll just get an iPad Mini and pen.

solarkraft 5y ago
I like the e-ink, but the iPad almost certainly comes with a much better software experience (huge selection of note apps, comfortable web browsing, fluid scrolling, video consumption, colors ...) at a similar price.