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Comment by AlphaWeaver | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

iOS 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.

I wish it worked more consistently. Maybe I’m just not smart enough, but sometimes triple clicking the side button works, other times it doesn’t.

I wonder if you're not triple clicking quickly enough for the system's defaults? You can adjust this in Accessibility > Side Button

That's an incredible feature that I had no idea existed. Thanks! Now my kids will stop deleting my apps.

I'd love to be able to map this to ipad side switch (which no more exists) - my kids use it to fix the picture on screen so that they could put a paper over screen, and use the picture as a template for drawing.

I can't thank you enough for this comment, it's exactly what I was looking for for so long.

You just changed my life, thank you!

Wow, thanks!

Doesn't sound all that convenient. In truth I just want a hardware switch.

It’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.

No, it's not like that at all. You have to not just enable it but also select inaccessible areas of the screen. Every time. And they get greyed out which makes it unusable for watching videos while disabling inadvertent interactions (accidental pause/resume/rewind etc).

You don’t have to disable any part of the screen. Just hit “start” and you are locked into the app. I just tested it and the only thing I could not do was change the volume.

You've missed my point completely. I want the _whole damn screen_ disabled so I don't inadvertently press pause/skip forward when watching videos for example. It's exactly the opposite of the behavior you get from "guided access" thing.

I apologize, I misread what you said. In options (bottom left of the screen) there is a switch to disable touch completely (it also seems to remember it’s setting for that particular app).

There's an option to disable all touches without greying anything out, but I agree that it's too cumbersome to use.

There is an android app called touch lock which I use for this on the odd occasions my 2yo daughter watches youtube/netflix

It's a bit hacky but kinda works (netflix doesn't like stuff floating over a playing video so you have to set touch lock to lock in 10 secs then press play, there's a sort of knack to it. Also it doesn't lock the power button so sometimes that accidentally gets pressed and I get asked why did it stop? :) )

If there are better options out there I'm all ears!

Game Tools on Samsung devices have this feature. For apps that aren't games you need to add them in Game Launcher so the Game Tools button appears in those apps.

I 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

I have one of those, but the problem is that it seems to be very picky about the devices that it can support as a display. I can get output from my Thinkpad X1 just fine, but an assortment of different Raspberry Pi models produce a mess of pixels (whereas the same devices work fine with a regular external HDMI display).

The newer Onyx models seem to have a monitor function as well: 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?).

I 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.

Don't have one, but the review sounds like the max 3 is the complete opposite: https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/onyx-boox-max3-review

Overpowered hardware, stock android 9, no restrictions.

It'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.

So it's you who got that incredibly sick 1733 custom bag! Figures I'd run into you here. /r/ManyBaggers says hello!

Been 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. :(

I 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

[0]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

I 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.

I'd love something like the BOOX Max3 13.3 but sadly I'm locked into Amazon's Kindle with an extensive collection of books.

You always can liberate your DRM-ed ebooks with something like Calibre + plugin.

If it runs Android why can't you install the Amazon Kindle app?

Thank you! I somehow completely forgot about that.

You can do this!

Not 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

How's the battery life, or to be inexact, how often do you recharge it?

I 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.

what model did you get?

I 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.

Video 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?

As 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.

Thanks for the info!

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