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Comment by ruph123 | Hacker News Reader

After switching to a Onyx Boox Note Air from an iPad I am so happy with this technology. Writing is truly paper-like and reading is so incredible. Latency is great, pens work nicely and are much finer and (can) have more friction than the Apple Pencil, contrast and resolution is great. And it is MUCH more versatile than a remarkable. Due to Android apps, more storage and great stock apps.

I know it is a bridge-technology at best but for me it beats any LCD/OLED screen by a mile. So I am more closely following this tech again now.

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I can agree that it is an amazing device indeed.

You can use any Wacom compatible stylus to replace the existing stylus and the third party stylus will probably perform better than the original based on other owners' reports.

Check these comprehensive three parts in-depth review video of the Onyx Boox Note Air by a reputable eBook reader reviewer [1].

My main complain is that it has a rather limited built-in web based app to transfer from your laptop/PC/etc to the device directly via WiFi but not the other around. If you want to transfer wirelessly from the device to your laptop/PC/etc you need to register with Onyx's portal and sync from there, thus it's a more cumbersome to use. Normally I just email the document to myself because unlike Remarkable's devices it has Android OS and normal browser being installed.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdQ5sXTJRMI

Yeah I have the Lamy, the Samsung pen that Voya is all about but I like the Staedler Norris Digital Jumbo the best. Voja‘s videos where the main reason why I cancelled my RM2 order and went with the Boox. For syncing I set up „FolderSync Pro“ to automatically sync between my WebDav server for PDFs and also automatically upload the notes folder (where the explicitly exported notes are saved). It is just too bad that the later are only rasterized PDFs whereas if you enable a sync service from the OS like Dropbox, the notes are uploaded as vector PDFs.

One thing I am not happy about is the constant phoning home to Chinese servers (multiple domains incl. alibaba) This can be disabled via NetGuard but then you also lose the ability to automatically upload the handwritten vectorized notes to Dropbox.

Could pi-hole help with this by limiting access to certain domains?

Oh for sure! I just cannot set it up where I am right now. I am sure that NetGuard may also somehow be able to block domains but I have not been able to find out how.

> My main complain is that it has a rather limited built-in web based app to transfer from your laptop/PC/etc to the device directly via WiFi but not the other around.

You should take a look at Symcthing, that's what I use to keep directories in sync across devices securely. There's a slight learning curve, but once you grasp the concept of devices combined with folders and how they interact it's a breeze. You can set it and forget it and it will do it's magic.

That has an e-ink display. This does not.

How is the general battery usage?

My Onyx Boox Max Lumi certainly has excellent battery for my purposes.

Also owner of a ReMarkable 2, will be reviewing both of them soon as I think they are an interesting niche tech, and are big investments for people.

A comparison of both would be very appreciated. I've been trying to decide which to get.

If you could also try and to a pcap to make sure nothing funky is going on with the Onyx ROM that would be amazing.

Please share here on HN when you do the comparison. This class of device (somewhere between a Kindle and an iPad) are of interest to me, but the market is a little immature and I don't feel like being a beta tester.

I also will chime in that I would like to see a comparison.

Hard to say because I have auto sync set up to keep my PDFs up to date which runs every 15mins. And Wifi is mostly on. But with that and moderte usage I may need to charge it between 7 and 9 days. But you can probably do optimize the settings more (after what time does it disable wifi when it started sleep mode, when does it start to shit itself off, front-light adjustments, etc.)

How well does it handle PDFs? Zooming and all.

It handles PDFs well, even large ones (~300MiB) but I do not zoom. It has a nice auto cropping features which allows me to read everything (including various conference paper formats) well.

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