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I bought, and returned the Note Air.

The build quality is impressive. I had it for 2 weeks, used it for about an hour daily, and set it to only poweroff after a day of inactivity.

Its battery dropped from 100% to 48% over that time. Yes, I was quite positively impressed.

However, their theft of code (which is what you do, if you do not respect the code license, eg, gpl), the fact that even a brand new model tablet was 3+ monthly Android security updates behind, and the pcaps I took showing all the phoning home, including IPs in China...

Well...

As I said, returned. Quite sad, loved the hardware.

Would it be a security threat to have that on one’s home network?

I’d mostly want it for reading articles online and email newsletters. I could make a burner email account for this purpose.

That seems a tolerable tradeoff, as I don’t consider what I read on HN to be super sensitive. (Though others may reasonable differ there)

The trouble is that it is behind your security perimeter once it is on your home network. It can start discovering other devices, monitoring traffic, enumerating ports and services, etc.

If you're set up for it, you can always set it up on a sandboxed SSID with access only to the internet (or even just to sites you choose, like an FTP server of your ebooks). This is probably a good idea with most sketchy gadgets that "need" access to the "internet" but will probably be off the table in coming years as it gets cheap enough for manufacturers to embed 5g connectivity if they want.

Sounds like a lot of work when the alternative is just using a device that doesn’t spy on you in the first place. For instance, Remarkable is a great e—ink tablet that literally gives you the keys to the kingdom: there’s a UI in the product that gives you the root PW (which is set randomly for each device).

Does remarkable have a web browser or email support? I don’t use chrome so it will be hard to add reader articles. Mostly I want to add them from twitter on ios.

Not as a 1st party feature, but there are several open source tools for doing that: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

Wow those look great! Thanks. No email newsletter though right?

Maybe I can make an rss feed out of them and use goosepaper or print them to pdf.

You can print to a pdf from your browser and upload that to the device as a simple workaround. It's pretty straightforward.

Oh that sounds pretty great. How is pdf legibility vs a formatted article? I have a kobo and remember finding some pdf articles small.

Also how do you upload from the phone, can you print to a dropbox folder or the Remarkable phone app or some source so it is automatic?

Does Eero let you do this? That’s my router.

Vote with your money. Don’t buy stuff from companies that are doing the wrong thing.

https://youtu.be/ObtjXO_hEPw

This was a pretty thorough traffic analysis of their Max Lumi device. I think it would be pretty similar with the Note Air. I bought a Max Lumi after this as there didn't seem to be much concern.

> Its battery dropped from 100% to 48% over that time

I have the same model with insane battery life. I think your unit might have been defective.

> and set it to only poweroff after a day of inactivity.

Might it have been this?

the poster is returning the device because of moral issues with the manufacturer, the anecdote regarding battery life was meant to indicate product quality (although rhetorically structured as a complaint and therefore confusing)

14h hours using up only 52% is impressive to me.

For anyone looking for pointers to buy e-Ink devices, Voja from MyDeepGuide has a comprehensible collection of different e-ink devices and is a trusted reviewer.

You can watch the comparison of all the e-Ink tablets here on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkK_HQRf6xg

This guy is indeed awesome, a very valuable resource, however he only reviews from the perspective of usage, not covering things like security updates, gpl compliance, phoning home, etc.

Thanks for sharing this. I've been pondering getting a Boox Nova 3 in the near future (mostly because it has the yellow backlight and ends up being only $5 more than a Kindle Oasis (where I live)... and then I get the benefit of all the additional features. :-)

This is what I did and love the device. You can adjust color temperature by mixing cool and warm light. Also, larger screen than the kindle and high res enough to read technical books.

Came with a case and stylus.

The BOOX tablets seem really interesting. I'm wondering if you or anyone has tried a terminal app (e.g. termux)? Is the refresh rate fast enough?

It's usable, but only just, and you have to fiddle with your colorscheme (most of the defaults are unusable for some colors).

My major problem with basically all the BOOX devices is they're violating the GPL by not releasing their kernel/uboot sources.[1]

[1]: http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/install-linux-or-alterna...

My Max Lumi can be used as a monitor, and it is possible to work on it, but visual feedback is sluggish and you have to accept a lot of artifacts for the sake of speed.

I do hope to try coding in the sun with it some time. Got it in winter though, so haven't yet.

I've tried it with the Boox Note Air 10.3 (arrived a couple of weeks ago!), it's decent enough but I had to install the termux-styling apk to change its background from black to white. I think it works better that way.

The refresh rate is good enough for me but I'm not very picky so YMMV. I'll try to use it for work one of these days using ssh, so I'll report back once I've done so.

With all the phoning home, and lack of security updates, you may want to reconsider ever entering anything sensitive into a Boox product.

Some time ago I had a sign in attempt with password on my Google account. Inputting the password on the Boox was one of my theories as to how it was stolen. I've since made a dedicated account for the device, and the sign-in is now done via a one time token so that risk is mitigated.

You have to make sure you don't have a cursor. Normal printing is fast enough, but the typical block-style cursor makes it not really usable for me (Tolino Epos (Gen1)).

I recently tried the Note 3. Very cool device! My impression of the Google Play app support: it works, but the experience isn't as good with 3rd-party apps as it is with the first-party Boox apps. I tried loading the Kobo app, as well as Evernote and OneNote. In the Kobo app, text was not as clear (even on the clearest setting) and the page turning experience was off (it had to sort of re-orient the text). Neither OneNote or Evernote were usable for note-taking with the pen.

All of this is probably to be expected, but I wanted to share because the idea of being able to run any android app is certainly part of the appeal of the device.

It is still a good device, but when comparing it to other e-ink devices on the market, I'd really consider the Google Play support to be a bit more of a novelty than something you would actually use unless you have a very specific use case and don't mind a less than stellar app experience.

Hi thanks a lot for sharing. You never feel that 10” is too small for PDF? With charts especially. I know it will scale well with ePUB

It has a crop-margins feature for reading PDFs that (for most documents) makes the text size slightly larger than it would be printed on letter sized paper. It's pretty seamless. For two column documents there's a "quarters" reading mode.

It's not a great experience for a PDF with no margins and a complicated layout (like some magazines.)

I’ll second the Note 2. It’s the greatest gadget I’ve ever owned. Completely supplanted paper/pens for me!

I have a BOOX Note (v1) and found no reason whatsoever to replace it. The auto PDF margin crop functionality Just Works, the only reader I've seen where this problem is solved to any degree of satisfaction.

I vastly prefer reading PDFs off the Note than on a computer, regardless of the paper size.

How's the page turning speed and/or screen refresh speed?

I remember looking at an e-ink reader years ago and thought it was unusable because of the weird page refresh/slow page turn.

They've generally gotten faster over time.

The newer ones also have partial refresh modes that are faster still, but not quite as clean, which lets you trade speed for clarity. The fastest modes work for video (sort of) and at least the Boox have lots of configuration options e.g. different apps can refresh at different speeds, the refresh rate can vary when you start scrolling (in standard android apps that aren't optimised for e-ink, in readers you generally "page" through text) and can set it to do full refreshes after X amount of actions, or manually force a refresh.

But, as all the above probably indicates, if you have it on full quality mode, then there's a noticeable delay and flicker as it fully blacks out the screen to "clear" it and then displays the next page.

This is particularly bad for some of the color ones, as they seem to only be able to do each color layer in sequence.

Also, as far as I know, it's the only ebook-reader with USB-C.

What software do you use for reading and syncing with your BOOX?

The OP mentioned Syncthing .. I have a similar workflow where I use dropbox to sync(with dropsync installed on boox)

google drive