Some Kobo e-readers can now run Linux, becoming inexpensive e-ink tablets
tuxphones.com
tuxphones.com
On that note: The Linux system Kindles run is pretty cool: It uses X, dbus, Awesome (window manager), Upstart and contains a lot of not only not obfuscated, but commented javascript and shell scripts. It's fun to dig around and will even run simple Linux tools like Rclone and Syncthing, making it a breeze to integrate into your existing systems (for instance I used to listen on the outOfScreenSaver dbus event to run an update script) [1]! The main issue I encountered is that my Kindle Touch doesn't support TLS 1.3, but the relevant library should be updateable.
If you are interested in modifying these cool devices, have a look at the MobileRead forums [2], a vibrant little community around that exact topic (mostly focusing on Kobo/Tolino and Kindle).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoPgXb-JNM
[1]: https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/fa1bee41f970eb3a3da23d721...
The only things I can think of are potentially better PDF viewing, and simple games like chess or solitaire (I think Koreader already has those however). Seems like a lot of effort to go to for little benefit.
In practice you'll see full screen refreshes be the high quality type, and smaller refreshes being of the fast type. That said plenty of e-ink displays don't bother with the fast refresh or even with partial refreshes and just always do a full screen high quality refresh. For E-books that's probably fine.
For you, I guess? Lots of people are just fine with it, including myself, especially against the background of the great reading quality.
Text-based use is actually excellent.
The general principles of eink UI/UX design that I've been formulating are:
- Persistence is free. If the display doesn't need to change, it draws no power, and will display the last-painted content indefinitely.
- Pixels are cheap. The pixel density is high, typically 200--300 dpi. This is better than all but the best Retina displays at the low end, and parallels paper at the high end.
- Ambient-light and bright-lit environment performance is excellent, most especially direct sunlight. Frontlight or backlight systems make low-light performance better. Principle mode is reflective rather than emissive display. Shading and pigmentation is subtractive rather than additive.
- Paints are expensive. They draw power, are typically far slower than emissive displays (1-8 Hz rather than 60--200+ Hz), and result in significant degredation (ghosting) at higher modes. Repainting the screen is highly distracting.
- Contrast is limited. Modern displays are typically 16-shade greyscale. Line art and high-contrast block regions display well. Halftoned images appear better than direct rendering. Shading and any deviation from pure-black-on-pure-white contrasts degrades performance.
- Colour is nonexistent in most cases, and limited where present. There are colour e-ink displays, though these tend to be muted and pastel, best suited to comic books rather than high-saturation photorealistic presentation.
- Paginated navigation is highly preferred to scrolling. Pagination is predictable and executes a single repaint for a navigation action. Scrolling at high-quality display levels creates noise and takes time, at lower-quality display levels remains difficult to track accurately and creates a large level of artifacts on display.
- Dark-on-light is preferred to light-on-dark, generally. Night-mode themes typically don't render well.