Boox Palma review: A phone-shaped e-reader
sixcolors.com
sixcolors.com
What suspicion or hostility does E Ink Corp have towards the GPL?
Would love a review if you have one!
But this is big enough to fit in my pocket, so I hope to have it with me pretty much always. Also, it’s a decent FLAC player—supports microSD, though it complains about USB-C headphone eating up power (as opposed to Bluetooth).
The camera will be handy for when I don’t have my phone—I’d like to be able to be without it (ok, I have a cellular Apple watch) without that “but what if I need to??” feeling.
I need an eink device for reading from apps like Scribd, Libby, etc
"You can connect a wired keyboard to the Palma via a USB-C to USB-A OTG Adapter. After that, you can type in the Notes app and third-party word processor apps. "
Which sounds promising!
[1]: https://hisenseeink.com/products/hisense-a9-pro-e-ink-smartp...
I only ask because I had to stop using the Kindle and go back to paperback, and I am by no means a purist for these things. I just found the delays in everything so bad to use that I was actually avoiding reading just because I was avoiding using the device.
I'm hoping to revisit e readers in a few years to see if things have improved on that front.
Currently using a Kindle Oasis and I like the fact that it's not just a flat rectangle and has physical buttons. I wouldn't mind a bit more chunk to it, but it's easier to hold. Really liked my last Kobo but it died after just a year or so of use.
If you have DRM encumbered files obviously you're going to need to do something else, first, but why did you buy a book with DRM? Seems unwise to begin with lol
Can you imagine buying a dead tree book and have the publisher come up and say "no no no, you can't sell that when you're done!"
DRM'd ebooks. What a world.
If it wasn't over-specced for an e-reader (and thus overpriced) I would grab one ASAP personally.
1. The phone form factor actually kinda makes sense to me because so few Android apps and websites are tablet optimized.
2. The lack of a fingerprint reader is a deal-breaker for me. I tried the Tab Mini C and found entering a passcode all the time to be too annoying. They put a fingerprint reader on the Tab Ultra and I don't understand why that hasn't been a priority on other devices.
3. Although I prefer the look of non-color eInk screens compared to the current generation color ones, they are worse at displaying apps & websites that aren't optimized for eInk (i.e, that aren't black text on a white background), which is most of them. As soon as you start adding color backgrounds, things can turn into an undifferentiable sea of black pretty quick, which makes a color display much better for this type of device.
I won't be buying one of these but I like that they are experimenting with different form factors and features.
I am still using a PocketBook, which is fine, but I'd like to still be able to also purchase books -- yet without surrendering to arbitrary and morbid DRMs and privacy violations like with Kindle.
Regardless of hardware, the options are to play ball with lock-in and DRM schemes, to buy only DRM-free books, or to buy books wherever and strip the DRM.
I buy books from ebooks.com and then use Calibre and DeDRM to turn them into vanilla ePubs. Once you've got an ePub, just about any reader will work with it (barring older Kindles).
My requirements are pretty much similar, I reckon. In other words, I only read books (i.e., all network connections always turned off, etc.) and supply the current reader mostly with EPUBs.
As for hardware and such, my PocketBook is a little slow but I still fancy its matte display. That is, I don't want another standard "computer".
(Cynically: yes, it's probably the anti-competitive friction reason.)
tl;dr Onyx Boox devices have a modified Linux kernel, and Onyx apparently refuses to release the source for it.
Based on what I've read about the ras pi hardware, without any info here, I'd guess all these smaller devices have secret blob images and use of undisclosed or nonpublic apis from the hardware makers, and they can't disclose them. We should reverse engineer them, get the hardware makers to disclose them. I've further read one reason for this is wanting to control their hardware, but also because there can be patent encumbrances about capabilities, not disclosing apis hides that. Of course these are problems the gpl wants to fight too.
I've been meaning to get a Scribe since it was released, but it's still not available where I live.
There's definitely a market for small, phone-shaped ereaders.
Android 11 is a year older... so it probably still has a few months to go. Months. On a new device. And it seems unlikely they're going to upgrade between android versions if they're running a 3 year old OS on release.