EWritable – e-ink tablet news and reviews | Hacker News Reader

EWritable – e-ink tablet news and reviews

ewritable.com

89 pointsSushiHippie55 comments

I've had a Kindle Scribe for just over a year, and my micro review is: "It's like paper, only much more expensive."

The writing experience is good. I use it for largely bullet journaling of things I need to do. It works well, but honestly a paper notebook would work nearly as well. I had hoped to get nebulous other benefits, I'm not exactly sure what, but maybe exporting or templates or viewing from multiple locations. But the software is fairly slow and fairly minimalistic.

Honestly: It's an e-reader with minimal pen functionality. What it has over a notebook is: It lays flat, and it's easy to erase. I do use it every business day.

Downsides: Page flipping is maddeningly slow, and the pencil is $50 if I lose it, and $1 nearly every time I drop it (replacing the nib). I've had a number of close calls where I thought I lost it and didn't look forward to the cost of replacement.

I'm amazingly close to selling it on ebay and replacing it with either a notebook and pen, a Boox Note Air 3 (non-color). I hear ReMarkable is coming out with a new one soon too.

A few years ago I supported a Kickstarter project for a paper notebook that may be a great fit for your needs. The Rocket Book is a wire bound paper notebook that has icons on each page and a mobile app. When you take a picture of a page with your phone it automatically syncs to your favorite cloud apps. As a bonus, it is designed to work with a special heat sensitive erasable pen so the notebook is reusable. Simple pop it in the microwave under a mug of water for 1 minute and the book comes out blank and ready for reuse. I am not affiliated and ultimately decided to type my notes or use an iPad but wanted to suggest it for those who prefer paper.

https://getrocketbook.com/

Looks like current ones are water-washable instead of microwavable, which I assume has the disadvantage that you need to do it page by page.

But you can use off the shelf Pilot Frixion pens with all of them, including the OG Wave version (which they do still sell as one of their cheaper ones, but looks like it can only take a few erase cycles).

This looks surprisingly good. The app that does the scanning and transfer to other services has a 4.7 on the iOS App Store, so I assume it works reasonably well, and I don’t see any subscription fees whatsoever.

$20-60 for a notebook is pretty dear, but certainly cheaper than $200-300 for an e-ink tablet as long as you can get enough reuse out of them.

That's a good reminder, I did try Rocketbook, I just printed out some of the samples and used them with pen/paper. At that time I was trying to get fancy with making a custom template, but for most of my use I really don't need anything more than lined paper and I rarely refer back to it after I'm done with a day, so no need to scan it.

I had originally started with a Panda Planner (because I got a bunch of them years ago to try to get my family into the habit, but that plan didn't work, so I had them laying around). I generally liked it, but wanted to make a format custom to my workflow, and that's where the Rocketbook was going to come in. But eventually I just went with lined paper and carried that over to the Scribe.

Also of note: You can search and download "daily planner" templates on the Internet and print them to try different formats and see what works for you.

> It works well, but honestly a paper notebook would work nearly as well.

When I went to university I used a Crosspad. It's been a quarter century and as your comment shows for actual use that's still fine. To recap, you are writing on paper mounted on an electronic pad with a special pen which radios in your position and the device records vector strokes you later can download for reading / editing. It wasn't a success because it was early and the software wasn't great and also because you needed to put in the work after class to somehow tag your notes for later searching.

As long as handwriting OCR is as unreliable as it is, I fail to see what adding a screen -- with its additional cost and weight -- to this setup brings. And indeed your comment shows: nothing.

I can recommend Ratta Supernote. I’ve got the A5X and I still use it regularly after a couple of years. It has handwriting recognition, the interface is pretty nicely designed, and sync is handled well also.

I bought one recently, and I’m using it primarily as an ereader at the moment.

I really like that in landscape mode, it’s the same size as two 7” Oases side by side. It feels like reading a paperback when I display the text in two page-sized columns, and I hadn’t realized how much I missed having that. It turns out the “look to the left, then to the right” thing you do to read the two pages makes the experience feel much more authentic to me.

It’s also a manga-reading beast, for the same reason. It’s much more enjoyable to read in two-page mode for me.

I am impressed with how good the writing feels on the surface. It’s very tactile compared to my iPad. I’m looking for places I can try to work it into my flow. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff that has simply not occurred to me because I’ve become so used to not having pen and paper around.

What about the fact that those kindle products are equiped with amazon apps that are preinstalled and can not be deleted. Apps and infrastructure that share your personal data with god knows who?

> It lays flat, and it's easy to erase.

A spiral-bound notebook lays flat too and, if you use good paper and a good pencil it's easy to erase as well.

I’ve had the Scribe for about six months and absolutely love it: I actually relish using it every single time I open it up.

I’ve had Kindles for probably 10 years, gradually upgrading until the latest warm-screen version Oasis.

But reading on these smaller screens always felt like a compromise: having to constantly flip pages was a nagging mental reminder that the platform was digital, and for some reason this always impinged slightly on my enjoyment.

I use the Scribe in portrait mode and now it feels like a luxurious hard-back page I’m looking at. The only thing that would make it conceivably better would be a yellower tint to the base color, which even the warm light doesn’t quite achieve - making it feel even more like a paper-page.

I also write work notes on it every day. The pen feel is beyond comparison to ‘writing’ on an iPad - which is really nothing more than sliding around with a piece of plastic on a sheet of glass.

I haven't used the Scribe much for reading, I do most of my kindle reading before bed, and I find the smaller Oasis is a nicer form factor for me to read while holding it. Using the Scribe as a reader, if you wanted something bigger, is probably a great experience. I agree that the pen feel on the scribe is great.

If anyone running a site like this finds this thread, I’d like to suggest that always declaring the PPI is important. At least to me.

I straight up am not ever going to buy anything with less than 300 PPI, because that’s the point where I stop noticing the pixels. So being able to filter out everything that fails that saves a lot of time.

Ewritable is definitely my go-to resource for comparing eInk tablets (I'm a big fan of the space). Hopefully it survives the hug of death soon so more folks can discover his hard work.

I also came across https://comparisontabl.es/e-readers/ lately, which has a lot of niche and older devices, but doesn't have the same depth of coverage for the bigger incumbants.

I tried to make a similar website [1] but find very difficult to present this type of information on mobile.

So I made a full text search, but still doesn't do the trick very good.

I'd like to see a good responsive library to show this kind of comparison tables on mobile (that's where all my website visitors seems to use).

[1] https://world-of-ereader.com/find-e-reader.html

I'm hoping there's a good (and not super expensive) smartphone (without cellular) color e ink device in the future.

I know a lot of people want the boox palma to have cellular but... I would prefer for it to be cheaper and retain just wifi. I have one, and I've never felt like I need mobile internet on it and I've also never felt like I would want to replace my phone for it either.

I doubt dropping cellular is going to save any significant money. 4g chipsets are so cheap you can buy an entire 4g phone for $17.

A Unisoc T107 is dirt cheap when bought in bulk.

If only price was correlated to the cost of the implemented features.

If they put cellular I assure you they can easily charge an extra 100 dollars for it.

HiSense makes eink phones you can import from China but need to do your research as far as carrier compatibility.

I'm one of those people who wish the Palma had cellular, and it's exactly for that reason: I want it specifically for use as a phone.

I bought a Boox Palma after a couple of eink threads here recently and it primarily exists for me as a replacement phone to reduce eye strain in bed. I can do all the reading I used to do on my phone on the Palma, I can do Anki flashcards, I can comment on HN, I can even watch and get the gist of an embedded short video. It's great!

But what was even greater was when I went out for a bike ride last weekend and kicked back on the beach for a bit to do my flashcards in the sun. Except... couldn't sync with AnkiWeb because there was no 4G. Fortunately I had my phone with me too and set up wi-fi sharing to do the sync, but how much better would it have been if I could have left my phone at home? Way better! The eink screen was much easier to read in the sun than my phone ever could be, and the Palma is (slightly) smaller and lighter than a phone too. I would love if it could be my primary bit of kit for traveling around during the day, with just enough connection to sync Anki, download up-to-date weather reports and maybe send the odd email. It probably wouldn't replace my phone for multi-day or overseas trips where GPS and having a legacy phone number/dialer is still useful, but with 4G internet it'd be the perfect day trip device.

The Kindle used to have its own cell connection a long time ago, letting you leave the phone behind and access content. I want to say it worked worldwide too.

It did! I took one with me when traveling by sea for a few weeks and it was great to be able to download the news whenever a scrap of 3G appeared from whatever remote island or coastal outcrop. I even remember using the janky browser to try find a hotel when arriving somewhere in the middle of the night when everything was closed. Sadly the "free worldwide 3G" offering has died in recent Kindles, making them less useful as a travel device.

My experience with the Kindle 3G back in the day made me feel like there should be some kind of international public service set up to provide free worldwide internet, just enough to send email and download the news and weather. I think if you have a high-end phone you can buy eSIMs nowadays that should work in multiple countries, but there's something appealing about the idea that people would never have to worry, just knowing that wherever they end up, with whatever device they have available to them, they'll be able to access basic informational services in their own language.

Yeah, I mean, to each their own right.

I guess my point is I'd like for these to offer a model with or without cellular. More options is always better.

> I guess my point is I'd like for these to offer a model with or without cellular. More options is always better.

I think that shopping for a PC vs. a Mac shows that this isn't always true. (Or, at least, it didn't used to be; now, or the last time I shopped, the confusing variety of options on the Apple store is, while still well short of PC levels, way less controlled then what they used to offer.)

Of course there are prices, and plenty of people don't like the Apple "you'll like what we tell you" way, but plenty of people do, so I don't think you can make any uniform statement.

The boox air 3 c is currently at the top of my list of useless gadgets I want to play with for a week before placing on the retirement shelf.

Dang, I'm curious what you don't like about it. I've been loving mine

Just my experience but I felt they are slow fragile and not particularly great on battery life. I think a dedicated device like remarkable or kindle without Android stuff running in the background might make more sense.

I sadly recently broke my ultra c with the pressure just from putting on a new screen protector using a cardboard applicator. I was mainly using boox notes with the stylus to read pdfs and pressreader on flights and that was a decent experience.

My other criticism is prior to this just having the magnetic pen attach itself damaged the finish on the side.

I'm glad you like yours, but the appeal wore off quickly for me and I would suggest any potential buyer familiarize themselves with reports of experiences of trying to get service or warranty on these through the company.

> Just my experience but I felt they are slow fragile and not particularly great on battery life. I think a dedicated device like remarkable or kindle without Android stuff running in the background might make more sense.

I have a reMarkable 2.

My primary problem with it is the battery life. If you leave it on, it will, after a certain period of time, overlay a banner on the screen saying it's turned off because of inactivity.

But the banner appears to be lying. Leaving it in that state rapidly drains the battery. If you want the battery to last, you need to manually tell the device to shut down, at which point, instead of displaying whatever was last on screen plus a banner explaining how it's shut off due to inactivity, it displays a different screen saying "reMarkable is powered off". At that point, the battery stops draining.

I can't understand why shutting off due to automatically-detected inactivity isn't supposed to take the device out of "actively drain the battery" mode. It seems like a huge, unforced usability failure.

If you are in London I'd be happy to let you use one over coffee.

> Error establishing a database connection

Wondering if this is the result of the HN equivalent of being slashdotted ...

Probably, before submitting this link everything worked fine, but now I can't even load the page.

Didn't knew that so many people on HN look into the "new" tab, that it could crash a website.

Here is an archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802013632/https://ewritable...

We call it the hug of death.

HN H(ug)o(f)D(eath)

I'm always surprised when I see this happen. I could see a quick surge in traffic locking up the server, likely at the database, but I'd also expect that to sort itself out quickly with a reasonable infrastructure setup.

I'm seeing a 503 here now, maybe they ran into a hard cap on hosting bandwidth?

I think it is just a news site about e-ink devices. Maybe just falling over is a reasonably failure mode and they’ve set up enough infrastructure? The site will be there in a day or soC for people that are really interested, most likely.

I think it has to do with the default value of max_connections in MySQL being somewhat low, I think it's like 150 or something.

> of being slashdotted

haha, you're old... :-)

Yes, yes I am. Now get off my lawn! :-)

My ideal portable machine would be an ARM laptop, Thinkpad x220 build and an e-ink screen running Linux. With the right power management, it could last days on battery.

Every now and again, I see stories about Onyx and their tablets pop up and I have to dust off this old comment of mine [0]. I've since sold the tablet and picked up a remarkable that I am very happy with and have modified in many ways.

Long story short: - Onyx still doesn't release kernel sources

- Onyx still uses outdated and vulnerable builds of Android, with questionable settings such as disabling SELinux

- Their devices are very chatty back to servers in the PRC.

- Their digitizer API is still hostile to developers.

- They shut down their support forums when the chorus of disgruntled customers began to get too loud

And even worse, they are using "anti-China movement" as an excuse to not comply with the GPL. This company is shit and no one should give them any money. And yet, all of these "review sites" (full of every kind of affiliate link imaginable) can't help themselves from riding the gravy train of free product from this company.

Edit: And then there are large threads like this [2] where people recognize all the problems and try to "secure" their devices. （ ´_ゝ`）

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041543

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...

[2]: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?s=64718a04c...

I have the same experience with a Onyx Boox. No more updates after 1 year. As (european) consumers rights require a working product for at least 2 years, and security updates are an essential part of a 'working product', it's easy to return it to the seller (not Onyx).

> I've since sold the tablet and picked up a remarkable that I am very happy with and have modified in many ways.

Could you elaborate a bit more about the modifications you've done to the remarkable?

After looking at all these devices, I always come back to the remarkable, but then things like their cloud subscription thing and the weird ways to get files to/from it steer me away.

It's just linux under the hood and they give you root access. So you can install anything that you can compile, and you have access to all the compiled packages in entware [0].

For sync, I have wireguard and syncthing. For backups, I use rsync. For epubs, I have koreader. I even installed netsurf for fun, but I don't use it often. I was even using gocryptfs at one point, but that workflow kept breaking with updates so I stopped using that.

All of the tablets that I have seen perform handwriting recognition via a cloud service, so that doesn't interest me and I haven't come across any local solutions for rM (although it's been over a year since I last checked).

It's an unusually nice experience for such an open platform.

[0]: https://toltec-dev.org/

Ah TIL, thanks!

> and I have to dust off this old comment of mine

Do you really have to, crusader?

When the site finally worked it was nice to learn of the super note. Never heard of it before and I’m curious when the next iteration of their 10” version comes out. Seems like a good note taking first and e reader second. Which is what I’m looking for, already enjoy my smaller kobo for reading only.

The site speaks to that: https://ewritable.com/when-will-the-ratta-supernote-a5-x2-be... . In brief, Ratta is open on Reddit, but I don't think anyone has much faith that they'll meet their latest estimate, so we're all just guessing.

Long shot, but does anyone know the ODM/OEMs that produce these? I’ve had an idea for a niche device and I bet there’s a few firms that specialize in the hardware.

I really liked my remarkable 2 for the feel of writing. Honestly what stopped me from using it is the lack of backlight (since most of my use is reading ebooks)

I like mine, but my uses for it may not be that common ( I let my kid doodle in it; I write a journal; I have some books in it, but I don't remember last time I read a book there ). I have some minor beefs with it for the price, but by far it was the best experience in terms of 'feeling' of writing as if it was paper.

boox air 3 (non-c) is my favorite reader ever, i can run android apps like lichess, hive, logseq, hacki, termux, chatgpt. write on it with a stylus, take notes and read books in a large format. it has a nice interface, unfortunately no buttons, is thin, has good battery life and bluetooth and wifi support so i can use it with a foldable keyboard and it doubles as a grayscale xfce machine.

Not the most mobile-friendly site

Came here to find this comment

Seems like this website is hosted on a 1ghz e-reader.

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