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Comment by mcbetz | Hacker News Reader

Any first-hand experiences with the Nxtpaper devices? There's a lot of press coverage of the release official material, especially on the 14 inch model, but few actual reviews. Availability or even infos on availability is an issue, at least in Europe as well.

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I just ordered the nxtpaper 11 arrives next week so will post back later.

I was torn between the HannsNote2 and Nxtpaper 11 but the battery life for the HannsNote2 is apparently less than 3 hours which I think is not going to cut it for a device which is meant to take me away from my phone

I ordered the nxtpaper from TechInn - I think they ship global

For anyone that was interested my Nxtpaper 11 finally arrived.

I am annoyed because I realised the Nxtpaper 11 is available on amazon.de the product listing was just buried because it hadn't bubbled up the search and its name isn't great for search.

Have only used it a few hours so some initial thoughts:

- this is my first ever real tablet but its heavier than I thought, its a bit awkward to read one handed especially without anything to grip, I might get one of those hand bands to get a lightweight grip

- the tablet is noticeably slow, you can see some slight frame choppiness when scrolling in Substack for example, but obviously way better than an eink reader

- the Nxtvision settings for reading mode and eye comfort mode are quite nice. Images and figures in documents look pleasingly "flat"

- the resolution is noticeably low, I do notice the DPI is not that crisp when reading PDFs

- I like the matte screen texture it is quite pleasing

- reading code on it via Github was quite fun/pleasant

All things considered for 250 Euros its probably worth a try if you're not too fussy. I can live with the shortcomings, this is a sufficiently niche space that it'll take a while for the perfect product to drop out.

I'd love to get my hands on a Hannsnote 2 to compare

I’m very close to getting a HannsNote 2. The battery life is disappointing, but it is very thin (maybe unnecessarily so). It’s no hardship to carry around a battery in a bag.

I have a crazy idea about VNC or SSH in which case a host laptop might not be very far away anyway.

The HannsNote2 is such an interesting piece of tech I am extremely interested it's one of those situations where its just one or two features away from being a killer product IMO.

Having a back/frontlight, bigger battery and faster CPU could turn it into the ultimate tablet for what I'm looking for.

I can settle for weaker CPU, I'd need to try it in person to test whether I can live without a light (hard to know just how much ambient light you need to use it indoors at night comfortably) but the battery I think is too short especially if you factor in natural degradation too. For me it means I'll always be worried about charging it or tethered to a cable and spontaneous usage always requires diligent charging. Stuff like train journeys and plane rides are all then also dependent on the power bank

What's the idea about SSH?

I planned to use the tablet to connect to a tmux session and mirror a shell session on my laptop. I could then type on the laptop but use the RLCD display.

Not a crazy idea, but might look a little weird.

I’ve had a reMarkable 1 for a few years, and even had fun hacking it [0] but ultimately it’s too restrictive and slow for what I ended up using for, which was reading and annotating PDFs away from my desk.

[0] https://blog.afandian.com/2020/10/pipes-and-paper-remarkable...

I believe the HannsNote can serve as a monitor as its running android or am I mistaken? What's the benefit of tmux over it behaving as a regular monitor?

That would be better, I’m sure. I’ve not looked at what’s available. I’d prefer to avoid using a Google account, so limiting myself to F-Droid.

MKBHD did a review of a TCL phone with an NXTPAPER display and the screen looks like just a normal LCD with a matte screen protector. It has some extra layers physically to limit the amount of blue light, but it 100% looked like any other phone screen with a "paper-like" screen protector on top. The only other thing were the screen modes that would wash out colors (partially or completely) to imitate the "paper look", but it's still pretty much glowing like any other regular display

The other thing I saw that was remarked was the image felt very close to the top of the screen which improves the paper-like feel

There are surprisingly few reviews of any nxtpaper devices outdoors. Chalid Raqami did a comparison with two generations of eink displays, stating that the nxtpaper 10s appears hard to read and washed out outdoors but the accompanying video clip hardly demonstrates that.

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