Me too. There aren't many companies making similar devices, so Boox almost occupies a niche all by itself. I'm generally a fan of eInk stuff, their suspicion of/hostility towards the GPL makes me not want to support them.
Boox devices run Obsidian and I have been working on an e-ink optimized theme[1]. This seems like a really fun device for reading, I wonder what it would be like for writing?
I have used Obsidian on my Onyx Boox Nova Air, and it's fine for reading, but writing with the stylus with OCR to write into notes isn't a great experience.
I got one. I love it so far. I never liked the original Kindle size, since it was too big for my pockets, at which point, why not offer more screen? So I had generally preferred readers that are more small tablet / iPad mini size—Boox Leaf 2 was my favorite.
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.
This is probably asking too much of it, but does the Boox Palma have GPS? Occassionally I go on outdoor trips with little or no reception, and I'll download maps to my phone that work offline. If I could have a device with great battery life handle map/navigation duty, and also read some ebooks in the evening, that'd be really nice.
Good to see there is still some competition because I am getting the same vibe off Kindle that I got from Ballmer-era MS software. "We won, draw down the team and put it in maintenance mode." In particular, the iPad app has bugs I run into almost every day.
Not sure how the iPad fits into that. It’s pretty heavily developed and they’ve even spun off a dedicated iPadOS to take advantage of the additional tablet size/hardware features.
I think the parent comment is addressing the Kindle app on iPad rather than the iPadOS. IMO the Kindle app has been buggy on iPad and Mac. They recently overhauled the Mac app to be more like iPad (Catalyst I guess).
I really like the sound of this product, both for reading and _possibly_ for writing depending on the capabilities. I've been wanting to make a little writing tool with a really long battery life that I could connect to a mechanical keyboard and carry around with me. I wonder if I could use this device as a screen for that kind of thing - plugging in and powering an external keyboard, and if it would support a word processor app.
This is very cool! You're right that not exactly what I'm looking for, but great to see nonetheless. I did see on the product Q&A page[0] that one of the questions was about plugging in a keyboard. The answer was:
"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. "
I was strongly considering buying this, but instead ordered the Hisense A7 off of Aliexpress. The main differences is the the A7 is a bit larger than the Palma and also has a headphone jack. It does get some service in the US, but it's also filled with a bunch of Chinese apps that are constantly phoning home, so I currently don't have my sim in it. I've ripped out much of the Chinese bloat with ADB, but I've had to reenable/reinstall when it lead to something breaking. Aside from that, I'm pretty happy with it. It looks some people have gotten root access, but it looks like a somewhat complicated process.
I would kill for a major manufacturer to make an e-ink phone that isn't hard to acquire and run. The Hisense A9[1] looks just about perfect, but the difficulty of getting Google services to run on it puts me off.
Does a device like this have faster screen update rates or is more responsive to inputs than e readers like the Kindle?
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.
AFAIK, Google doesn't hand out Android certification for e-ink devices and without the certification a manufacturer can't bundle Google Services on the device.
I wonder what level of demand there is for this. I could read books on my phone, but carry a separate e-reader because I want a larger screen that's more book-like.
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.
I like to read books on my phone while traveling, especially on long flights, but the OLED screen leads to eye strain very fast. The fact that this is e-ink makes it very attractive.
If it wasn't over-specced for an e-reader (and thus overpriced) I would grab one ASAP personally.
If you have an ebook in mobi or epub or azw3 format that isn't DRM protected, Calibre has the ability to convert it to whatever Kindles like out of the box.
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!"
Agree. Also the fact that DRM'ed ebooks from Kindle can only be read on Kindle devices or apps - you can't even use another device like Kobo or another reader.
Libary books. My (I am not in the US) local library lend out ebooks, they are obviously DRM protected. You can read them on the web or in the iOS/Android apps, so I can't read them on my kindle, on this device I would be able to as I could use the android app.
Having used Boox devices in the past (but not yet the Palma) I have a few thoughts on this one:
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.
Can anyone here provide a summary of the market offerings at the moment?
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.
What are you looking to do that you can't with your PocketBook?
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).
Even new Kindles are still a bit of a pain when dealing with ePubs, unfortunately. You can't just copy them onto the device, because the Kindle itself doesn't support ePub. What Amazon did is change its Send To Kindle email/app services to support ePubs, so when you use them it handles all the converting for you. If you want to put an ePub on your Kindle without going through Amazon's services, you still need to do the manual conversion dance with Calibre or similar.
Is there any reason (e.g., patents) for Amazon not to natively support ePubs or do they just want to make sure there's that extra bit of friction in using anything not from their store? (While claiming "support" for ePubs -- just with extra steps.)
The general mechanism for making Kindle books in the past (on the Amazon KDP website) was to run a tool (kindlegen) that would convert EPUBs to Kindle files. Amazon could have native support for EPUB from day 1 if they wanted to.
Based on the rate of changes to the software for Kindles, I have to assume that their Kindle dev team is one or two people working on it in their spare time, so maybe it's lumped under the heading of "legacy format issues, we'll get to it someday".
(Cynically: yes, it's probably the anti-competitive friction reason.)
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".
I got a Meebook M6, it's a typical 6" reader but it's running android 11 so I'm free to use any digitalized store. I really hope the market for android readers grow, actually the market is only closed proprietary and jailing devices...
Has the fsf ever sued anyone for violating gpl? I'd donate for that. Not because I want to destroy them, just push companies to release their mods.
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 using a Kindle paperwhite for a couple of years and I only wish the display was larger, not smaller. PDFs, Kindle books with code, comics, etc are terrible in the paperwhite.
I've been meaning to get a Scribe since it was released, but it's still not available where I live.
Onyx Boox have larger models (10 inch screens) with the added advantage of full Android with all it brings (lots and lots of apps) if you can swallow their disregard for the GPL.
I've been enjoying the reading experience on my Supernote A5x. I'd recommend it if you're looking for something a bit more multifunctional than a dedicated e-reader
A lot of books don’t display way on smaller e-readers. Larger format e-readers like the Kindle Scribe are likely the future. Until that came out, I couldn’t stand e-readers unless the books were just text only novels. They just destroy all the formatting
'The future' has been with us for a while. There are so many 6"-13" ereaders. I've got a 13" one and it's awesome for PDFs. That said, I could definitely use Palma for regular novels as you say. My 13" ereader is pretty much a couch device, it might as well not have a battery because I'm always near a plug. Whenever I travel, I just think "naah" and downlad novels on my regular smartphone.
There's definitely a market for small, phone-shaped ereaders.
Android 10 stopped receiving security updates in February...
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.
Then again, do you need security updates on your ereader? Are you really going to log in to your email, bank account, or whatever other service on a screen that does 15FPS (and is one of the best eink displays at that)?
I mean, what for? Sure, synchronizing books, yeah. I do that, then turn the wifi off. It's just draining battery for no reason. Perhaps synchronizing your notes to the cloud if you use the ereader as a tablet, that I could see for heavy note takers.
