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I’ve bought a few of these bundles but could never get into reading the science or tech books on my small laptop.
I know the feeling. eInk finally solved that for me.
If you’re in the market for an e-Ink device that’s not locked down, I’m a fan of the Boox series. I don’t trust their proprietary services, but they work great stand-alone with a home NAS.
The Hacker News crowd likes the reMARKable but I don’t see what’s so great about it. Inkplate is the only one I find interesting for now, and I’d want it to be bigger.
Thanks I didn’t know about that. Interesting though pretty expensive and runs android 11 (I’d prefer to stay all FOSS). A convertible laptop is another idea, e.g. thinkpad yoga. Also would want easily replaceable battery which the inkplate has. The Boox sounds more like a giant smartphone, is that reasonable? This type of device should be nearly BIFL imho. 13.3" inkplate would be great.
Laptop means an emissive display, which generally results in excessive brightness in lower light scenarios and inadequate contrast in very bright ones, because it needs to power through the ambient light. Epaper is way easier to read because it inherently matches the lighting of your environment (or you can use a front light to boost it slightly in the dark) by being reflective instead. There are interesting efforts at reflective LCD screens, but they’re even more expensive and limited to monitors and TVs for the most part. For text based content, eink and other epaper devices read like actual paper, and you can’t match that with other display tech currently. The display is most of the cost of those devices, though, because they’re still pretty low volume and hard to manufacture.
I’m not sure the distinction you’re making with “big phone”. The bigger ones support pens for you to write on them, and it feels similar to using my iPad to read, just without animations and with a more paper like display that doesn’t get blown out in the sun. (The current version would be the tab x, just to clarify.) I think Apple’s tablet experience is a lot better than android’s, and there are a bunch of apps that I like that aren’t on Android, but I wouldn’t say it doesn’t feel like a tablet.
Big phone means same mostly proprietary software and spyware apps, hard to replace internal battery, limited software updates after which the device becomes obsolete, non upgradeable memory and storage, etc. By comparison my 2011 era laptop still runs current gnu/linux distros and has a swappable battery, HD/SSD, and other replaceable parts.
I know the feeling. eInk finally solved that for me.
If you’re in the market for an e-Ink device that’s not locked down, I’m a fan of the Boox series. I don’t trust their proprietary services, but they work great stand-alone with a home NAS.
I might get an inkplate 10 (same size as Boox) but really want something bigger, like 14 inch or more, to read arxiv.org PDFs.
Oooh. That is cool. Thanks. I’m not quite ready to give up Android, but I’ll keep an eye on this project.
The Hacker News crowd likes the reMARKable but I don’t see what’s so great about it. Inkplate is the only one I find interesting for now, and I’d want it to be bigger.
There’s a 13.3" boox that’s pretty decent. I have the older max 3, and I’m waiting for them to get a color version that size to replace it.
Thanks I didn’t know about that. Interesting though pretty expensive and runs android 11 (I’d prefer to stay all FOSS). A convertible laptop is another idea, e.g. thinkpad yoga. Also would want easily replaceable battery which the inkplate has. The Boox sounds more like a giant smartphone, is that reasonable? This type of device should be nearly BIFL imho. 13.3" inkplate would be great.
Laptop means an emissive display, which generally results in excessive brightness in lower light scenarios and inadequate contrast in very bright ones, because it needs to power through the ambient light. Epaper is way easier to read because it inherently matches the lighting of your environment (or you can use a front light to boost it slightly in the dark) by being reflective instead. There are interesting efforts at reflective LCD screens, but they’re even more expensive and limited to monitors and TVs for the most part. For text based content, eink and other epaper devices read like actual paper, and you can’t match that with other display tech currently. The display is most of the cost of those devices, though, because they’re still pretty low volume and hard to manufacture.
I’m not sure the distinction you’re making with “big phone”. The bigger ones support pens for you to write on them, and it feels similar to using my iPad to read, just without animations and with a more paper like display that doesn’t get blown out in the sun. (The current version would be the tab x, just to clarify.) I think Apple’s tablet experience is a lot better than android’s, and there are a bunch of apps that I like that aren’t on Android, but I wouldn’t say it doesn’t feel like a tablet.
Big phone means same mostly proprietary software and spyware apps, hard to replace internal battery, limited software updates after which the device becomes obsolete, non upgradeable memory and storage, etc. By comparison my 2011 era laptop still runs current gnu/linux distros and has a swappable battery, HD/SSD, and other replaceable parts.
Yeah. When an eInk laptop running Linux hits, I’ll be very happy.
With USB-C to occasionally drive an external display, I think the technology might be close to ready for prime time.
I used a reflective laptop (Toshiba T1000) in the 1980s and today’s stuff isn’t really that much more functional, at least for text.