Why the ReMarkable doesn't have a backlight I do not understand.
The new Kobo Elipsa has lighting. I'm wondering if the writing experience will suffer on it.
The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
171–180 of 530 posts
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah so you want the Boox with Play Store installed. Then you have all that stuff.
Well, in theory. One could write an app for that I guess. But the whole complex android stack does not really appeal to me. Simplicity I think, would also be really important. And I think openness goes hand in hand with that.
Boox is easy to root and the remarkable is open. Not sure how well the remarkable would work with a keyboard, but my Boox included a keyboard (it's just a BLE one but it has good support). On the remarkable at least you should be able to run some tiny linux distro with a simple as you want stack. Guess in time we will get something; just not sure how to make sure it's more open.
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#173Has anyone here used a reMarkable 2 and had the chance to compare it to a Supernote or a Note Air? I've had the opportunity to use a reMarkable in person, and it's the first and only digital writing device that I could tolerate to write notes. The MS Surface, iPad Pro and Samsung tablets have never cut it for me. It's difficult to quantify why - a combination of pen-to-display distance, latency and screen texture per…
I've used the Note Air, briefly, and now use the RM2 everyday - my use case is for reading documents, signing documents, and storing notes at work due to the high number of lawsuits and FOIA requests. I use it almost exclusively for those three things.
The Note Air felt like drawing on plastic. Like using a ballpoint pen on a projector screen. It was easy for me to drift around the page. And my already terrible handwriting suffered. The transcription wasn't clean, and had many errors based on my handwriting. The RM2 feels like writing on paper. It has fantastic recognition for my handwriting, and the transcribing has one or maybe two weird words per page.
The only thing with the RM2 is there is no way to tag and search your pages. So you have to be very strategic with how you organize your notebooks, otherwise it's easy to just have a mess of a million pages you can never get through to find what you need. Tagging and searching would make the RM2 just AMAZING.
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#174> Later this month I'll take a look at Supernote which already has a enthusiastic community and promises to have a rich API for 3rd parties to explore and expand. I tried the Remarkable 2 for a month but ended up returning it and ordering the Supernote A5X instead – I couldn't be happier! Its main advantages (IMO): - The Supernote acts as a regular USB mass storage device, so syncing files (w/o resorting to the cloud…
Thanks for sharing. I got the reMarkable 1 pretty early and I've been debating ordering the reMarkable 2. I've heard almost exclusively good things about it, but right now I'm happy enough with the original device. I hadn't heard of Supernote until seeing this comment, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on when I think about upgrading. I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty much none" w…
> I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty much none" when it comes to PDF reading and annotation capabilities.
Well, all you can basically do is scribble within a PDF. The RM2 doesn't offer proper PDFs annotations and it doesn't even come close to the Supernote in terms of other useful features like bookmarking, digests, etc.
> EDIT: Wow. Looked at the A5X and for the price compared to the RM2, it's very enticing.
Yup, exactly. It seems more expensive upon first sight but it's actually a pretty good deal.
> Do you know if there's any API that allows me to write my own utilities to sync with the A5X? Specifically, I want to be able to send PDFs to the device programmatically that will be eventually synced the next time I use it.
This is exactly what I'm waiting for, too! My hope is that once they open up their platform I'll be able to install the Syncthing Android app and sync my Supernote with all my other devices over WiFi.
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can actually SCP into the device without any modification. It's under the Copyright section of the device. It'll show you the default SSH password for your device and then you can drop files in there. :)
You can, but getting the reader to pick up a new pdf involves - Setting up a bit of metadata - Restarting the system service it's not quite as simple as `scp file remarkable:/folder`
For me it's much easier to drop files to reMarkable using RCU [0], works over wifi, too.
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#176I bought a Pocketbook 912 [0] soon after it came out, around 2012. It wasn't cheap - I think around £400. It had a 9.7" screen with a resolution of 1200×825. But the CPU & memory were what you'd expect a decade ago, so the experience was quite laggy. OTOH the display was superb for reading most text books - almost native size, PDF rendering & page turning was fast enough , and zero eye-strain. It came with a pen for…
I used to have a 912 as well but its bugs were tiresome so I stopped using it. I can say that the rM2 is a very different beast from that. I didn't expect to like the rM2 and was anticipating returning it when I preordered it but now it pretty much accompanies me everywhere.
Can I ask two questions please? First, what don't you like about it now that you've used it for a while? Second, are you sharing data to and fro with a GNU/Linux desktop/laptop (if to is the workflow comfortable) or is it primarily a reader and note taker that generates notes that are sent one-way back to your computer?
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#177Onyx Boox Note Air Is extremely fragile. I had mine in a case in my backpack. Not a scratch on the screen, not a crack anywhere. The E-ink has crazy lines in it, not sure if it was pressure in the back pack but be careful. I loved the device, reading and writing on it was awesome but the company wanted $200 to fix it plus shipping both ways. Thankfully Amazon made an exception and I got all my money back.
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#178I bought the Onyx Boox Note Air some months ago, and I must say that I'm really happy with it. Screen refresh is good, there's almost no ghosting in default mode, and refresh rates are acceptable. There are only two downsides about it: The vendor does not respect FOSS and does not publish the sources for their modified Linux kernel, and the device constantly phones home to China. However, the device can be rooted eas…
Is there any information on what data it sends home? Is the problem the server is in China? My Android phone always phones home to some US servers. P.S. I own a rm2 but I'd be interested in an e-ink android tablet.
It's been a while since I looked at it, but here's what I remember:
In the UI, you can choose if the device should communicate to Chinese or US servers. Both of them are available under the boox.com domain, so I assume they are both controlled by the Chinese manufacturer. The device uses this to check for firmware upgrades, to sync notes, for their own book store and IIRC to send some basic usage statistics. As per firmware version 3.0 (v3.1 is current), this traffic was only partly encrypted.
Besides this, the software seems to include some kind of Tencent SDK, which tries to contact Chinese servers quite aggressively, regardless of which setting you choose in the UI. The traffic is encrypted, so I couldn't figure out what it does. The servers seem to belong to Tencent's QQ service [1], so they supposedly use it for their on-device support feature. However, because the device tries to contact the servers immediately after startup, I assume it does some kind of analytics tracking as well. Blocking the service's domains on the DNS level doesn't work though, as the SDK will start to contact fixed IP addresses if DNS resolution fails.
Luckily, all of this traffic can be blocked after rooting and installing a firewall (see my post above), since all of this is implemented under Android user ID 1000, which makes it easy to block in AFWall+.
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I don't know. I have the Onyx Poke 3 and I find the software pretty janky. For instance, in order to install a dictionary, I have to jump through a whole series of hoops to download one to a PC and then upload/install it on the tablet. I could install the Kindle app (after I enable the Google Play Store), but then I might as well buy a Kindle. In order to upload epub or pdf documents to the Poke3, I have to inte…
You can install a dictionary on the device, they are just stardict dictionary files...it's literally putting a file in a folder. They also have some available to download although mainly focused on Chinese/Russian. It runs Android. You can just sync things through the cloud provider of your choice. Put the Dropbox, OneDrive, NextCloud etc. app on and just download it from there. Most eReaders don't have upload by ema…
I thinks he is looking for a "kindle" and really should get a Kindle. I actually own a Kindle and a BOOX Nova 3, they are two different products, not interchangeable if you are picky about which is better at doing what. I would have a E-ink tablet, a Kindle and a iPad depending on the tasks.
Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
#180Ah, e-readers. I'm looking for a good one since forever, but they are either too small, too slow or too costly. Hopefully technology developments will bring soon a good 10" before my eyes will need a 15" one:) Reading old books and magazines is also a problem: they're often 100% graphics with no OCRed text, therefore they're really slow, also zooming a page with diagrams on a technical book can be painful on low end…
No offense, but the article discusses 10" ereaders heavily (that's the screen size of both the reMarkable 2 and the Note Air). There's also the Kobo Elipsa if you'd like something that's totally focused on reading.
I've been using a 7.8" Nova 3 myself for a few months now, and it's a dramatic improvement over the 6" Kindle I was using before. I love having a screen that's closer to the size of your average hardcover page, and it's just large enough to make PDFs readable at 100% zoom. It's also very fast, though there's always a bit of perceivable e-ink related lag unless you put an app on the fastest refresh rate. The warm frontlight is also the best I've experienced on an ereader, even better than what I've seen on Kindles.
IMO, 10" might be a smidge too large for comfortably reading in bed -- the Note Air might feel a bit too large physically and heavy to hold up if you're reading for long periods of time with one arm holding it up. If that's a common use case for you, you should really consider the Onyx Boox Nova 3, like I have, or maybe the Kobo Forma, which is a bit cheaper and reading-focused.
I'm using my Nova 3 completely disconnected from the internet most of the time, though I do occasionally find it useful to fire up Firefox for random browsing (and to sometimes transfer files with https://snapdrop.net/, which is like Apple's Airdrop on your local network). I don't think using the Nova 3, Forma, Elipsa, reMarkable 2, or Note Air offline most or all of the time would be a problem, though from what I can tell reMarkable has invested a lot in sync functionality that you might not necessarily want to turn off. Though the reMarkable probably wouldn't be for you, since it's focused on note-taking, rather than reading.