The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

I am happy with the Boox; it's a great device (hardware + the reader too) I think and I use it every day. Besides the China nature (which means what user Tho85 already explained here), I am a huge fan of the idea more different eReader types. For a lot of tasks. I often work in bright sunlight and it works really well while my laptops, including the MacBook m1 will give me a headache in 15 minutes glaring against the sun; this is just perfect and powerful enough to be a big screen for another device.

Because of this device I now have the weird hallucination of my perfect device; seems it would be a surface pro x lte (but later gen; it needs to at last get closer to usable software wise) but with a color eInk screen. I know they will never make this but yep, that would be basically my daily driver. The Boox people could come quite far but they focus on eReaders.

I always think of the remarkable as a really odd device. Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now.

Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that instead of having something great to do technical sketching, email or even interactive notebooks like Jupiter on, you get a really over engineered piece of paper.

Now, it's pretty open, which is great, but I am not that convinced it will necessary remain so, and at that price, buying it only in the hopes of some people making better software in their free time always seems like a bigger gamble I like to take. I accept that for me ~120€ ereader, but for 5 times the price?

I really wish they would embrace mobile computing. Combining an e-ink tablet optimized for text with a moldable operating system like on the old xerox machines could be so incredibly good.

By the way, does the hardware allow connecting an external keyboard?

I have an RM2 and use it a lot but the jagged lines bother me. I got the Onyx Boox and returned it, the software was just too clunky and did not have the paper feel, instead felt very plasticky

I work in the display industry. My take is neither will happen. Lets start with B.

> B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.

There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today. Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide.

E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called Advanced Color and marketed as "Gallery". But it would take 30s to display an image and it was 32 colors or 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. I mean only 16 colors. E Ink tried to get the industry to buy in and start making products using this technology but nobody really signed on. They revamped their production to then start producing 7 color panels in much smaller sizes like 5" for signage. I heard that hasn't hit the numbers they needed to even cover their RnD costs. I doubt it will be a commercial success.

When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable. You'll never be able to get both. That's why newer technologies by various startups like ClearInk sacrifice the bi-stability in order to get fast video speeds. But look at the market response, the market isn't exactly embracing that either. Venture capitalists aren't exactly eager to fund the billions needed to create new display tech when they could invest in some new internet services startup or AI/ML startup instead.

As for A), these are all emissive technologies. They will by their physics always be distinguishable from paper. As to whether you'll care or not, that is something I can't predict.

I don't use most of their stuff on it; anything Android works and that's what I use. However I do like their reader. Never tried a dictionary installation but the rest is all resolvable with Android apps I would think; for synching anything you would use on an android phone works here too; dropbox, google drive etc.

The fact it runs Android is vastly better than some custom software (like Kindle and others) because of this reason.