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E-ink Devices

7 minute read

I've accumulated a few.

reMarkable

I use this for notes and sketching. Also sometimes as an e-reader (with KOReader) as the screen size is really nice and it’s a very light device.

I find that the act of writing with a pen feels good and believe it helps me with thinking. My thoughts seem to work in a different pattern somehow when I’m using a pen vs a keyboard — especially when I’m planning an app or trying to work through a problem that I’m going around in circles with in my head. I find visualising on ‘paper’ often helps me to crack a problem. Different senses, muscles in use, different groups of neurons firing.

None of this is exclusive to reMarkable, paper and pen would work just as well. The reasons I prefer the reMarkable are:

  • It feels nice. When I use real paper I prefer it to be good paper. But then I feel precious about it, and it makes me reluctant to write or draw (I had a lovely little Moleskine notebook but rarely used it as I didn’t want to ‘waste it’).
  • It has a few extra features like being able to cut/copy/paste, making it easy to rearrange notes and clean them up.

I also like that it runs Linux and you can SSH into it and get root.

I have the first generation, the rM1, which I specifically prefer over the later version. The rM2 replaced the plastic screen with glass, and the outer casing with metal. It is now more ‘premium’, and I think more people prefer the industrial design of this model. Honestly I find it dull and characterless, yet another metal and glass slab. The newer device is more brittle and likely to shatter, and for me it’s moving towards being more like an iPad (my least-favourite device, and one I keep only for FaceTime, it otherwise sits unused on a shelf). My plastic rM1 is softer, lighter, can flex a little without shattering, and the screen has some give in it which is satisfying to write and draw on. It has less RAM, a slower processor and worse battery life, so I lose out there, but I like the way it feels so much. Ultimately I can write very comfortably on it, and make very complex drawings (as complex as I would ever want to draw at that size anyway), so although I’d prefer the upgraded internals, I wouldn’t swap what I have.

Onyx Boox Nova 3

I keep a keyboard attached to this and use it as a small, peaceful writing device.

Each weekend I take 24 hours away from the internet and electronics. Some weeks I’m more strict than others so sometimes I do some writing or check emails, and this is the device I use. With the light off, writing markdown in Vim, it barely feels electronic, more akin to a typewriter.

Keyboards made to fit iPad Mini (or at least old versions like the 4th gen) fit the Nova (7.8" screen) pretty well. They attach with the tablet sliding into a little rubberised grip, which seems a bit kludgey but works fine.

I first bought a cheap Arteck keyboard which was selling for less than £10 on Amazon (those iPad models for which the keyboards are compatible are old, so there is probably not a huge market for accessories). It was OK but didn’t exactly feel high end. It creaked and felt hollow around the palm rest, and the most annoying problem for me was that the screen(/tablet) could only rotate back a little, not far past 90 degrees. This meant it was difficult to get an angle which was good for both typing and seeing the screen. It proved the concept (that the iPad keyboards could work) though.

I’d heard good things about the Brydge ones. They were silly prices in the UK though, well over £100 (about 3x the US cost). But I waited and kept checking eBay, eventually snagging one for less than £20.

The Brydge keyboard is a blatant step up in build quality. It feels really solid, made of lovely materials — the shell is thick aluminium and the rubbers and plastics feel dense and durable. The keys have a great action, although the travel isn’t huge it feels well-defined… when you press a key you know you’ve pressed it.

Some truly bizarre design choices have been made though: tab is hidden behind a modifier, and look at that weirdly massive Q key (in the pic)!

For now there’s not much I can do about the Q key but I can hammer out some of the other weirdnesses with the Key Mapper app on Android.

Like all Boox devices the Nova 3 runs Android, and therefore Termux. I have root. So I can use it for most things I do on my other devices, but its small screen makes it less than ideal. As a writing device though, it is ‘andsome.

Onyx Boox Max Lumi

This is my favourite device for reading those books which have a lot of important formatting, such as programming textbooks, or illustrations. A lot of documents are only available as PDFs which don’t re-flow very well on smaller screens, so this is great for those too.

It’s the first Max (13.3") device with a light (even though I prefer e-ink in its natural unlit form, an optional light is definitely handy at times). Although it’s a couple of generations old now, it still feels light, fast, and reading large-format books on it is very pleasurable. The e-ink panel is a Mobius, which has been superseded by panels with higher contrast ratios now, but does have a plastic substrate meaning it should be even more forgiving to flexing and bending. Similarly to the reMarkable 1, this device feels warm, soft and friendly, rather than cold and dystopian like so many modern devices.

I find the tone of the bezel around an e-ink screen can really affect my perception of the screen. If you consider that the screens have quite a compressed dynamic range (spanning middle shades of grey rather than true black/white), then surrounding them with a pure black or a pure white bezel changes the overall dynamic range within your field of view — now you have a more extreme tone in view, and the range of greys on the screen becomes comparitively compressed/more narrow.

The Max Lumi comes with a black bezel. I’ve temporarily modded mine with white tape. I definitely prefer the device with a white bezel, although my solution feels tatty (as you can see in the pic). I don’t know of a reasonable way to change the bezel to white permanently, but if I find one I’ll do it.

Kobo Mini

This is the device I take with me in my rucksack when I go into the city for grocery shopping, to read while I wait at bus stops. I bought it for next to nothing on eBay as it wasn’t working, but it was a software problem I was able to fix. It’s small and light, so cheap that I don’t mind if it gets damaged, and it doesn’t look shiny or expensive so doesn’t attract attention. It would be my favourite small e-reader if only it had a front light.

Kobo Glo

The Kobo Glo is basically the same device as the Kobo Mini, with a slightly larger screen and a front light.

I run KOReader on all of my e-readers as it’s a great bit of software and I can sync books and reading progress without being logged in to a Kobo account.