If I wanted to read books on a phone shaped e-reader I'd just use my phone without carrying an identically shaped device for the same purpose, and if I wanted a separate device just for reading e-books then I want that to have the aspect ration optimized for e-books, not to mention the lower price tag that regular e-readers come with not something expansive just to read books.
It just feels pointless on so many levels.
Anyways, it is also not just an e-reader, so books aren't the only content you can use it for. A lot of websites look and work best when used with a phone-sized device.
There are also more people who prefer the smartphone size every year, just because it is now the default media consumption device.
It's also a great stepping stone if the company wants to enter the mobile phone market.
Most mainstream e-book readers also fit in most pockets.
If they sold a version that was actually a smartphone I’d be very interested.
Why small eink android tablet cannot be quite useful? This is a reader device. Do you really need every shoe and slipper to be your primary comms device? E.g. there are small android handheld gaming consoles, you cannot use them as a phone too, but that does not, I mean, why would even
And would you be surprised if I tell you Sony makes Android based Walkmans that mostly look like a phone except you cannot put a SIM card in them?
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
"If I wanted to read books on a phone shaped e-reader I'd just use my phone"
The phone is full of notifications, games, work reminders, and other distractions. E-readers aren't going to be peoples' default device for those purposes, so they enable greater concentration when reading. And you won't have to worry about your phone's battery life after a long reading session either.
You might as well ask why anyone would buy a Kindle instead of an iPad mini, and I don't think I need to answer that question.
If you look at BOOX website, they have a number products that may not make sense to you, but there is a market for those products.
Every entry-level sub $100 e-reader is small and light enough to let you read in bed with one hand.
Case in point the Tolino Shine 3 which, at 166g is even lighter than the BOOX Palma's 170g.
> Don't forget it has Android
The Tolino I mentioned also runs Android underneath.
The wiki page effectively says they are in violation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_Boox#GPL_Compliance
> As of 2022, Onyx International Inc. has declined[20] to release the source code with Linux kernel modifications licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 in response to a written request by a user. The GPLv2 license states that if a modified version of a covered work (such as the Linux kernel) is released, the corresponding source code must also be released under GPLv2.[21]
But on this thing?
In fact, this comment made me remember that I’ve had a color filter accessibility setting in iOS that lets me turn the screen to grayscale.
Kind of a trip to use a modern smartphone like this, but also kind of… relaxing in a weird way.
Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Color Filters
You can even set a shortcut to quickly toggle them on and off.
E-ink needs a surprising amount of voltage/current to change the screen, leading to a high "energy-per-screen change". LCDs on the other hand, are ephemeral. The liquid-crystals unalign themselves within fractions of a second, so they require a constant source (though very small amount) of electricity to remain on.
But the amount of energy per screen change on LCDs is basically free.
As such: today's methodology of showing information when the user is interacting (especially information that moves and needs to change within 2 or 3 seconds), is superior on an LCD screen.
------------
In fact, the lowest-power monochrome LCD screens are something like 0.1 mA (or ~100 uA) of power usage, meaning an e-ink screen needs to change once-per-15 minutes (!!!) or less to match this level of power consumption. (And the LCD screen can constantly change in those 900 seconds with full animation).
https://mm.digikey.com/Volume0/opasdata/d220001/medias/docus...
The spec-sheet claims 12uA typical, 130 uA worst-case for this 1.3" Sharp memory-lcd (rumored to be the Pebble smartwatch's screen).
------------
That being said: e-ink is still cool technology and I'd like to see more designs using it.
That's a complete deal-breaker for much beyond watches and small shopping labels. The biggest is just barely larger than my cheap thermostat's display. It's a great choice for watches (minus perhaps the low DPI), but not even slightly an option for ebook readers or even phones, much less larger signage or wall-art like https://hackaday.com/2021/04/11/a-fresh-e-ink-newspaper-deli...
I doubt that has much of anything to do with the technology, but you can only buy and experiment with things that exist.
To me phone is: a camera in your pocket, a wide array of chat apps for different friends and communities, a music player, a navigation device and a bunch of other similar tools. For others it's also a gaming device.
Swapping to calming eink is cool and all, but you give up a camera, you give up your fast mobile typing experience for chats, and you don't really get much back. You need a larger surface if you want to read, write or sketch comfortably.
It runs Android (likely even has Google Play Store), so you can build an app within that, and use their eink-specific APIs in some ways (iirc, not totally confident on that though. Might just be vanilla Android.).
The device itself is fairly closed beyond that though, and Boox is a fairly widely known GPL violator so you can't really get sources or run your own OS on it.
Basically all of this is true for all Boox products.
One things thats weird to me though... when reading my phone, I notice fairly often I'm really only looking at the top ~15%. I keep scrolling content into the same area of space, rather than viewing down.
It suggests such weird things to me. At simplest, it suggests using a device like this in landscape mode. But more, it suggests that pure consumption doesn't need a big device. Yes, we need to navigate & browse, and that takes space, but actual reading? When we and the machine are in-line, knowing what's happening, on a straight path? At that point we actually only need a very small display area to work very well.
I'm almost always glad when form factors get explored & tried. Markets are so centrist, regurgitate the already proven schemes without exploring boundaries. This is stasist & centrist, a self reinforcing cycle, and it is against my nature & what moves me, but I understand it. I salute the attempts at different. Even if, in this case, I'm not really sure what the major advantage is. Very short scanlines feels weird, feels like it means moving one's eyes quickly back and forth. But at least it's a friendly portable form factor, better than most epaper devices. I wish it well.
They could've made it an actual phone and I'd have considered buying it (their devices are quite easily rootable). The only competition (Hisense) is even sketchier.
This is just a weirdly shaped E-Reader, but with a camera for some reason. Crazy.
At least they're releasing something actually new again instead of the same hardware for the third time.
They just have so many devices in their range.
Phone is about same price, and higher FPS with color.
It's nice to see improvements in other spaces, but I don't need this.
