tablet with e ink and lcd screen made in china

Alibaba.com offers 845 e ink reader products. such as 4g, 3g, and gsm. You can also choose from return and replacement, call center and on-line technical support, and repair. As well as from 4gb, 2gb, and 512mb. And whether e ink reader is type-c, usb, or usb2.0.

Xiaomi doesn’t launch tablets very often, but they do have a niche product that not many people now about. I’m talking about the Xiaomi Note E-Ink Tablet, which was just launched in China, sporting a 10.3 inch E-Ink display.

The device is up for preorder on the Chinese market. It sports a 10.3 inch E-Ink display, made to look like paper, with a high visibility and contrast. It’s also very slim, measuring just 5.35 mm in thickness and weighing 440 grams. Specs include 3 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage, plus a 3000 mAh battery with support for up to 18W fast charging.

The device will be sold with an USB-C cable and stylus, but we’re not sure about the charger. It also comes bundled with the WPS Office Suite, it has dual band Wi-Fi and a quad core Cortex A55 processor, that helps it run Android 11. Priced at around $398, the preorder of the device requires a small deposit fee. There’s also an audio jack on board and the Wi-Fi here is Wi-Fi 5.

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UPDATE 13-5-2019: We earlier stated that the tablet was up for pre-order via OGadget"s site. However, that page only contains a form used to join a mailing list with more information. The tablet can be pre-ordered via Kickstarter. We apologize for the mistake.

There have been a few companies that have tried their hand at making a device that blends a traditional LCD display with an E Ink screen. The most famous of these is probably Yotaphone, which sadly declared bankruptcy earlier this year. The folks over at Eewrite are giving it a shot now, and their Janus (formerly Epad X) tablet is going up for pre-order soon.

The primary gimmick of the Janus is its 9.7-inch E Ink display, which can be activated with a dedicated button on the side. Eewrite says that the E Ink screen also supports Wacom styli, although the company hasn’t given any details beyond this statement. However, that should make the Janus a decent tablet for taking notes or sketching, provided the E Ink display can refresh quickly enough.

If you’re interested, the Janus will go up for pre-order soon, although the exact date isn’t yet known. Eewrite is selling the device through OGadget.com for $400 for pre-orders. After the pre-order period, the tablet will go on sale for $700.

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When it comes to e-paper devices, the Kindle is of course the first brand people think of, though I’ve done my best to spread the Kobo and reMarkable gospel as well. Chinese e-reader maker Boox is a relatively new entrant to the space, and its devices are experimental but useful options in the niche market of monochrome tablets. In fact, they make my new favorite small device.

A brand from parent company Onyx, Boox has a wide array of devices, some might say too wide, ranging from pocketable to medium-sized e-readers to A4-sized tablets. Its branding is not particularly memorable and slightly updated versions come out quite regularly — one device I hoped to test was actually being replaced by the time I got around to writing this article.

The unifying aspect is the OS, a modified version of Android 10 with a few special-made apps for reading and productivity. Made with Chinese consumers in mind, the services probably aren’t ones you will have heard of.

I tested several devices from Boox, the simplest being the Poke 3 e-reader, then the larger and more complex Note2, followed by the svelte Note Air and enormous Max Lumi. Most recently I have been looking at the Nova3 Color, which uses E Ink’s latest Kaleido Plus color screen.

The truth is if you didn’t turn them on you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that these devices were all from the same company. They have quite different hardware styles, though of course there’s only so much room for expression in a black tablet with a screen in shades of grey.

Let’s begin with the simplest and most familiar format, the 6-inch e-reader. In this category we have the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Clara HD. The former is probably the best one Amazon makes, but I prefer the latter, even though its build quality is, frankly, poor.

Boox in this space has (among others) the Poke 3, not exactly the catchiest name, but it makes up for that with its form factor: pretty much the platonic ideal for a small reader like this. I liked it so much I broke it out into a separate review, but here are the basics.

The 6-inch, 300-PPI screen is of equal quality to the Kindle and Kobo, and like the Clara HD has a temperature-adjustable frontlight. The front of the device is completely flush, just the way I like it, and has just enough bezel to grip without it becoming too much or too little. The seamless design makes it pocketable and resistant to crumbs and spills (though it makes no water resistance claims). There’s a power button up top (thank you) and a single USB-C port at the bottom.

Regarding the hardware, I find it difficult to come up with any criticism at all. It could, I suppose, be lighter, but its dimensions could not be smaller than they are without adversely affecting the ergonomics; a millimeter could conceivably be shaved off the thickness but it would be barely noticeable.

The OS is a highly customized version of Android, with all the pros and cons that comes with. I have always enjoyed the simplicity of Kobo’s interface, though they seem bent on complicating it. Boox’s OS is powerful but busy, uneasy in its decisions of what options to make available and prominent to the user.

The reader app, NeoReader, supports tons of file formats and has a huge set of controls for changing your view, highlighting and notating books and PDFs, and so on. This is more for the larger devices than the small ones, which really only need font adjustment and other basic stuff.

If all you want to do is read e-books you already have sitting on your computer, it’s as easy as dragging them into the “Books” folder on the device’s storage. That tab is what you’ll see when you turn on the device, and it’s always easy to get to. There’s a built-in store that takes up a whole tab, though it isn’t available in the U.S. — then a file manager tab for rooting around in directories — and a tab each for your apps and settings.

The apps are another custom situation: This being a Chinese device, it comes without the usual Google-authenticated App Store, whatever it’s called these days. Instead, it has its own store with dozens of the most-used reading apps, from Pocket and GoodReader to the Kobo and Kindle apps. But these are essentially side-loaded: for instance, the Kindle app is a few months old. That’s far from a disaster, but you do need to commit to a certain amount of trust in Boox and its proxy app store in order to use the device as-is.

Of course, you can also enable Google Play services in the settings, which adds the official store into the mix. But for most people this is already far too much work. We are both spoiled and deprived in our e-reader selection in that they are generally simple and extremely straightforward to use. Someone who is not familiar with Android, using this device and a Kobo or Kindle, would probably opt for one of the latter.

Yet the possibilities are many for those who wish to take the plunge. For my part, I like the form factor of the Poke 3 so well that I will brave any OS to use it. Besides, you spend 99% of your time on these things in a book, so as long as that part works, the rest is just icing on the cake.

At the 6-inch scale, this all seems like way too much. But on Boox’s larger devices, the flexibility starts to make more sense. The idea with the Note 2 (now 3), Note Air and Max Lumi is to provide almost all the capabilities of an Android tablet, but with the benefits of an e-paper screen. Admittedly that makes playing racing games something of a non-starter, but it could be very attractive to the types of people for whom their reMarkable is used more than their iPad.

If you read a lot of documents, doing so on a bright tablet screen — or a dim one, for that matter — sucks. An e-paper screen is better for the task, but the best device for that, the reMarkable, is also very deliberately limited in what it can accomplish, since the whole philosophy of the company revolves around focus. So there are definitely people who want the capabilities of an Android device with the readability of an e-paper one. Or at any rate Boox thinks so.

The Note 2 and Max Lumi seem related: They’re unremarkable black tablets of impressive dimensions and, in my limited explorations of their hardware, what seemed to me excellent build quality. The Note Air, it must be said, is the opposite of unremarkable — in fact, when I saw it, I thought it was a clone of the reMarkable 2!

This first impression turned out to be less than generous on my part, as while the two share some significant design elements, they are in fact quite different and Boox’s facility in creating other devices has led me to give them the benefit of the doubt here. The blue and orange motif isn’t the greatest, but it does help set it apart, and all the devices (especially the Air) are thin and well designed.

All the tablets feature frontlights, and I’m happy to say that my skepticism that it could be done with such big screens was needless. It works well and like the Poke 3 the light is adjustable in both brightness and temperature (though it’s a bit fiddly).

The Nova3 Color has a 7.8-inch screen with the latest color e-paper tech from E Ink. I’ve always been excited for the possibilities of this side of the technology, but color e-paper screens have always suffered from poor contrast, low refresh speeds, ghosting and other shortcomings. While this latest iteration does go some way toward amending those (and a software update helped further), it is still unfortunately too much of a compromise.

The hardware is similar to the other Boox devices, solid and unassuming. The difference is all in the screen, which shows in color even when the device is off. Color e-paper works by combining the microscopic black and white beads that form images with a layer of color filters that can be changed. This one, like the others, has a frontlight and it helps a lot with making those colors pop, since without it they’re all rather muted.

There is still the issue of ghosting, though if you’re reading, say, a comic, you can easily set it to refresh every page (it takes only a fraction of a second) and the problem is gone. It’s less easy to do this with more dynamic content like a webpage, though of course navigating the web on an e-reader is already something of a novelty.

More troubling to me is the decrease in contrast and effective decrease in resolution that the color layer brings. When color content is shown, there’s a distinct screen door effect to it, not quite like ordinary LCD aliasing but still visible. And when you have greyscale content you sometimes see moire and other interference patterns in mid-tones.

Books look all right but not nearly as clear as an ordinary monochrome E Ink display; the screen door effect is always present and reduces contrast. It’s still very readable, but when cheaper devices do the job better, it’s hard to justify.

I appreciate Boox making the latest screen from E Ink available, and it may be useful to some who want a little more tablet DNA in their e-reader (at this point the two categories are not very distinct). But for most people the color does not add enough, and subtracts too much.

The OS is the same on all of these as far as I can tell, but on the these devices the focus shifts to interactivity rather than simply reading. Boox makes a Wacom-like pen that can be used to write on the surface of these larger tablets, and it serves its purpose fine, though with nowhere near the responsiveness or accuracy of reMarkable’s.

That said, the final result when sketching or writing was a pleasing one, though the OS takes a moment to catch up and anti-alias the marks. I thought the brush in particular had nice gradations.

One thing the Boox tablets have on others like them (that is to say, the reMarkable, the defunct Sony Digital Paper Tablet and a handful of other niche devices) is in the PDF handling. The Boox devices let you navigate and mark up PDFs with ease, and the original files are simply saved over with your doodles and notes added. Though marking up a document is easy on the reMarkable, its slightly clumsy app makes sharing and sorting them a bit of a chore. I prefer the simple approach: modify the original file (there’s always a copy somewhere) and email it directly from the device. It’s that simple!

Besides the reader and notebook, there are a handful of included apps that any tablet user might find useful. There’s a browser that’s about as functional as you’d expect — it’s Chromium-based and renders well but ghosts terribly; a voice recorder, a music player, a calendar… and of course you could download plenty more from the built-in or Google app stores. If you wanted to, you could make these quite well-rounded devices.

I’m not entirely sure just how large the market is for this kind of e-paper tablet. But I feel these devices offer something interesting and unique, even if they’re also… well, it’s hard to get around the fact that you can get an iPad for half the price of the larger Boox tablets, and then do most of the same stuff and more.

These e-paper devices have a certain draw, though, and if you plan to read and mark up long documents, it’s way better to do so on one of these than on an iPad, for a number of reasons. With Boox’s lineup in the mix there are more options than ever, and that’s definitely a good thing.

We"ve seen color e-readers before, even colored e-paper displays. But in 2011, Chinese e-reader maker Hanvon will ship the first color reader with a screen made by Cambridge"s E Ink themselves.

According to the New York Times, Hanvon will announce their new e-reader at Tuesday"s FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo. Sporting a 9.68-inch color touch screen, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, it will retail in China in March 2011 for about $440.

The reader uses a standard E Ink screen with a color filter, so it has the same low-power, lightweight, high-readability characteristics of its black-and-white cousins. But this also means the screen is more-or-less static: it can show color photographs, illustrations and possibly some animation, but not full-motion video. Without a power-hungry backlight, the colors won"t be as bright as an LCD screen either.

Other features of the device remain unclear. Hanvon is known for its handwriting technology, which it packages with some but not all of its e-readers; the NYT is silent on whether the new device includes it. Business users, who are the device"s target market, are often more receptive to a stylus interface than the general consumer market; introducing color could make a stylus appealing to illustrators as well.

The long-term trajectory of color e-paper displays is even less clear, even as more-capable products from E Ink, Mirasol and Pixel QI come to the market. Color plays a different role in reading than it does in video or gaming. Will color illustrations be enough to satisfy readers, or will they drift towards LCD screens and tablets?

The short version is that consumers want everything: vibrant color and full video with low power consumption and zero glare at an unbeatable price. Until that arrives, we"ll continue to see both makers and readers in this space accepting tradeoffs and experimenting to find a balance that works.

Some people use camomile tea, others use breathing exercises, but, for me, the most reliable tactic for getting to sleep quickly is to avoid screens before bed. Yet, actually doing so requires some creativity if I want to keep up with news online. My current system involves saving articles to the read-later app Instapaper, which sends a daily digest to my Kindle each evening. But it’s a hacky approach where articles often aren’t formatted properly and sometimes don’t appear at all.

I could switch to a Kobo, which offers native integration with rival read-later app Pocket, but the Onyx Boox Nova Air C offers a much more tantalizing alternative. Unlike either a Kindle or Kobo, its E Ink display is capable of showing colors, and it’s running a modified version of Android that allows you to download and run a variety of apps that go far beyond reading ebooks. It opens the door to numerous read-later apps as well as full-on word processors and third-party note-taking software. It even includes a stylus for handwritten notes.

At $420, it’s pricey compared to Amazon’s Kindles, which often cost well under the $200 mark. But that price gets you something closer to a full-on Android tablet than an e-reader. It’s just a shame that the total package doesn’t fully deliver on the promise.

The Onyx Boox Nova Air C is an unassuming device, with big bezels around its 7.8-inch screen and a generally plastic-feeling construction. Its power button is on the top left, while a USB-C port is on the bottom alongside a pair of downward-firing speakers. They’re roughly as bad as I expected them to be, but it’s better than nothing. (Amazon’s Kindles haven’t included them for years.) Internally, the Nova Air C is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

The main attraction here is the color E Ink display. The Nova Air C is equipped with E Ink’s Kaleido Plus screen, which uses a color filter layer on top of a more typical E Ink panel to offer 4,096 colors. The approach comes with some obvious drawbacks. For starters, the screen can’t display color content with the same resolution as black and white, so while the display reaches 1404 x 1872 in black and white (300ppi), it’s limited to a paltry 468 x 624 (100ppi) when showing color. And even then, the colors are far more muted than what you’d get from even a cheap LCD panel, whose range of colors can be counted in the millions — not the thousands. My former colleague Sam Byford described the colors on the similar Kaleido-equipped PocketBook Color as like “a newspaper that’s faded over a few days,” which felt like a very apt description of the Nova Air C.

And yet, even basic color is better than no color at all. The Nova Air C’s colors might look washed out and low resolution, but the essence of the image remains — unlike on a Kindle, where color imagery just looks broken. I’d almost liken using the Kaleido screen to watching a foreign movie with subtitles; you miss out on a lot of the subtlety, but you can still fundamentally understand what you’re looking at.

I briefly tried watching video on the Nova Air C’s screen via YouTube, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Content looks incredibly juddery thanks to the screen’s low refresh rate, colors look washed out, and there’s a huge amount of ghosting. You can see what’s going on in a pinch, but I’d rather watch video on literally any other screen.

Despite the color, the tablet retains the benefits of an E Ink display. I had no issue reading the Nova Air C in bright sunlight, and, with a small boost to its screen illumination feature, I was also able to read it in low light before bed with no eye strain. Battery life is also as impressive as any other e-reader. I’ve been using the tablet on and off for the better part of two months, and its battery level is still sitting at 55 percent.

That said, part of the reason for this impressive life is likely to be the Nova Air C’s aggressive power management settings, which, by default, see the tablet fully shut down if you don’t use it for just 15 minutes. This can mean waiting around 27 seconds for the tablet to boot up every time you want to use it. I’d suggest adjusting the “Power-off timeout” in settings to one or even two days, which will allow the laptop to wake in a couple of seconds when you want to use it. But be prepared to sacrifice a little battery life for this increase in responsiveness.

The highlight of the Onyx Boox Nova Air C is its built-in note-taking app. Handwriting notes feels great with the included stylus, with pen strokes appearing on the screen near-instantaneously and 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity that offer a lot of versatility. There are a variety of different brush styles and colors, and the software can attempt to transcribe your handwriting into typed text and even emoji.

This character recognition worked okay in limited cases but struggled with lengthy passages. Once written, it’s easy to export notes to a PDF or PNG file by simply scanning a QR code with your smartphone or sharing them to another app on the tablet. It all makes the Nova Air C a great device for taking notes by hand.

But trying to use the tablet like a traditional e-reader is more complicated, and you’ll have to jump through more hoops than on competing devices like the Kindle. Although the Nova Air C technically comes with a built-in “Store,” in practice it seemed to be filled mainly with public domain works, and I couldn’t find any of the modern books I was hoping to read.

That leaves you with a couple of other options. You can download ebooks from elsewhere on the internet and then transfer them to the tablet, and it supports a good range of filetypes, including PDF, ePub, TXT, RTF, and MOBI. But, when I actually purchased an ePUB from eBooks.com and tried to load it onto the Nova Air C, I discovered that it doesn’t support the Adobe DRM the store uses. (The only DRM the e-reader supports is the Chinese-focused JD DRM.)

Thankfully, Onyx is using a heavily modified version of Android 11 as software on the Nova Air C, which means you’re not limited to using its built-in software. You can download and install most apps from the Play Store as though you were using any other Android tablet, including, crucially, Amazon’s Kindle app. Getting Google Play Services set up on the device is a bit of a weird process that requires you to hop through a couple of strange hoops. But, once I was set up, it was relatively easy to benefit from my preexisting Kindle library. While I was there, I downloaded a couple of other Android apps: Instapaper for reading all the web articles I bookmark for reading later throughout the course of my day; Obsidian for note-taking; and Comixology for reading comics.

Take note-taking. The Nova Air 2 comes with a decent note-taking app that works very well with the stylus. But it works less well for typed notes, which you might want to do if you have a Bluetooth keyboard to pair with the tablet.

So, instead, I downloaded the note-taking app Obsidian. It worked well, allowing me to type up notes far faster than I could ever handwrite them. And, unlike when using a laptop or my phone, I could happily do so late at night without having to look at a bright screen. You could use whatever word processing or note-taking software takes your fancy — so long as it has an Android app. It’s also possible to download alternative stylus-compatible apps, but my experience was a bit hit and miss. OneNote worked well, but INKredible felt laggy with Onyx’s stylus.

I was also able to get Instapaper up and running with minimal hassle. I had full access to all my saved articles ready for me to read without having to go through the clunky sync process that Instapaper’s Kindle integration requires. Comixology worked okay for reading comics, but the screen was just slightly too low in resolution and small for it to feel like I was getting the most of the experience.

But, very quickly, I started encountering issues with these apps that had obviously never been designed with E Ink screens in mind. You control apps on the Nova Air C with a combination of taps and swipes, same as you would on any other Android tablet. But its E Ink screen is so much less responsive than the 60Hz LCD or OLED panels found in most other Android devices that it’s hard to “feel” your way around each app. You can’t half-swipe to check what a full swipe might do; you have to fully commit and hope you got it right.

Things feel a lot better when you start using physical buttons to control the tablet, which is made possible via Onyx’s magnetic Nova Air case. This not only adds a protective cover to the tablet but also includes a pair of physical volume buttons, which many reading-focused Android apps will let you remap into page-turning controls. If you’re going to pick up a Nova Air C, I’d strongly recommend getting this case for it. It’s sold separately from the tablet for $59.99, which feels expensive given how necessary it is.

I had very high hopes for the Onyx Boox Nova Air C. I wanted it to be able to do it all: read books; read online articles; and act as a repository for all my notes — all in a form factor that I could happily use late at night without eye strain.

And, yes, it can absolutely do all of these things. But the more I asked of the tablet, the more I could feel its E Ink screen creaking under the pressure. E Ink panels are more than responsive enough for reading books using software designed specifically with them in mind. But throw in an app designed for a 60Hz touchscreen, and it can be a struggle to use. And packing in this much functionality means that the Nova Air C struggles to match a simple Kindle when it comes to simply being able to flip it open and immediately start reading. You have to choose the app, and possibly even the book, first.

I wanted a lot from the Nova Air C, and at $450, I think it’s reasonable to expect it. Amazon’s Kindles cost roughly half of what Onyx is asking, and you can even get an alternative e-reader with a color screen from PocketBook for $234. Or, if your priorities are less about having an E Ink screen and more about having the functionality of a tablet, you could get an iPad Mini with an 8.3-inch screen for $499 or a base level iPad with a 10.2-inch screen for $329. None of these devices will tick all the boxes. But, then again, neither does the Nova Air C.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

Paper can be used for both reading and writing, but the vast majority of e-paper displays on products like Amazon"s Kindle are used exclusively for reading. This is due to a number of technology and market forces. For example, when Amazon launched the Kindle, its first major digital device, the product tied into the book-buying franchise that was the company"s foundational strength. Furthermore, unlike far more popular LCD and OLED technologies, E-Ink displays don"t wash out in direct sunlight. They reflect external light rather than trying to compete with it, thus providing a reading experience that is more familiar to eyes accustomed to tree-based competition. E-paper uses little power and can display an image indefinitely without any power consumption, making for long reading times.

But people create outside as well as read. Why hasn"t there been more of a market for e-paper creation devices? More than a decade ago, the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 laptop used a sunlight-readable display by a company called Pixel Qi. But the display company found no sustainable customers after the children"s clamshell faded.

Today, there are a few specialized e-paper products that position themselves as hybrids of reading and writing/sketching. These devices are optimized for consolidating and marking up large documents. They tend to feature screen sizes of 10 inches or larger, such as the Digital Paper models from Sony. Sony has a long history with E-ink. The company pioneered E-Ink readers before Amazon jumped in and now has a joint venture with the technology supplier with much in the queue, according to Good E-Reader.

More recent introductions include the 10-inch reMarkable tablet, which advances on Sony"s software user interface, and the curious Lenovo Yoga Book C930 2-in-1, for which an E-Ink touch screen doubles as an e-reader in tablet mode and displays the keyboard when in clamshell mode. It represents a leap in functionality (as well as price and performance) over the first-generation Yoga Books, which used LED-lit outlines for keyboards.

These larger e-paper products appeal to those who wants to be able to accomplish anything outside that doesn"t rely too much on fast-moving color -- applications more like AirTable than Asphalt 9. Indeed, even Amazon hasn"t revisited the large e-reader market since it discontinued the Kindle DX introduced back in 2009 (to the dismay of some). While the reMarkable tablet was introduced as more of a creative tool, it has found an audience with enterprises who have a need for its outdoor legibility. The Sony Digital Paper product has seen most adoption among professionals such as lawyers and movie script editors who need to mow through reams of documents while minimizing eye strain. While both support touch screens and styluses, these products lack the app ecosystems and Bluetooth keyboard support of Android tablets and smartphones.

But that is changing. Already in China, HiSense sells smartphones that feature an LCD on one side and an e-ink display on the other. Tapping a button in the navigation control row on either screen lets you continue working on the other. And since the crowdfunding campaign of the FreeWrite Traveler that I wrote about last fall, a number of E-Ink-equipped computing products have recently hit crowdfunding platforms. These include an 8-inch Not-eReader tablet/display from Dasung, the LTE-capable 10-inch E-Pad from Eewrite and, most recently, a 5.2-inch dual-SIM Kingrow K1 smartphone (which had not launched its campaign as of this writing). The K1 offers two weeks of standby time, a throwback to the feature phone era.

All the new products have estimated delivery dates within the next few months. A bona fide e-paper clamshell remains elusive, although the E-Pad should be sized right to work with a number of Bluetooth keyboard cases. Onyx, an early maker of Android E-Ink tablets, had previewed a 2-in-1 it originally called the Onyx Boox Typewriter, but then hit the Delete key.

There have also been a couple of basic digital memo/sketch pad products such as the web browser-equipped MobiScribe that cost considerably less than those with full-fledged Google Play compatibility. But the largest and most expensive recent intro is Dasung"s 13-inch Paperlike Pro, which recently launched on Indiegogo. Unlike Dasung"s smaller Not-eReader, the Paperlike Pro includes no operating system of its own but rather works with other devices as a monitor.

The Paperlike Pro best exemplifies the trait that has made e-paper more practical for applications beyond reading -- far greater responsiveness. While it still cannot keep pace with LCDs, it represents a huge leap forward from the early days of E-Ink products, where simply turning a page would result in a distracting flash effect as the display updated its image.

In addition to relatively slow refresh rates, the lack of color screen availability has made these screens no match for more common displays when it comes to consuming video or even looking at photos. Indeed, color e-paper in general has faced a tough road. Two smartwatches that used reflective color displays, the Pebble smartwatch and Qualcomm"s ToQ proof-of-concept that used a display technology from now-defunct Mirasol have been among the few products to see limited distribution.

Still, Lenovo, which has been the PC vendor most willing to experiment with e-paper, has invested in an E-Ink competitor called CLEARInk. The display vendor has shown off color displays, but recent viewings indicate the same lack of vibrancy that has detracted from previous attempts. While e-paper displays are flexible and can fold, Lenovo is using a foldable LCD for its newly shown folding ThinkPad tablet.

More competition can only help the e-paper device market beyond the Kindle and digital signage. While entry-level Kindles are now very affordable, the price of these more capable devices are high compared to their LCD-based counterparts because of minimal competition and low volumes. It"s unlikely that these new devices can make a significant dent in the market for LCD smartphones and tablets. However, they have stronger market potential for workers who must get their digital work done in bright sunlight. That scope of tasks demands the ability to run popular and custom applications, an issue that Android compatibility can help address.

After Californian startup CLEARink Displays had closed a USD5 million in Series C funding, backed by a number of Asian display manufacturers, eeNews Europe caught up with the company"s Vice President of Marketing, Sri Peruvemba.

CLEARink Displays claims it is the only company to be able to offer full colour e-paper capable of running video, with refresh rates over 30Hz. The technology which Peruvemba like to describes as ePaper 2.0, relies on a single-particle system. In the white state, the electrophoretic display"s fluid-born black nanoparticles are positioned only nanometers away from the surface of a transparent film imprinted with micro-hemispherical cups. Those microcups then provide total internal reflection. When applying a positive charge, the negatively charged particles move up against the back of the film and absorb the light, creating a dark state. Full colour is added with an extra layer of colour filters.

According to Peruvemba, incumbent ePaper manufacturer E Ink fails to deliver video rates because it uses a slower two-particle system, with black and white particles having to interchange their positions on top of the substrate. The process is slower than the one-particle system CLEARink Displays uses, which has a much shorter distance to travel to the top film, explains Peruvemba who remembers demonstrating E Ink"s animated ePaper almost ten years ago, as he was then the company"s Marketing Chief Officer (he left E Ink in 2013).

"Since we are a small startup, we have to focus on the markets where E Ink is not strong, and video capability is our business driver", says Peruvemba, arguing that for e-Schoolbooks, animations just don"t cut it, full colour video is what OEMs want.

"One of the investors in the company is currently manufacturing LCD-based e-Schoolbooks for China, but they want low-power video. Right now, they are buying LCDs and ePaper displays from E Ink, but they"ve pre-paid for three million of our display units to be shipped late 2018. If you have animations in school books, that helps, but they want to watch videos, they want children to have access to the best content" explained Peruvemba, noting that his company is currently trial manufacturing pilot units at a LCD factory in China.

"Following this, we will transition to production that might start mid next year and complete later in the year. This could also be on a line that is much bigger than the one on which we are building the trial samples now".

When asked if by refreshing the display so often, video rates would defeat the low-power benefits of bi-stable ePaper, Peruvemba claims that the voltage requirements of CLEARink"s ePaper are significantly less than that for E Ink"s ePaper, resulting in a video rate that draws less power than animated ePaper (in the 10 to 20 frames per second). Then again, if you compare this to backlit LCDs, the power savings are in the 80 to 90% range.

"Our consumption power is probably the same as that of the LCD driver electronics, without the backlight" says Peruvemba. However, curiously the primary need of these eSchoolbook manufacturers is not low-power, but sunlight readability, he says.

"There is a lot of debate in Asia about what causes the high incidence of myopia there among young people (reportedly, 90% of Chinese teenagers and young adults are short-sighted compared to 10 to 20% sixty years ago). This is not unique to China and the current belief is that kids spend too much time indoors. One possible prevention that is being experimented in various programs is to get the kids outdoors with their laptops, so they get more exposed to sunlight, or maybe so their eyes can also accommodate to distant objects. But they need a display that can be read even under bright sunlight".

Talking about display specifications, Peruvemba is cautious not to be too definitive, since the company only has lab prototypes which it says are not production representative.

"Our samples were optimized and the trial production of a few hundred units is happening right now in a LCD factory in China. That will result in units that we will use for characterization, testing etc. so we can create customer ready specifications (required for formal contracts). It is possible that we might have enough extra units that we can start sampling to customers and building kits that we can sell", explained Peruvemba.

So far, he says the lab samples exhibit a white state reflectance of 83% (compared to 43% with other ePaper technologies), and a contrast ratio of 1:20 (compared to 1:12). The company produced black & white samples at a resolution of 212dpi, which would yield a 106dpi resolution in colour, once RGBW filters are layered on top to create the colour pixels. Even with the colour filters overlaid, CLEARink says it still achieves a reflectance of roughly 40%, about twice that of colour ePaper.

"Our intent is to build displays at much higher resolution" Peruvemba told eeNews Europe. "Our resolution is determined by the TFT backplane, not by the microstructured film we place on top. In fact, the size of the reflective microcups can be varied. It is a few tens of micrometres in diameter but we can bring it down to single digit micrometres".

But high resolution on eSchoolbooks is a "nice-to-have", not a "must-have", and people do not want to pay a premium, argues Peruvemba. "I highly doubt they would want to pay for more than 300dpi" he says, emphasizing that a long list of companies approached CLEARink to invest in the startup.

The startup has established a joint development agreement with chemical company Merck who produces the ink. CLEARink plans to manufacture the ePaper via contract manufacturing in a fully depreciated LCD fab to address its target markets.

In the modern information age, we use mobile phones and tablets all the time. We can’t deny that they make our lives easier - but unfortunately, these devices also cause many problems. The flickering and bright blue light they radiate into our eyes cause irreparable retina damage over time.

90 percent of people experience eye discomfort when staring at LCD/OLED displays for more than 3 hours. Modern life has many people suffering from myopia (near-sightedness), dry eyes, and retinal damage. This is unprecedented in human history. We must take action - and for most of us, completely eliminating usage of LCD/OLED screens is not an option.

DASUNG has invented a new and revolutionary 7.8" E-ink Android device that can also be used as an eye-friendly E-ink monitor for your mobile phone to eliminate eye strain.

E-ink is the world’s best ambient-light-reflecting display technology. It displays like a piece of paper instead of emitting a harsh backlight. You can use it for very long periods of time without eye soreness, fatigue, headaches, and other problems caused by mobile phones and other LCD devices.

DASUNG”Not-eReader”  with 7.8" E-ink Screen. It is very portable and easy to hold. It has 300 ppi high resolution, Cold & Warm Front-light, Android 9.0, 5600mA Battery, Quad Core Processor, 4GB+64GB, Bluetooth, Wifi, 5-point touch, 2-channel stereo.

DASUNG ”Not-eReader” is the World’s First -ink Mobile-phone Monitor. Wireless connection to mobile phones creates an E-ink alternative to LCD screens. This means you don"t need to change your phone, ”Not-eReader” can be used with your mobile-phone. It can protect your eyes.

You can even control your mobile phone by touching on "Not-eReader". So you can use the"Not-eReader"as your familiar mobile phone. You can chat with your friends, read the news, use your favourite APPs that have install in your mobile phone all on "Not-eReader"

DASUNG”Not-eReader”is an unprecedented E-ink device can play video. Significantly faster and smoother than other traditional e-readers. Kids and teenagers can use it to watch favorite cartoons, online video lessons, without harming  their eyes.

As the first E-ink device that can play video and cartoon,” Not-eReader” uses DASUNG"s E-ink Turbo high-speed refresh technology to play videos very smoothly. There is no need to worry about the speed shortage of E-ink.

DASUNG intensively designs and reconstructs the video-stream signal processing, storage scheduling, and E-ink drive, etc. in a chip, resulting in the peerless fast speed of E-ink tablet.

Connects to a computer and becomes a mini E-ink monitor. You will have an amazing working journey with paper-like E-ink monitor. Using HDMI cable, it can achieve data transmission. And of course, with this powerful DASUNG"s technique, typing and browsing internet page can be done without any delay.

DASUNG ”Not-eReader” has an eReader function. Displays text via e-paper technology (functions just like a Kindle). You can read novels or comics.  "Not-eReader"can support a variety of mainstream document formats. Such as PDF, EPUB, TXT, MOBI, JPG, PNG, etc.,

DASUNG ”Not-eReader” is an open Android tablet. Runs Android apps autonomously with high visibility and contrast. You can use a lot of favorite Apps, such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.,

If you"re someone who loves to write notes by hand, an E Ink tablet could be a good fit. Not only do they provide an excellent reading and writing experience, they also boast a long battery life, while letting you save paper in the process. An E Ink tablet combines the distraction-free and easy-reading environment of a Kindle-style

The ReMarkable 2 is the best E Ink tablet for students who love to take lots of handwritten notes. It is only 0.19 inch thick and 0.88 pound, which makes it light and easy to carry in your backpack.This 10.3-inch tablet uses a monochrome digital display with a resolution of 226 DPI. The writing and text looks clear and sharp, and you can choose from over 40 different page templates for notes, including seven options just for musical notation. The software is easy to use, with clear buttons at the top for you to add notebooks and folders. It has 8GB of internal storage and now includes handwriting conversion and Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive integration. Those services used to be part of ReMarkable"s Connect subscription, but are now included for free with every device. The Connect subscription itself still exists, but now costs $3 a month instead of $8. It offers a ReMarkable 2 protection plan, along with unlimited cloud storage and the ability to add notes in your notebooks when you"re on mobile and desktop devices.

The included stylus doesn"t require pairing or charging but supports tilt detection and a standard 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity. Practically speaking, it offers the most realistic writing experience of any tablet I"ve ever used. The screen has a paper-like feel, which gives the pen a level of friction that feels incredibly true to life.

The ReMarkable 2 also shines with PDFs. Highlights automatically straighten themselves and turn a legible shade of gray without any needed adjustment. You can add pages to PDFs for extra notes or write in the margins with ease. The ReMarkable"s thinness, two-week battery life, pen input and PDF management capabilities made this E Ink tablet my favorites.

That being said, the ReMarkable 2 isn"t without faults. The biggest issue is that it lacks any kind of backlight, which could be a deal breaker. Much like an actual book or notebook, this device requires an external light source to use in the dark. Even the cheapest Kindle now has front light illumination for night time use. It also doesn"t function particularly well as an e-reader, as the only formats it supports are PDF and unprotected epub. That means that you won"t be able to access your Kindle content or any other epub books with digital rights management software, which includes almost all legally purchasable ebooks on the market.

Ultimately, I found this tablet to be incredibly useful. This is the cheapest E Ink tablet on our list, but it"s still essentially just a PDF and note-taking device.

The Boox Note Air 2 is the most tablet-like E Ink device I tested. This 10.3-inch tablet features a resolution of 227 DPI, runs on a customized version of the Android 11 operating system and even has its own app store, where you can download third-party apps that have been optimized for the device. And yes, while it doesn"t come pre-baked into the system, there is a way to access the full Google Play store – though I wouldn"t recommend it for anything other than downloading an e-reading app, as the Boox still has an E Ink display and isn"t made for games or video. A step-by-step on how to get the Google Play store installed is in this hands-on review of a previous model.

Also, the Boox comes with only 64GB of nonexpandable storage, so you don"t want apps filling up your system. The company does offer 5GB of cloud storage from its own service for free to help transfer documents to the device, though you can also use Dropbox, Evernote and OneNote.

The biggest benefit of the apps store is that you"ll have access to your entire collection of books from your Kindle, Nook and Kobo library. You can also download the Libby app for library books, and Marvel Unlimited users can download the app and read comics, though not in color. The Note Air 2 includes speakers and a microphone, allowing you to listen to audiobooks from Audible or other audiobook apps.

This is a great selling point of the device, but I found the in-app experience to be less than ideal. Many of the features that make the Note Air 2 unique are disabled in third-party apps. For example, you won"t be able to use the pen to take notes or highlights in books on the Kindle app. Instead, you"ll have to type in notes you want to take, like using the app on any other tablet. To write directly onto books, you"ll need to have them in DRM-free ebook format. Luckily, the Boox supports a wide range of formats including PDF, epub, DOC and Mobi.

Note-taking and PDF management are strong on the Note Air 2 but not as seamless as on the ReMarkable 2. Highlights aren"t automatically straightened, and users have to choose the color and width of the marker. The Note Air 2 provides 16 options of grayscale color, but they all look the same on the device, leaving highlights looking dark and messy. The included stylus also features 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity but lags ever so slightly when writing across the page. On the plus side, you can include audio recordings for more accurate retention. The Note Air 2 also lets you open a PDF and notebook at the same time in a split-screen view, giving you the ability to read and take notes all at once.

Like the Kindle Paperwhite and Oasis, the Boox Note Air 2 comes with a warm and cold front light to help make the screen easier on the eyes and give it a more paper-like look. You can easily adjust both lights with a swipe-down menu. Plus, it also measures its battery life in weeks, not days.

You might see that the company has recently announced a Note Air 2 Plus. I haven"t tried that one, but it"s almost identical to the original Air 2 -- just with a bigger battery, which also makes it very slightly heavier.

Kobo might be a smaller company than Amazon, but it"s been making e-readers for just about as long. While Amazon once made a 9.7-inch Kindle, the product never offered natural input with a touchscreen or stylus and was discontinued in 2014. More recently, Kobo was first with a waterproof e-reader, and it"s the first of the major e-reading players to make a 10.3-inch device with a stylus.

Like most Kobos, the Elipsa is an excellent e-reader and offers battery life measured in weeks, depending on use. Unlike Kindles, Kobos have a seemingly limitless ability to customize the reading experience. You can play continuously with margins, line spacing, fonts and font size to get a page that looks exactly how you want to, no matter the size of the screen. The included stylus can be used on any PDF or Kobo ePub, so it works just as well on library books as it does on books from the Kobo store.

Speaking of the library, Kobo is known for its deep integration with the ebook library service OverDrive. You can easily access, browse and download library books directly from your device, so long as your local library uses OverDrive. Borrowing an ebook from the New York Public Library was a seamless experience and one that makes all Kobos a must-have for library lovers.

Unfortunately, the Elipsa"s note-taking capabilities are lacking. There is a noticeable lag when writing with the stylus for any length of time, and the notebook features are fairly basic. Only four templates are available in the basic notebooks and only a single lined template in the advanced notebooks. Advanced notebooks do let you insert drawings, diagrams, math equations and a free-form section, while also offering the ability to convert your handwriting to text. There are only a few pen types to choose from and only five pen brush sizes.

The Kobo Elipsa has 32GB of storage, a resolution of 227 DPI and a blue front light, but it lacks the warm light of the Boox. While this E Ink tablet misses the mark on long-from writing, it excels as a large-screen, library-friendly e-reader with the ability to scribble in the margins.

The Kindle Scribe comes with a fantastic 300 ppi, 10.2-inch display that is evenly lit and perfect for large-format reading. The writing experience is also very pleasant and natural, but the Scribe"s software limitations keep this device from soaring.

The Scribe looks and feels like an extra large Kindle Paperwhite or Oasis, though it lacks the physical page-turning buttons of Amazon"s premium e-reader. Words look crisp and clear, while the device itself is fast and responsive.

The Scribe"s notebooks are easy to use, but lacking in features compared to other E Ink Tablets. You can export your notebooks via email, but there"s no Dropbox or any other third-party support. There are 18 notebook templates available, including six lined options, graphing paper, musical notation and to-do lists. All of that is great, but these notebooks lack any smart features. For example, there"s no way to insert equations or convert your handwriting to text.

Similarly, writing in books and documents is too limited to be useful to serious highlighters and doodlers. That"s because Amazon doesn"t actually let you write directly on the page in anything other than a PDF. Instead, you"ll need to write on "sticky notes" if you want to handwrite a note in a book or even a Word Doc. Not only does this prevent you from scribbling in the margins of books, it also means you"ll need to take a separate action to start writing at all.

The sticky notes are then collected automatically in your Notes and Highlights section, where they are presented without any of the context in which you wrote them. It does allow you to jump to the page on which a note was written by tapping on your markings. This is great in theory, but is confusing if you have more than one note on each page, as it doesn"t pinpoint the exact location where the note was created. The Scribe also doesn"t let you write any kind of notes at all on manga, comics, graphic novels, magazines or newspapers.

Currently, you are allowed to write directly on the page in PDFs, but the experience isn"t great. The pen itself works well, but dealing with documents is more difficult than it should be. When you"re in a PDF, you aren"t able to adjust the font size or layout, so instead you have to pinch to zoom in order to enlarge or reposition the document. That part works well, and it"s not too hard to find a level that works best for you. However, once you"re positioned in your PDF, you can"t stay there. The Scribe makes it impossible to maintain your current zoom levels from one page to the next. Instead, you have to zoom all the way out again in order to swipe to the next page, just to reposition it all over again. This is a huge pain and makes reading long PDFs cumbersome and frustrating.

Ultimately, the Scribe is great if you want a large-screen e-reader or are eager to handwrite sticky notes in Amazon books. But it just isn"t quite good enough at either PDFs or in-line note-taking to recommend it as anything other than a gigantic, but excellent, Kindle.

Every E Ink tablet undergoes extensive hands-on testing. In this case, each tablet was used for one week of rehearsal in a professional theatrical production. This involved evaluating the set-up process, loading PDFs and books onto the devices, and using both the device and included stylus as a script during full six-hour days of rehearsal. Tasks included highlighting, taking notes in the margins, and creating and taking detailed notes in notebooks. We also downloaded ebooks onto the device and used it as a recreational e-reader.

Anecdotally, we considered the hardware design and features, stylus capabilities, overall ease of use, effective UI layouts, notebook settings, E Ink settings, PDF markup capabilities, e-reading settings and format compatibility, app support and performance, and the overall speed and reliability of the system.

Both e-readers and E Ink tablets use E Ink technology to render words and images on the page. They both offer a distraction-free experience that"s easier on the eyes than a traditional LCD color screen.

E-readers tend to be smaller than size and focus only on the experience of reading a book or PDF. E Ink tablets offer e-reading features but also include the ability to use a stylus to write notes in a digital notebook and/or in the margins of PDFs and ebooks. Since handwriting is integral to the E Ink tablet experience, the devices themselves tend to be bigger in order to more closely approximate the size of a sheet of paper.

E Ink tablets are best suited for people who enjoy writing notes or sketching by hand and who need to read and markup lots of PDF or DRM-free ebooks. They could be a particularly good fit for students, lawyers or any other professional in need of a digital, distraction-free note-taking device.

Low-power electronic paper displays are foundational to the e-book industry, and it’s no understatement to say that the Kindle wouldn’t exist as it does today without this technology. The E Ink Corporation is easily the biggest player in this space, and three years ago it announced its Kaleido screens that finally brought color to e-paper displays at a reasonable price. Color screens haven"t risen to dominate the e-book market just yet, but E Ink has been pushing ahead with the technology and just announced its latest generation of Kaleido panels, with some decent-sounding upgrades

Huawei has been doing its best to keep its mobile lineup enticing since it was forced to drop Google’s services, thanks to those notorious US sanctions. That hasn’t stopped the company from trying to keep its consumer business afloat, though, and the likes of the P50, P50 Pro, and P50 Pocket (its first clamshell foldable) are recent attempts to sustain its relevance (even as the lack of GMS makes things difficult). Now with MWC 2022 officially getting started, Huawei has announced an E Ink tablet that looks perfectly poised to take on a whole new market segment for the company.

The Consumer Electronics Show is always full of surprises, and one of them this year was a pre-production smartphone with a color e-ink screen from Hisense. While Stephen wasn"t convinced of the device"s usability during a hands-on demo, Hisense doesn"t seem to be the only company working on an e-ink phone.

Your smartphone"s screen is a glutton. Sure, it may be beautiful, high-res, and with action as smooth as silk, but every second you"re staring at it your phone"s battery is just ravenously being sucked dry. Manufacturers have been working since smartphones existed to mitigate that problem, but progress has been a series of baby steps. Now a new tech promises to turn screen power consumption on its head, adapting the sort of low-power B&W e-ink screen you"ll find on devices like Kindles to show a full range of colors.

Last month, phone manufacturer Yota Devices declared bankrupcy and began shutting down. That company was best known for its Yota Phone, a phone with an e-ink display on the back for on-the-go reading. If you"re still longing for a phone with a paper display, the "Kingrow K1" might be the answer.

Engadget claims that the YotaPhone 3 will have a Snapdragon 625 processor, which would make sense for the device"s price point. The front screen will be a 1080p 5.5" display, with a 5.2" 720p e-ink display on the back. The phone will also have 4GB of RAM, dual SIM slots (one of thm can also be a microSD card slot), a 12MP back camera, a 13MP front camera, a 3,200mAh battery, and a USB Type-C port.

The YotaPhone 2 and its predecessor have always intrigued me. They"re probably the only significant departure in form factor available on the market right now that isn"t different for the sake of being so, adds value, and has been relatively successful in its endeavor. After its European release last December, the YotaPhone 2 is coming back with a new color variant: white. And it looks striking if you ask me, especially with that new E Ink white theme where the old interface"s colors are inverted.

Lenovo might own Motorola now, but the company is still doing its own thing when it comes to mobile devices. There are a pair of new Android phones today, as well as a wearable and a completely self-indulgent accessory—a selfie flash. Your life is complete now, right?

Five months after demoing working InkCase Plus prototypes at this year"s Mobile World Congress, Oaxis has taken to Kickstarter to get its hands on some cold hard cash. And it"s paying off. Already the company has amassed over $100,000 in pledges, surpassing its funding goal on just the first day. The idea of a case that adds a Bluetooth-connected secondary e-ink display to a phone apparently has a lot of people plenty excited. As of right now, over 500 of them. Nevertheless, $30,000 of their funding has come from three $10k sales, $15k from five $3k sales, $13k from thirteen $1k sales, and $7.2k from eight $900 sales. At those rates, it only takes a few.

Companies file for new patents all the time with nothing ever coming of it, so Google"s application shouldn"t be taken as evidence that such a device is coming down the pipeline. Nevertheless, some concepts are just plain cool. Google has designed a computing device with dual e-ink displays that folds as though it were an actual book, according to a patent application that the US Patent and Trademark Office recently published.

The YotaPhone was one of the only genuinely exciting mobile products to come out of CES 2013 nearly a year ago. If you"ve been itching to get your hands on this interesting combo device, you can lay down your money right now... so long as you"re laying down Rubles. YotaPhone just started online sales of its LCD/E-Paper combo phone in Russia. Our Russian readers can pick one up for 19,990 Rubles (about $600 USD).

I"ve taken a less conventional path into the world of Android. I owned a Honeycomb tablet long before I finally got my hands on my first smartphone, and before that, my first Android device was a Nook Color (I booted CyanogenMod from a microSD card, so it was legit). It is due to this background that I am sad to see Barnes & Noble end in-house development of its Nook line of tablets.

Have you seen Firefly? I have. I love that show. Whedon"s "used future" conceptions are second only to the Star Wars universe. In this world, the two dominant language cultures are Chinese and English, space ships can be cheap junkers like someone"s first Honda is today, and crime bosses can toss around amazing, full-color, flexible displays like they"re nothing. This i