Why has no big brand succeeded in the e-ink tablet space?Huawei and Lenovo tried and abandoned their productsAmazon has the Kindle Scribe series but it's AmazonBoox has nice hardware and features but typical Chinese brand software longevitySuprenote is mehRemarkable is trying to be Apple too hard
>>107826750Because tablets need high refresh rates and color, which E-ink sucks at. Anything you might reasonably do on a E-ink tablet you can already do in any random E-ink reader
We would need more 60Hz displays first.
>>107826750>Why has no big brand succeeded in the e-ink tablet space?Devices with e-ink displays are, frankly, DOA outside of e-readers. There are too many downsides to e-ink for it to be used in a general purpose device. You just can't do much on a screen that has below average contrast ratios in low light conditions, a terrible refresh rate, awful ghosting and latency, and worse color reproduction than newsprint.I have a hunch that reflective LCD is going to sweep e-ink and take a larger portion of the market in the tablet space once a serious manufacturer (not TCL) realizes it's potential. Being made from normal LCD displays is a huge advantage.
>>107826750Amazon has succeeded bigly in the e ink tablet space
>>107828756Surely a reflective LCD still needs a constant supply of power supplied to it? That's the main advantage of e ink displays, and it's why they are showing up everywhere like supermarket shelf labels
>>107830644yes but it's fuck all, just look at watches and calculators
>>107826750>Why has no big brand succeeded in the e-ink tablet space?reading books is too niche of a market now. e-ink wouldve done numbers in 1995.
>>107826750if i want 7 inch, black and white display, asymmetric design, buttons, no android what do you recommend? I was thinking about old oasis, they are cheap used but it looks like they are unrepairable. Is pocketbook era my only real option brand new? there is few used eras and kobo libra on my local marketplace but prices are so high that i would be better buying something new. Running old kindle, works fine but blue light fucks with my sleep
>>107830651I can't see the same degree of benefit, if you want a sharp display you'll need a lot of pixels, a calculator only has dozens of pixels
>>107826750You want to know why? I have a kobo aura hd from 2012. That's a 14 year old device. The screen on that? 6.8 inch 260ppi display. Old as fuck abandoned software, still reads everything and opens pdfs with zero issue. Just werks, aside from its failing battery. I bought this thing for 30 bucks used in like new condition back then.Decided to try something "modern". Got a "cheap" Android tablet ereader on amazon. 300ppi screen, 7 inches. This one was 200 dollars. The built in reader app that the entire tablet launcher is designed around can't open and format the same books on the 2012 ereader. Forced to download and use koreader instead. Has a bunch of other features because it's Android, and i have no desire to use any of them because i wanted to use this device to read fucking books. It looks nice, sure, but somehow this thing costing 200 bucks seems retarded when i can just buy a new battery for my old one and continue to use that with zero issue. Why the fuck does my 14 year old 30 dollar device outperform a 2025 200 dollar device under any circumstance? E-ink has barely evolved in almost 2 decades. What the fuck are we doing?
>>107826901You're almost a year late.
>>107828756>Being made from normal LCD displays is a huge advantage.Why do RLCD have such low resolutions compared to coventional backlit LCD?The only reason I can think of is that the smaller the pixels get the less light can pass through them and RLCD are already a lot darker than color e-ink.Color LCD is built around color filters just like Kaleido so it will have the same issues.b&w e-ink has largely solved ghosting, latency and refresh speeds. What remains to be seen is how much color-particle based e-ink can be improved.
>>107831495>still reads everything and opens pdfs with zero issue.That's generally not the experience people have with Kobo and pdf.The latest firmware for the Aura HD is from November 2025, hardly abandoned at all.
>>107826750>More expensive than paper>Feels worse than paper>Looks worse than paperpdf for uni textbooks and paper for handwriting and personal reading. Done.
>>107831865>More expensive than paperNot after a certain point.Do you print your pdf or how do you handle them?
>>107831982>Not after a certain point.How long do the irreplaceable batteries on these last before they kick the bucket? 3 years? 5 years?A 600 page book is like 10-20 bucks, notebooks are also dirt cheap. Not to mention tge aspect of collecting your books on a shelf and admiring it.How many pages are you reading and writing per year?>Do you print your pdf or how do you handle them?I read them on my laptop screen. Textbooks suck on paper, I want to be able to highlight and find stuff quick. I use obsidian and zotero so they need to be on my pc.
>>107832127>How long do the irreplaceable batteries on these last before they kick the bucket? 3 years? 5 years?Supernote X2 has replaceable batteries but in general anecdotal evidence in general gives you battery life in excess of a decade. Depending on your usage you'll get a week to a month one a single charge.Wouldn't you want your hand written notes to be searchable and shared between your devices?
>>107826750I"d love to get a remarkable tablet
>>107832160Hold out for Remarkable 3 if you don't have money to waste on a Paper Pro or Paper Pro Move.
>>107831590>e-ink dies from refreshing>refreshing at a rate that will kill the panel in 2 months
>>107831865pretty much this. i like the idea of e-ink but it’s basically trying to reinvent the wheel… imagine trying to jot something down to pass on to someone else, you’re not gonna hand over your tablet just for that lol
>>107826750Don't forget Sony, they have an e-ink tablet specifically for like doing paperwork and note taking and reading PDFs. Would have been super useful in grad school, but they were (probably still are) overpriced.
>>107826750I really like my remarkable 2. My fiance got it for me when I was in grad school and it saved me from lugging around a million textbooks. Also, because it doesn't have a web browser or search feature I was allowed to use it for open note tests, which saved me lots of time and money from printing out slide decks.
>>107833288Had. Their branch was taken over by Fujitsu. Still very limited and hard to get outside of Japan. The current Quaderno A4 Gen 3 costs 80,000 yen but it's still limited to 207ppi.
