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Further adventures in e-ink: the Boox Nova3

Out of the two iPads that I own, the one that I use most is the iPad mini. The size just works really well for nearly of all my reading needs: bigger than a Kindle but not too big that a lot of eye travel across the screen is required. But increasingly I’m finding my eyes feeling problematically tired and sore from looking at the screen, leading me to turn down the brightness, reduce the white point and even turn off the colour. I’ve been using my reMarkable 1 more and more, but the limitations of syncing and the inability to bookmark PDF pages meant I could never quite embed the device in my workflow.

So I was excited to try the Onyx Boox Nova3: an e-ink, Android based, 7.8 inch tablet. Champions of the reMarkable tablet reject Boox on account of the putative inferior writing experience and the potential distractions of the apps. On the other hand, it offered a more feature rich experience which I felt might make it more suitable for my needs. Here are my intitial thoughts.

Size: I love the size of this, for all the reasons I love my iPad mini. It’s easy to carry around, it’s comfortable to hold, and it’s easy to find a comfortable position if you want to read in a chair or in bed.

Display: This thing is nice. I’m really starting to enjoy e-ink – I find it much easier to read and I seem to take in more information than when I read from an iPad. The display handles most PDFs well despite the small size of the device: scanned double-page PDFs and older academic papers with fuzzy writing are the only things that I’ve not been able to read easily. Unlike the reMarkable, the display of PDFs, such as the contrast, can be adjusted, and this can make a big difference to readability.

Frontlight: the lack of a frontlight on the reMarkable is one of the things that divides the user community. Many hold that it should never be illuminated as it is a replacement for paper (although of course one might question whether it should therefore have an undo function and the ability to convert handwriting to text). Others, and I put myself in this camp, feel that a boost would be welcome – I really don’t want to have to mess around with clip on lights that cause a glare on the screen. So I’m really pleased with the frontlight of the Nova3. The temperature of the light can be finely tuned, and the level of illumination can range from the very subtle to the very bright indeed. When the light is turned off (which can be done easily by holding the home button), the screen is very similar to the reMarkable.

Pen: the pen supplied with the Nova3 is cheap looking and plasticy, and way too thin to hold comfortably. I’ve addressed that by using a pencil grip from Amazon. I’ve also replaced the nibs with reMarkable nibs, and these work perfectly.

Writing experience: bearing in mind that I felt the reMarkable was too rough to emulate my preferred surface of gel pen on good quality paper, I don’t mind the writing experience of the Nova3 at all. A perfect amount of friction would be somwhere between the two – but since it now appears that the reMarkable 2 tablet acquires its writing feel from a simple screen protector (some people have mistakenly peeled it off), I feel confident that in time I can find a screen protector that gives me just the right amount of tooth.

Syncing: this is where it excels (over the reMarkable) for me. I use the DropSync app to sync PDFs from DropBox to the device and this means I can then view my annotations on the ipad just by accessing that DropBox folder. That’s a gamechanger for me. In a similar way, the Boox note app can be set to generate a PDF when you close a notebook, and I sync these to DropBox as well.

Splitscreen: perhaps not so useful on such a small device, but on a larger device the ability to have a PDF on one side of a screen and an associated notebook on the other would be incredibly useful.

Distraction: one of the key selling features of the reMarkable tablet is the distraction free environment. I’ve written previously that this never quite worked out for me: the limitations and quirks of the software meant that I had to resort to workarounds that, frankly, just became a distraction in themselves. My experience so far is that the nature of e-ink is that it is slow – perfectly adequate for the tasks of writing and annotating PDFs, but it isn’t perfectly suited to browsing the web. So unlike using the iPad, where I feel the lure of the web browser at all times, I just don’t find myself tempted to start surfing. Equally, I haven’t set up email or Facebook. In short, up to now I’ve not found the device to be significantly more distracting than the reMarkable.

Verdict: I am really enjoying the Nova3. I love the size, the display is great, the frontlight makes it so much more versatile whilst being relatively gentle on the eyes, and the additional functionality compared to the reMarkable is great. I’m looking forward to exploring it in more depth.