Jenny Faulkner

The Boox has a built-in function to sync (the PDFs created from) notes to DropBox, but you can’t choose which DropBox folder to sync to and nor can you choose which notebook to sync: you either sync all your notebooks or none at all. These restrictions don’t suit my workflow. Furthermore, as well as syncing my notes, I want to sync other reading material such as annotated PDFs. To achieve this, I use the DropSync app (note: there are also versions of this app for other cloud services).

The DropSync app can be downloaded from the Google Play store (once you’ve enabled this on your Boox device), and I’d recommend paying the small amount for the Pro version which gives you the full functionality. Note, as with all apps downloaded from the Google Play store onto Boox, you will find it easier to work with them if you optimise them for the e-ink display.

1. Long press on the icon in the Apps screen
2. Choose Optimize
3. Remove the tick from ‘Whiten Apps Background’ (or you can keep it ticked and play with the settings until you find what works best for you).

In the most simple terms, this app syncs the folders of your choice on your Boox device with the folders of your choice in your DropBox. So, to set this up:

1. Open the DropSync app
2. Choose ‘synced folders’
3. Press the add button (the big plus sign)
4. Choose the folder in DropBox that you want to sync to (this has to already exist)
5. Choose the local folder on the Boox device (see below).

And that’s it, for a basic sync. By default this will sync the selected Boox folder and its subfolders – you can uncheck this if you only want to sync the Boox folder itself.

So, where do files exist on the Boox device in order to set up this sync?

Notes

Let’s first take a look at notes, those that are created from the Boox Notes app. It’s important to realise that what we are syncing here are PDFs that are generated from these notebooks, not the editable notes themselves. In order to ensure that PDFs are indeed being generated, go into the Notes app, go to settings (the three lines at the top right of the Notes home page) and make sure ‘Automatically generate PDF files after exiting a notepad’ is ticked.

Now, whenever you exit a notebook, a PDF will generated in a subfolder of Storage /note. The subfolder structure will match the folders and notebooks you’ve set up in your notebook app, so if you want all your notes to sync with DropSync, choose the root ‘note’ folder and make sure you haven’t ticked ‘exclude subfolders’.

PDFs and other reading material

For content you are adding to your Boox device, such as PDFs and other reading material, there’s a ‘Books’ folder already provided, or you can create your own folder in Storage. You can of course create a subfolder structure that works for you.

And that’s it! There are more advanced options, such different directions of sync, and also the ability to exclude and include files with a certain pattern in their name (you could exclude files of a particular file type, for example, or those notebooks with ‘temp’ in their name) but the above steps should get you up and running with basic syncing from a Boox device to DropBox.

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.

* See what I did there?

Last year, despite years of being an avid iPad user, I ordered a Remarkable tablet. My eyes were starting to suffer from the long hours on a computer during the day and the massive amount of course reading on the ipad in the evening, so a move to e-ink seemed a good one. I was also intrigued to test Remarkable’s two core claims: the distraction free environment and the feeling of writing on paper.

It arrived, I was excited to try it, I was fairly impressed, and then… for a long while I didn’t use it. Which is never a good sign for a gadget girl like me. Recently I’ve been wondering why that is, so I dug it out again and gave it another go, and here are some thoughts on what I like and what I don’t like.

Note writing

I seriously can write some good notes on this thing! At first I was put off by my handwriting (no iPad-style smoothing so it’s a bit ‘warts and all’) but I got over that. The e-ink device and the friction of the screen surface, which is meant to emulate paper (more on that later), means I feel really engaged with what I’m writing. And the conversion of handwriting to text is pretty darn good, most of the time, although occasionally it blips completely and jumbles up lines – which is not so great. I really like how you can select pages to convert, and then email the resulting text. I have the email address for my DayOne journal stored in the Remarkable, so this is a great way to get my thoughts into my journal. Converting handwriting doesn’t permanently convert it (like Nebo for iPad, which is a one-way street), so you can write, email it off, and continue. All good. However…

Writing feel

This is, after all, one of the main selling points: the ‘this feels like paper’ thing. Well, it does feel like writing on paper. Except what is the ‘writing on paper’ experience, in reality? The Remarkable has got several pen settings, from mechanical pencil to ballpoint to fineliner, and each of these feel very different in real life, so it can’t possibly emulate them all. To me, it feels most like writing on toothy paper with a pencil, which feels great when sketching and making very rough notes. But, and this is a big but in my world, I don’t choose to write on tooth paper with a pencil; I choose to write on fairly smooth paper with a rollerball or gel pen, and therefore I’d prefer something that is just a little smoother that what the Remarkable offers. This is totally a matter of personal preference, of course, and I know that on the Facebook group some people are passionate about the writing feel. But for me, something with a bit more of a ‘glide’ to it would be perfect. And this brings me on to the stylus nib.

For my handwriting, the friction of the screen wears the nibs down quickly. Again, the RM user group on Facebook is divided in opinion on this. Some people claim they can make a nib last for months by adjusting their handwriting, but I find mine starts to wear down after just a couple of weeks. You can rejuvinate it with a nail file but it still feels increasingly like writing with a pencil stub and I find that super distracting. Not great for a device that claims to be distraction free. To address this, I’ve experimented with other pens and am currently settled on the Lamy EMR pen with a Wacom felt nib, which seems to last a lot longer.

Annotating PDFs

This was the core reason I bought the device and the experience on the whole is good. PDFs are easy to get onto the device using the Remarkable iOS app, although I find it an irritation that they always save to the root folder and then have to be moved. However, they display well, and annotations are easy to make. The only annotations that are possible are freehand written ones – there’s no text selection function – but it’s a replacement for paper so that is okay.

However, annotating PDFs usually means writing in the margins, close to the very edge of the document and therefore to the edge of the screen, and the RM doesn’t always perform well here; text can be distorted and appears offset from the tip of the pen. Nothing major, but again a distraction in what is meant to be a distraction-free device.

In addition, although the annotated PDFs sync well to my Mac or iOs devices using the Remarkable app, that’s as far as they go. There’s no underlying folder that you can index in other devices ,so if you want to use your documents for any other purpose you need to share them from the app as a new copy. That just doesn’t work well for my workflow – I like to keep annotated documents and related notes in my Notebooks app so that they can be filed alongside notes that I’ve made in other apps, so it’s just a pain to have to keep on top of the filing. And I find the thought of having to do so to be distracting.

Other gripes

I am constantly irritated by the way you have to select your pen every time you open a new PDF or a new notebook. 95% of the time, I want to use the fineliner, but this is not the default pen and I have to go in and select with every new PDF or notebook. Super irritating, as I always forget and then have undo what I’ve just written, change the pen and start again.

There is no Kindle style frontlight on this device. Again, people are passionate about keeping it this way and will recommend a clip on backlight. For my eyes, though, this creates a glare that is distracting, and I’d love a mild frontlight that just boosts the illumination for when I’m in darker lecture theatres or winding down in the evening.

Conclusion

This was not intended to be a full review but instead a collection of my thoughts on the Remarkable tablet. Do I like it? Yes, I do. But for the reasons I’ve noted above, I don’t find it as distraction free as it makes itself out to be. Perhaps if my way of working meant that I was happy to keep all my notes and annotations on the device, or if it would sync PDFs to selected folders in (say) DropBox, I’d use it more, but I just find myself slightly put off from using it. Most of these things are softawre related, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a future update.