Holy cow they finally did it! Finally a decent COLOUR E-Ink tablet. And it only took… well…. too many decades. I’ve been waiting for this my whole life!
When Sony released their first English language E-Ink ebook reader [PRS-500] in 2006, it turned my life upside down. I had been badly in need of a device like that. Since childhood I’ve always been an avid reader [to put it quite lightly] and paper books were always a massive hassle. The weight of carrying a number of them around, the space needed to keep them “all”, and then of course there was the matter of moving from country to country which unfortunately resulted in leaving many beloved books behind. I had already switched to ebooks out of necessity, but it wasn’t working very well. I had no intention of destroying my eyes by staring at a screen for hours, so let’s just say that I was wasting massive amounts of printer paper. And literally daydreaming about an E-Ink reader.
Of course the technology already existed and a few companies, including Sony, had already released such devices in the Asian market, since at least a couple of years earlier. But for whatever reason, the benefits and general point of E-Ink devices have always apparently been clearer to people in that part of the world and so, the English speaking market has always been quite inconveniently lagging behind.
I was fascinated by the technology and the difference it would make for people like me. And so I really really [and I mean reeeeeeeeally] wanted an eReder. When PRS-500 finally got released in the US, some 10 minutes later I had one. And oh my god I loved it! The simple functionality of that ebook reader really made my life so much easier. Being able to carry around a library in my pocket, and reading for hours without worrying about destroying my eyes, it was fantastic! No more leaving books behind, and hey, killing far less trees!
I was a huge fan of Sony’s line of ebook readers and E-Ink technology in general [enough that I even got involved in the development for a short time]. Each Sony eReader that came out could do more and better than the previous. They really were putting a lot of effort into it. Around 2008, when papers and articles related to colour E-Ink tech started showing up on the web, I was pretty sure Sony was going to release a colour ereader soon enough, putting an end to the final shortcoming of these devices. Unfortunately that never happened.
Instead to my disbelief and disappointment, in 2013 Sony put an end to their eReader line. Simple fact was that E-Ink devices never gained a lot of popularity in the western market. I can’t tell you the number of times [both in North America and Europe, though interestingly never in the Middle East] I had people ask me why the heck I was reading on this strange monochrome device, instead of all the colourful tablets out there. It was frustrating to watch, but the coin never seemed to quite drop for the general population in certain parts of the world. And Sony didn’t see a point in continuing the development of such devices when they only appealed to a bunch of nerds like me.
Of course the mess made by companies like Amazon and devices like Kindle Fire didn’t help matters at all. Amazon and a couple of other companies calling their very much normal blue light emitting LCD tablets “ebook readers” created even more of a confusion and less interest in the E-Ink technology by completely disregarding the reasons E-Ink devices were created in the first place. Yup, I’m talking about the generally overlooked matter of one’s ocular health, the “small” matter of staring at a type of screen that as it happens DOESN’T destroy one’s eyes.
So the following so many years were frustrating. Colour E-Ink devices became less and less of a discussion, and while there was and even the monochrome ebook readers available were devolving and generally of terrible quality. I tried a variety and it was just sad. The last one in the long line of useless devices I tried was the Kobo Aura H2O [2nd edition] which was supposed to be oh so wonderful, and turned out to be the kind of pain that nearly brought me to tears. I went from Sony devices that could deal wonderfully with various formats including PDFs, had great note taking, audio and….. functionalities to a piece of $£I@ that needed to be rooted and modified in a million different ways to do anything at all.
However meanwhile in Asia, the interest in the technology kept growing, the E-Ink foundation continued R&D and eventually in 2018 E-Ink Kaleido was announced. After that it took a rather short time for colour ebook readers / tablets to start popping up in the Asian market. The first several attempts were not great, but eventually as of last year some decent-ish readers started making appearances in Asian electronics shows.
I kept watching the development of E-Ink devices on the other side of the pond and wondering if the only solution would be to eventually find a way to get my hands on Chinese E-Ink tablets and “somehow” find my way around the language issues. So you can say I was quite excited when suddenly I started seeing a couple of brand names, that previously I only read about on websites like goodereader.com, started making appearances on the websites of a few Swiss retailers. At the time I was near tears with the Kobo and I decided to give the Onyx Boox Nova Pro a try.
Well, I have to say that the Nova Pro was already pretty much years ahead of anything produced by the English speaking market. A true E-Ink tablet with great capabilities such as note taking, audio, Bluetooth and WiFi, and just about anything else a decent Android tablet would have. While it was clear that some things were still under development [using the device with wired headphones needed some tweaking and that kind of thing…], I was very very happy with the device. And so, as more and more colour E-Ink devices became available in Asia, I knew it was only a matter of time until Onyx went for it too.
And yes, they did. Oh they so did. Onyx Boox Nova 3 Colour was released in March, and in April I got my hands on it, WOOHOOOWW! As you can imagine my expectations were ridiculously high, and I’m happy to say the Nova 3 Colour has managed to reach all of them! The device is a dream come true.
To start with, the colours have a much better quality than I was expecting. They are sharp and vivid [as you can see in the picture], and ghosting is really minimal. Especially in A2 screen mode, which was pretty much designed for reading comics et al, there’s next to no ghosting. The hardware specs have had quite the upgrade [even since the Nova Pro, you can see the full specs here] and running Android 10, so at this point it’s possible to use just about any Android apps on the device. And yes, it’s actually possible to watch videos on the device which blows my mind completely. The audio quality is amazing, and the device even comes with a voice recorder. Note taking is quite smooth and the included pen has also had a design upgrade.
The device is something I have quite literally been waiting for my whole life, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Now I just wait for Onyx to release a colour version of the Max Lumi [or hopefully something even larger?!] so that I can finally have E-Ink displays for my PCs!
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