The build quality is impressive. I had it for 2 weeks, used it for about an hour daily, and set it to only poweroff after a day of inactivity.

Its battery dropped from 100% to 48% over that time. Yes, I was quite positively impressed.

However, their theft of code (which is what you do, if you do not respect the code license, eg, gpl), the fact that even a brand new model tablet was 3+ monthly Android security updates behind, and the pcaps I took showing all the phoning home, including IPs in China...

Well...

As I said, returned. Quite sad, loved the hardware.

I’d mostly want it for reading articles online and email newsletters. I could make a burner email account for this purpose.

That seems a tolerable tradeoff, as I don’t consider what I read on HN to be super sensitive. (Though others may reasonable differ there)

Maybe I can make an rss feed out of them and use goosepaper or print them to pdf.

Also how do you upload from the phone, can you print to a dropbox folder or the Remarkable phone app or some source so it is automatic?

I have the same model with insane battery life. I think your unit might have been defective.

Might it have been this?

This was a pretty thorough traffic analysis of their Max Lumi device. I think it would be pretty similar with the Note Air. I bought a Max Lumi after this as there didn't seem to be much concern.

You can watch the comparison of all the e-Ink tablets here on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkK_HQRf6xg

Came with a case and stylus.

My major problem with basically all the BOOX devices is they're violating the GPL by not releasing their kernel/uboot sources.[1]

[1]: http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/install-linux-or-alterna...

The refresh rate is good enough for me but I'm not very picky so YMMV. I'll try to use it for work one of these days using ssh, so I'll report back once I've done so.

I do hope to try coding in the sun with it some time. Got it in winter though, so haven't yet.

All of this is probably to be expected, but I wanted to share because the idea of being able to run any android app is certainly part of the appeal of the device.

It is still a good device, but when comparing it to other e-ink devices on the market, I'd really consider the Google Play support to be a bit more of a novelty than something you would actually use unless you have a very specific use case and don't mind a less than stellar app experience.

It's not a great experience for a PDF with no margins and a complicated layout (like some magazines.)

I vastly prefer reading PDFs off the Note than on a computer, regardless of the paper size.

I remember looking at an e-ink reader years ago and thought it was unusable because of the weird page refresh/slow page turn.

The newer ones also have partial refresh modes that are faster still, but not quite as clean, which lets you trade speed for clarity. The fastest modes work for video (sort of) and at least the Boox have lots of configuration options e.g. different apps can refresh at different speeds, the refresh rate can vary when you start scrolling (in standard android apps that aren't optimised for e-ink, in readers you generally "page" through text) and can set it to do full refreshes after X amount of actions, or manually force a refresh.

But, as all the above probably indicates, if you have it on full quality mode, then there's a noticeable delay and flicker as it fully blacks out the screen to "clear" it and then displays the next page.

This is particularly bad for some of the color ones, as they seem to only be able to do each color layer in sequence.