I have been searching for an e-ink device that I can use when I want to read books, articles and PDFs, but which can also handle services like email, web browsing and Reddit. Those tasks are all I require now and I need to manage them with as little stimulation as possible.

My iPhone is brilliant at all of these tasks, but no matter how hard I try with dark mode on all of the time, an extension to darken Safari and various Accessibility tweaks the stimulation is still to much and so I am using it a lot less.

The problem goes deeper because I am barely watching TV anymore to avoid stimulation and so the obvious option is e-ink.

If I ignore the need to read and markup medical PDFs, I could get away with a small device and after some research it appears that the Boox Palma 2 is the only real option. It runs Android so will cater for all tasks and is a decent eReader, but I returned it previously because it didn’t feel like a worthy solution, and at £280 it is not cheap. The killer feature is the ability to refresh very quickly which does make it feel like a phone.

The fact that a Palma is arriving with 4G in the future also makes me dither, but I am leaving the house so rarely that I guess this is not a big concern.

What has surprised me is the lack of devices on the market that use e-ink for more than just focussed tasks. Kobos and Kindles are excellent eReaders with poor writing features. Remarkables are decent writers, but poor at most other things and at extremely high prices. And then there are the brands with questionable privacy that stop me from writing and reading what I need to. I remember asking Boox about their privacy for handwritten notes and the answers I got, no matter how hard I pushed, were vague at best.

Ideally I need an e-ink monitor, and e-ink laptop or tablet and, maybe one day, an e-ink colour TV. If you know of any devices that could help please add a comment. Giving up Apple is finally likely for me because the company doesn’t touch devices like this, even if it is one of the very best for accessibility.

Categories: Articles, Books, Health, Thoughts