Review on 📱 BOOX Note3: 10.3 ePaper with Android 10, Front Light, 4G 64G - Digital Paper E Ink Notepad by Anthony Mangum

I am currently studying computer science and therefore do a lot of handwritten homework. Last semester I mainly used paper for my assignments and notes, but I ended up using about 400-600 sheets of paper. It's hard to sort, to keep in order, and once I lost a task altogether. One solution is to digitize them with Adobe Scan or similar. Getting a good result is a big problem and that's why I was looking for another technology. I've used other graphics tablets for homework, but they usually have an LCD or OLED screen that tires my eyes, even in dark mode. . The tablet I used for a few years was the Galaxy Tab S3, which had a pretty good stylus, but the small 9.7-inch display compared to letter-sized sheets was a very limiting factor. I've seen a 13 inch Boox Note tablet and drooled a bit but not for $800 and the reviews made it sound like it wasn't really great unless you had a very good reason to having a tablet with e-paper on android. I heard about the ReMarkable 2 and bought one to replace my Tab S3 for paperless homework. They advertised an almost entirely paper-like feel and no distractions, plus a 20ms pen lag, so it sounded fantastic. I waited about 9 months to get it and it was very disappointing. The typing feel was top-notch for a graphics tablet, but the device itself was ridiculously slow. I can't believe anyone would take it seriously as an e-book. It takes 20 - 30 seconds to download. Content of a 500-page PDF or EPUB document. It takes at least 10 seconds to navigate to a location in any of these document types. In principle, the device is not very useful for anything other than writing or drawing. If it was maybe $150-200 I would consider it and I thought about waiting for a software update to fix the problem but decided instead to embrace our free market capitalist society Engage and test the competition. The Boox Note 3 was the most similar device, with an e-paper display, 10.3-inch screen, stylus support, and a highly customizable operating system. Here the similarities end. Book Note 3 outshines ReMarkable 2 in many ways: you have 4 refresh modes: Normal for viewing pictures and reading books, Speed mode for quick drawing and normal web browsing where you need smoother scrolling, A2 mode where I'm not exactly knows what he is good at and in X mode which allows you to watch videos. like, not really. The built-in notes app is awesome and has a lot more features than ReMarkable. It doesn't support changing the shape of the pen setting based on angle, but this is a feature that only artists will use, and I don't think either ReMarkable or Boox Note are artist-ready. Now, some ReMarkable apologists might argue that they're trying to reduce distractions, but you can tweak it to not be distracting by tweaking the UI. With e-book reader app, you can easily read pdf and epub books and use pen to mark them as you want. Locating a string of characters in a document takes about 10 seconds for a long book like an EPUB Study Bible, but anything else takes less than 5 seconds and shows you the progress so you don't care if it's just frozen. Another thing that got me a little upset was that you can download Android apps through the Play Store. I was reading the Shonen Jump app (it's a brand of graphic novels, for those who are interested) and thought it would be great if I could read it on an e-paper tablet. I was pleasantly surprised that the impression is quite good despite having a lower contrast ratio than paper or LCD. The main thing is that some apps weren't designed for monochrome displays and the way Boox tablets display non-Onyx apps sometimes messes things up like hiding the buttons. These are all things you need to find workarounds for, but I'm just glad it works at all. You can also download the Kindle app which has also proven to be helpful. My school uses Canvas to manage coursework and turn in assignments that are easy to download so you can even submit assignments without ever having to connect your device to your computer. I assume the same will happen with other LMS applications like D2L or Moodle. Now I have to talk about what it really means to use this thing. I was originally going to give this review 4 stars but after getting more used to it I have to say that it's getting better with time. The first out-of-the-box experience is rather disappointing as the stylus doesn't seem to sync very well. If you have excellent handwriting, none of your strokes will match at first. Italics are slightly better, but writing in a non-linear space is still difficult. However, I found that the pin needs to be broken. I've heard that the stylus can be removed and reinserted and it can help and it's true, but instead for some reason this works best after using the stylus for a few weeks to erase the stylus and he starts to work better. The overall feel of using it is the same as using PaperMate Flair on a Moleskine notepad or Rhodia paper. It's very smooth and offers enough resistance to keep your kicks from going everywhere. The battery life is pretty amazing too. I was surprised that the battery life for the work I do with it is at least double that of the Remarkable. ReMarkable used to go down to 80 in a day, but Boox Note usually went down to around 90%, which is pretty funny considering how the folks at ReMarkable claimed you could ride for over a week on a single charge. . Not at all, but with Boox Note you can (use it 1-3 hours a day with very little or no backlight). A few notes on halos. E-paper displays work in a process called electrophoresis. The display contains small charged particles suspended in the oil. One color is positively charged and the other is negatively charged. To change the color of a specific area of the screen, an electric field is applied across the display, attracting positively charged particles to the negative electrode and, conversely, negatively charged particles. Because there are physically moving objects on the display, one of the types of particles may remain on the display surface after the update. This is the phantom of the image currently displayed, hence the term phantom. The higher the refresh rate, the more ghosting, since it takes 2 or 3 cycles for the particles to properly return to where they should be, which usually happens most of the time. In other modes, smooth scrolling and effects take precedence over image integrity. At first I was afraid that this might become a problem. However, they have included a nice feature where you can swipe down on any screen to open the system menu where you can change modes. Changing the mode to Normal always results in a full refresh. I haven't found any long term halos yet. Finally processing quality. The body is all plastic and it flexes quite a bit, but I like it. A slight curve when writing gives you the feeling you have when writing on a notepad, spiral notepad or a stack of notepaper on a tray. The device is a bit wobbly, but that doesn't mean it's of poor quality. In fact, I never understood that weak devices are made cheaply. I find the current trend towards glass panes in smartphones and tablets somewhat disappointing. You drop this thing without a case and it breaks. This happened to me with a phone I just bought that I haven't received a case for yet. Therefore, I support plastic cases for phones and tablets. Bonus Feature: Backlight. The reason I got the e-paper display was because I was trying to get away from backlit displays, so I figured I wouldn't really use that backlit feature. But as it turns out, when you're in a dimly lit room, the backlight helps reduce eye strain. There are even two color temperatures you can use to get the right color. The nice thing is that it doesn't feel like an LCD where increasing the brightness just takes away the world around you. Rather, the backlight is added to the light already reflecting off the display, so it's really nice. In summary, this product is fantastic and I recommend it to anyone who wants to practice using it. The battery life is the best of any tablet I've ever used. It takes some patience to get it right because the default settings aren't the best, but once you get it right it's an absolute pleasure to use and you won't have any reason to put off your homework. Attached are photos of the hobby project, homework, and graphic novel page taken with my iPhone. Although these are technically pictures of pictures, the quality is good enough that they pretty much match what you see in real life.