Joe Hart

🖋️The Search For The Eink Holy Grail

Image of my Kindle and Boox Palma on my bedside table
For the better part of a year now I’ve been on a quest, a fruitless adventure with many dead ends, false hopes and almosts. I’ve been trying to find one, or perhaps multiple, eink devices to replace my iPhone and my iPad. Looking for something that fits the perfect venn diagram of my desires so I can cast off my glowing slates of chaos energy and embrace a ploddier and slower pace of digital life.

Display Technology

If you, dear reader, have not also fallen down the eink rabbit hole there are a few things to set up as the background to our adventure. Firstly “eink” is both a technology, referring to the screens that move physical particles of pigment around to display things, and a company that invented the technology and up until 2018 had an exclusive patent on the tech.

Electronic paper (Side view of Electrophoretic display). upper layer transparent electrode layer transparent micro-capsules positive charged white pigments negative charged black pigments transparent oil electrode pixel layer bottom supporting layer light white black
A fancy diagram I copied from wikipedia about eink.

In my grossly unqualified opinion, this feels like a reason why eink tech isn’t that great or that cheap. No one has a monopoly on LCD, IPS, OLED or Whatever-The-Hell-Next-We-Do-With-LED technology. There’s a distribution between all the big, and small players, and they all patent share between them. Meaning displays are bountiful, relatively cheap and relatively quickly advancing. However Eink have a near monopoly on e-paper technology patents and even a core part of the manufacturing. If they just patent held and licensed that would be one thing, but they also tightly control manufacture of one of the core components(the films with pigment inside) that then other manufacturers have to use as a base for their products.

To be fair to them, eink haven’t been resting on their laurels entirely and have been creating new types of displays spread slowly across the last two decades. The initial eink launched in 2004 with Sony’s first e-reader is a very different beast from the displays in the latest Kindle Paperwhites. Higher contrast, higher DPI and faster refresh rates have all inched eink further forward as a piece of technology.

The truly elusive advancement however has been colour eink displays. The dream of having a digital device perfectly replicate colour printed paper has been ever alluring. And so far it’s all just been a bit naff.

Forgive me, reader, as we dive into some jargon. The first colour version was the Advanced Colour ePaper(ACeP) where instead of just one pigment, it could do multiple. Full colour at last! However the refresh rate was incredibly slow, please see the image below of a little train time dashboard i put together on an ACeP, I ended up canning the project because the refresh was so distracting even for a passive information display.

For images, perfectly fine. For train times, utterly frustrating.

So to course correct in the other direction Kaleido displays were developed, a display combining colours and a the refresh rate of standard eink? Thus the monkey paw curled and Kaleido was born. This technology is the same used in the recently controversial Kindle Colorsoft. It’s one that looks pretty good while backlit on a video recording, however when you get it in person you immediately see the dump stats used to achieve the refresh rate. The “white” base colour of the screens are actually grey, and if you are looking at the device from arms length, say for reading, you notice a kind of lattice over the display.

This is because that’s exactly how the tech works. It has a base layer of traditional eink ePaper and then has a layer above it that is coloured, to essentially filter the white light into colour. It’s kinda similar to those briefly lived 3D glasses for films and TV, it achieved the goal but sacrificed brightness and clarity for it.

For a really good look at the differences with some great pictures check out this blog post from Nico Verbruggen: Comparing Carta and Kaleido E Ink tech

Finally the most promising in a purchasable device is Gallery displays. The first few devices of these were pretty rough, being quite non responsive, however the Remarkable Paper Pro from all the reviews I’ve seen is pretty good. Responsive, the same kind of colour replication you might get from a newspaper.

So we’ve got the display tech, or at least a good enough display tech. Let’s look at the vast and expansive list of devices that use the latest Gallery 3 display we can currently purchase:

Oh. Oh no. That’s quite a short list. It appears that for what are probably very sensible cost or faff reasons the Gallery 3 displays were basically dropped as soon as they were released. We seem to have found the saviour our kingdom needed in our adventure, but it appears when they were needed the most: they vanished.

What can I read on the device?

Ok lets put a pin displays for second and talk about the true villain of our tale, and please forgive this horrible word: content.

This whole journey of trying to find a perfect eink device started for me as for the three thousand four hundred and seventy fourth time in my life I tried to start using my Kindle more. The Kindle is by far the most affordable and ubiquitous e-reader on the market today. I literally have never met anyone who owns anything other than a kindle when it comes to e-readers.

My issue with building a good habit with them however is that they just have books on the kindle store. If you want to read books and only books it’s a great place to be. However, most of my reading is: Newsletters, RSS Feeds, magazines like Clarkesworld and whatever newspaper I’m into at the time(Currently the FT, specifically their weekend culture stuff is surprisingly good).

Don’t get me wrong, I also read books. However I don’t just read books, and I don’t think only books are worthy of a lovely reading experience in eink.

Well Joe, why don’t you just get a Remarkable Paper Pro? It’s got the screen and it’s not a kindle, surely that’s the perfect thing to pick up? Alas, no. The Remarkable Paper Pro seems to be a fantastic device for what it’s meant to be: A document reader and note taker. It’s a device that wants to be in a briefcase and loaded up with quarterly reports. Getting actual stuff on it is tricky. Also the vast majority of methods people advise to getting content on it are slightly less than legal to be putting it nicely.

Maybe I’m adding too many hoops to jump through, but I want to pay writers for the things I read. Be that a book, a newspaper or anything worth a bit of cash. Now, of course, Amazon is not kind friend to authors and has a bunch of shit to work out, but whatever thin slice gets to authors through amazon is definitely more than the zero that would through piracy.

The best devices content wise I’ve found have been the Boox series of devices. I bought and then resold a Boox Tab Mini C(doesn’t that just roll off the tongue?) since it had the aforementioned Kaleido colour display that looked pretty good in YouTube videos but pretty naff in person. But content wise it was great! It ran android that meant anything Android phones/tablets can do this little e-reader could too. I could read comics on Marvel Unlimited, I could read the FT, I could read newsletters and RSS Feeds on Readwise Reader. I could download my obsidian vault and read my notes, it was great! Except the display had to have the backlight cranked to nearly full most times of the day and at that point I could just be using my iPad.

I am sat here hawkishly waiting for a Gallery 3, or similar tech, android tablet to arrive.

Where can I use the device?

The other thing that pushed me away from Kindles was their size; or should I say form-factor. I say “pushed away”, I still have one on my bedside table the natural environment for a kindle. However these are the days of lockdown no more, I desire to go into the world and read. On a park bench, on a crowded tube and at my most pretentious in a café. And for that the Kindle, at least the kindle I own when compared to the trousers and jackets I own, just isn’t pocketable.

This is where the dashing young hero of the internet e-reader world entered my life. If you hang out in the same dumb phone e-reader obsessed corners of the internet I do, you will have definitely seen this about: The Boox Palma. It’s a lovely little phone sized e-reader, but without any 4G just WiFi. It runs android, has a black and white screen and it’s fucking brilliant. It’s expensive for an e-reader but cheap for a phone.

It slips into my pocket easily, I open it in the morning before i leave the house to refresh my RSS feeds and download offline copies of the newspaper and off I pop out into the world.

If they brought out one of these with cellular support I would probably swap my iPhone for it. It feels like a wonderfully human piece of design. Additionally, in a very naive aesthetic sense it looks like the future. The kind of future that would be in a sci-fi show where someone time jumps into the future and everyone has forgotten about the existence of any visual influence other than Dieter Rahms.

How dodgy is the device?

Now there are of course eink phones out there, but they exist in two different corners of the wheeler dealer “oh its definitely safe” part of the internet.

On the one hand you have the Hisense A9 that you can get off various AliExpress listings emblazoned with large word-art esque declarations of “NO ROOTING REQUIRED ACTUAL PLAY STORE” that when ordered does a lot of suspicious phoning home if you inspect the network traffic. (Which to be fair, Boox seem to do to).

And then you’ve got the kickstarter and gofundme phones. The phones that are perhaps real and are perhaps lovely, but that include that risk of dropping a few hundred pounds on something that never materialises.

Also many of these devices, many Boox ones included, run outdated versions of Android. Which just sets off my security heebeejeebees.

What do I really want

So for now the Boox Palma and a rarely used Kindle is my current set up of e-readers, but every time I use either of them I am aware of how oh so close to good they are. I have no skills in hardware development, no wealth to swing around to get something made or even really the drive to do such a thing.

But I shall, in the laziest way possible list out my particular laundry list of my ideal phone + tablet eink setup.

The Phone

The Tablet

Both of them

The Quest Continues

To be fair looking at this list if Boox brought out a “Palma but we put cellular in it” then the phone part would be pretty much met. The real elusive one is the tablet, which I am less optimistic about getting. Tablet e-readers all focus on note taking with a pen as their number one feature and that simply isn’t something I do much. Not just for my horrendous handwriting, but also that I still like a physical notebook for those things. I want a little thing to read on and tip tap on when I get some time. For now, that’s my iPad. But hopefully not for too much longer.