Comment by carlosjobim
1 day ago
What exactly is a "general purpose device"? An eInk tablet is pretty far away from being "general purpose" as far as I can tell. Should I buy a Ford Ranger and demand that the company makes it easy to convert it to a lawn mover?
Examples: it sucks as an ereader, even though the hardware is super capable of it. It doesn’t have a built-in dictionary to look up words or check spelling. You can’t make links between documents or to different pages in the current document.
Their hardware is top notch, but I found the software to be so hamstrung that I returned mine after a few weeks. Basically, if you want to have exactly a physical paper notebook experience but with a computer, it’s great. If you’d like to transcend the limitations of a paper notebook and take advantage of the nice hardware to organize your work, or do literally anything but write or draw, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
Please point to the marketing page where it's primary purpose is declared as an ereader.
My car has four wheels, that doesn't make it a good ice-cream van
I’ve heard this excuse for it plenty of times, and it rings hollow and/or Stockholm syndrome. People (rightfully) made fun of Apple for not including a calculator on iPadOS for the longest time. Imagine Apple claiming “we never advertised it as a calculator!”, which is technically true, but clearly silly because it’s an obvious use case that everyday users would want.
Well, same here: a Remarkable tablet is nearly identical to a Kobo or Kindle in form factor and basic capabilities. It even includes an ereader app. But the app, frankly, sucks. They could swapped in KOreader and called it a day. But instead of that, they — or rather, their supporters — give the laughable excuse that “it’s not an ereader”. Well, an iPad’s also not a calculator, and yet…
If your car has four wheels, room to walk around inside, and built in refrigerators that are mounted upside down for some reason, maybe the factory would say that they didn’t sell you an ice cream truck, but everyone else looking at it is going to wonder why they didn’t make it possible to stock popsicles while they were at it.
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Good point. I would expect most eink tablets to be good ereaders.
Or at least competent, if not great. I mentioned in another comment that I switched to a Supernote. Its own reader isn’t fantastic. My Kobo is better for that. But it’s fine as a reader if it’s the only tablet-sized device I have with me that day.
That’s the baseline I’d expect from an e-ink tablet. It might not blow me away, but should at least be reasonably useful as a reader. Any tablet that can’t adequately let me comfortably read an epub is unserious, in my opinion.