Comment by dredmorbius
4 days ago
Most eink UIs feel like they just took interaction patterns from smartphones and crammed them in.
Many e-ink devices are Android (or Android-based), so there's a pretty strong technical reason for that inheritance.
Having used both Android tablets and Android e-ink tablets, as well as Android smartphones, my experience is that:
- Android is smartphone first. As phone formats have expanded, the size-constraint bias is less prominent, but still present.
- Tablets suffer from poor real-estate usage relative to phones.
- E-ink suffers from poor suitability to display capabilities and limitations: much slower response, limited (or no) colour / greyscale palette, ghosting, and abominable results from scroll, pan, or animation-heavy design.
On touch precision: many e-ink devices support a stylus, and I find that this is far superior to finger-based interaction, though generally the more I use tough interfaces the more I hate them.
Highlighting / selection is a problem on all touch interfaces. My solution is to install a soft keyboard (e.g., Hacker's Keyboard) or use a bluetooth keyboard which permit content selection using cursor keys or shift + modifier.
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