I have an old PRS-T3 from Sony and would like to upgrade, but don’t know much about the current world of ereaders, maybe someone could help me. (The PRS is working fine for books, so I can wait, but many websites stopped working and I would like to upgrade)
It would have to be robust and have a similar form factor(maybe smaller but not much bigger)[3 inches/7.5 cm] and I would like physical buttons, but they are not required. Since I am using omnivore as a read it later app and read my local newspaper on these devices, google play and a webbrowser would help a lot.
Thanks.
I don’t need an integrated store or drm reader, I add all my books manually.
I have Onyx Boox Page. It’s pretty much the same size as your Sony, but it’s sligthly wider because of the page turn buttons. It’s also slightly thinner and the display is bigger due to smaller bezels. It has Android
1211 and Play Store so you can install any Android app you want.Because it’s not a dedicated reader device, but an Android device with an e-ink display, it’s a bit more difficult to use than a typical e-ink reader. E-ink displays are slow to refresh and to overcome some of the problems caused by that, they have different refresh modes. Your typical e-ink reader chooses the best refresh mode for different use cases (reading, browsing the menus, etc.). Because the Page is an all-purpose Android device, the operating system cannot know which refresh mode is best for each app. That means that it’s the user who has to decide which refresh mode to use with each app.
The Page has a quick access menu to change the refresh mode and other settings. These choices are remembered per app. You’ll have to experiment with them to figure out the best (or good enough) settings for each app. The choices are basically between refresh speed and amount of ghosting: Faster means more ghosting. The Page has a feature that let’s you bind long press functions to the page turn buttons. I highly recommend setting one of the buttons as “full refresh”, so you can use speedier refresh modes and then just hold the button for 0.5 seconds (duration can be changed) to refresh the screen when needed.
Some Android apps are more e-ink friendly than others. You’ll want to disable most animations and use paginated views instead of scrolling wherever possible. Unfortunately, most apps aren’t optimized for e-inks, and while some of them have settings that makes them more convenient to use with e-ink screens, you pretty much always need to fiddle with settings and figure things out. As an example the Kindle app: If you swipe to turn page, there will be a page turn animation. If you look through the settings of the app, you’ll find a setting called “Page Turn Animations”. Regardless of if you enable or disable this setting, there will be a page turn animation. That setting just changes it to a different kind. But, if you use the Page’s page turn buttons to turn the pages (instead of swiping) there won’t be page turn animations regardless of that setting. Is any of that somehow obvious? Nope, but at least the app is usable, if your device has those page turn buttons. Without page turn buttons, those animations ruin your reading experience and you’ll want to use another reader app instead.
Overall I really like the Page. It has it’s quirks and you’ll need to fiddle with settings, but Play Store with all of its apps outweighs the problems.
EDIT: Corrected the Android version.
Thanks, this sound interesting. How is the battery life? I would guess android has a tonne of services, that could eat up battery, which i wouldn’t really need on an ebook reader.
Better than you’d expect, because most of the power draw on most Android devices is the screen. I’d recommend keeping airplane mode on when you aren’t using it, because that’s probably the next biggest, but on my Max it’s generally pretty seriously long, both in terms of reading time and sleep. Admittedly that’s a lot bigger, so a bigger battery, but I go through stretches of a lot to almost no activity, and it might be a month since I last touched it, just sitting on a shelf. I pulled it out at 25% just now.
The benefit of Android (beyond choosing your reader app for content you own) is that you can use other apps that don’t give you DRM free content you can move around. Libby and Hoopla are two that many US libraries support that will allow you to borrow books entirely for free, I use scribd which is a paid subscription service for a different library of books, and other platforms for purchasing content that is locked down (I don’t agree with it; but it’s a reality), pretty much everyone relevant has an android app. Same with magazines, news, and sports content that’s shorter but more time sensitive. And if you choose to pirate, you can do that right on the device as well in a lot of cases. After experiencing Android on an ereader (even though I can’t stand it on a phone), there’s very little chance I buy one with anything less again. It takes some tweaking here and there, but there’s just too much I would have to give up to go back.
As with most portable devices, battery life depends heavily on what you do with the device and how you use it. CPU and GPU under full load are biggest power drains followed by display, especially the backlight but high refresh rate also requires energy. You probably won’t be doing much CPU/GPU intensive tasks with an e-ink device (although you can watch videos and even play games on the Page if you are okay with the ghosting). E-ink displays doesn’t require lights and they refreshes only when the content changes, so the display uses minimal amount of energy - unless you turn on the light. When you put the device to stand by it disconnects wireless connections and, I assume, it disables some of the background processes as well. Also it’s not vanilla Android, but their own flavor of it. I don’t know what changes they’ve made beside the user interface.
I’ve had the Page for couple months only, and my use cases have been all over the place, so I can’t accurately comment on the battery life. It’s several days with one charge, and I try to keep the charge level between 20% and 80% to prolong the battery, so I’m not even using the whole capacity. The battery life is not an issue.
