TECHNO

Write On

Do you return from trade events with a pile of notes, a handful of post-its, and perhaps the odd voice recording on your phone? Time to look at the new breed of e-ink tablets, says Chris Partridge

Even in the digital age there is a lot to be said for handwriting. Writing things down fixes information in the memory much better than tapping at a keyboard, psychologists believe, and recently sales of paper notebooks and organisers have rocketed.

However, paper has one big drawback - it does not play nicely with the office software that rules our lives. Writing with a stylus on a smartphone or tablet does not feel the same, even though handwriting recognition is now incredibly fast and accurate.

A new generation of e-ink tablets with black-and-white screens like those of e-readers such as the Kindle promises to provide a winning combination of screens that are a pleasure to write or draw on, and the ability to convert the results into digital form. An e-ink tablet can potentially replace not just the latest novel in your bag but your notebook, diary, and collections sketchpad as well. The e-ink screen is clear to read even in direct sunlight, and the battery life is measured in days rather than hours. Put it together with your smartphone and you have a powerful productivity combo that can be put into action wherever you go.

Unfortunately, the offerings on the market are so varied it is very difficult to choose the best one to meet your individual needs. Some e-ink tablets focus on note-taking to the detriment of just reading books. Others seem to regard note-taking as an optional add-on with frustratingly sub-par performance.

The best example of a dedicated note-taking device is the reMarkable 2, a 10in, super-thin and lightweight e-ink screen designed specially to give a pen-and-paper experience when writing.

A very wide range of templates is supplied, including lined paper, graph paper and music paper for songwriters and composers. It is easy to enter new dates in your diary and scribble a new supplier or customer’s details in your contacts list. Handwriting recognition is excellent and PDFs can be displayed and annotated. Drawing is fluid and enjoyable. And cataloguing and storing notes for easy retrieval is excellent.

The price is right too - £279 direct from remarkable.com is less than you would pay for most tablets. The reMarkable 2 is a great professional tool, but it has the drawback that it will only show ePub books that are free of digital rights management restrictions (ie practically none), so if you want to read books as well as make notes it is rather limited.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Kobo Elipsa from Rakuten, Amazon’s main competitor in the ebook world. The Elipsa has a 10in screen and a stylus that enables you to annotate Kobo ebooks and PDFs, as well as take notes.

However. There is always a however. The stylus is a bit laggy so writing is not a totally fluid experience and drawing is limited to scribbles, really. The range of paper templates is sparse. There is no diary or agenda function and it costs more too, at £350. Probably a device for readers rather than writers.

Possibly the most plausible candidate for the optimum combination of e-reader and e-ink tablet is the the Onyx Boox Max Lumi2. This is an e-ink tablet with much bigger ambitions - literally: it features a massive 13.3in screen and runs the Android 11 operating system found on tablets so it can run apps from the Google Play store, and the company has worked with developers to optimise apps for the Lumi2, so such mainstays of professional life as One Note, Google Docs and Evernote all work well.

The Lumi2 even has a microphone

so you can dictate notes and have them converted into text, great when visiting a trade event and looking at new collections. There are only two significant drawbacks. One is that the stylus is a bit slippy, which makes writing and drawing less of a true pen-and-paper experience. The other is, of course, the price: the thick end of £900. The latest e-ink tablet has been launched by the 800lb gorilla of the ebook market, Amazon - the Kindle Scribe, at a price of £330.

The Scribe has a big, crisp 10in screen, a stylus and a built-in notebook app. Uniquely, readers will be able to annotate Kindle ebooks by attaching ‘sticky notes’ to the page, and sticky notes can be exported to Word documents, too.

The notebook app is a bit limited, at least according to the information released so far. For a start, there is no handwriting recognition, which is bizarre - most e-ink tablets and all smartphones have it so why not? This is a big restriction, making using the Scribe as your diary or email terminal impossible. It is a bit disappointing that Amazon has failed to take the opportunity to make the Scribe more an e-reader with tablet superpowers.

My personal vision is to be able to travel with just two items - a smartphone for communicating and colour photography, and an e-ink tablet for reading, writing and all the other things we traditionally did with a stack of books. So far, it remains a dream.

Koba Elipsa Onyx Boox Max Lumi2