I've had my new aipaper reader a couple of days in, and for others who are considering it, here are some impressions.
For context, I have a small collection of other e-ink devices. Currently have the first gen remarkable (which I hate and never use), a boox go color, a first gen kindle scribe, a previous gen kindle paperwhite signature, and I made my work buy me a boox note max. I've also owned many previous generations of kindle going all the way back to the original ones from like the 00s. I'm not an android guy usually, while I've used an android phone for a couple of months once before, the only more than super short term android use I've ever had has been with other e-ink devices. Other than e-ink stuff I'm squarely in the Apple ecosystem.
TLDR: hardware is great, software appears great but has some usability issues, plastic cover needs to end.
The good:
- the screen is great. I don't particularly mind the lack of a warm front light, my plan is to mostly use this when I'm out and about, and keep the kindle for when I'm in bed. But it's crisp and clear and the contrast is great.
- it's really fast and responsive! I'm not sure how much of this is screen quality or software optimizations but it's absolutely a joy to use. This is especially compared to the boox note max, which I have for reading PDFs, but where I feel like I have to pound on the screen to get it to do anything. But the Viwoods feels even more responsive than my kindles.
- it's so light! Feels weightless.
The bad:
- documentation is almost nonexistent. I've been using Gemini to figure out how to do things. For example, how to turn off the weird little screenshot button overlay that blocks part of the interface (it turns out that the option to do this is buried in the swipe down menu). The next quest is to figure out how to remap the hardware buttons, and, again, I have some info from Gemini that I guess I'll just rely on.
- naming of things is bizarre, for example, files as "learning" --- this exacerbates the lousy documentation problem. (I will say that the documentation on how to activate the play store is good though)
- Also apparently there are multiple different settings apps, the viwoods one and then the android one or something? At least this is what I can discern from switching to the inkOS launcher and seeing that there are two totally different apps named "settings" in there.
- the plastic cover that ships with it is absolute and utter **TRASH**. It is practically impossible to remove. I put it on just to try it out, and it took 20 increasingly panicked minutes to manage to take it off. At one point, I slightly damaged the back of my brand new reader trying to pry the fucking thing off with a butter knife. That cover is the single worst thing about the reader. If you buy one, you should immediately throw the cover out so that you're not tempted to try to use it like I was. I just bought a cheap neoprene sleeve from some random fly by night company on amazon instead, though I'm actively looking for something a little sleeker like a felt sleeve.
Overall:
On the whole, I really like it and am glad I bought it. For me the original choice was between this and the boox palma, mostly for reading while away from home, and I went with this one for the superior combination of features (with boox you either get the palma 2 pro to get LTE but are stuck with a color screen with worse resolution and unnecessary stylus input, or the palma 2---if you can even find it now---with no LTE), better price, and more recent version of android. And it looks like I made the right choice---I've got the kindle app going as well as a bunch of epubs from other sources in there and reading is seamless.