Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by solarkraft 284 days ago
FWIW I didn’t like the Boox experience: For writing you’re limited to the stock notes app, which I didn’t find usable: You can’t even zoom in it (something I thought would obviously be possible when choosing the smaller Nova 2). It also has a full Android system, which comes with advantages for sure but invites distractions and leads to very disappointing battery life.
3 comments
kybernetikos 284 days ago
I've been using a boox note air for many years and you definitely can zoom on that.

Android is great for this use case because it lets me syncthing notes and use sheet music apps and use both kindle and kobo and calibre library and offline wikipedia and my own tools. As far as I'm concerned if you try to use it as a generic android tablet you're doing it wrong, but android is a massive step above what everyone else is offering (i.e. none of that)

link
solarkraft 284 days ago
> because it lets me syncthing notes

I know this probably doesn’t exactly fit your use case, but I’ve actually been able to do this with a Kindle Touch (yes, from 2011)! It was a super serene experience to have your books synced over into KOReader.

> if you try to use it as a generic android tablet you're doing it wrong

I agree, but I felt that’s what the system invited me to do (may just be my tinkerer genes though). Update notifications, etc, web browsing, hoops to jump through to share files ...

How‘s your note sync workflow? Can you reasonably easily and quickly access your handwritten notes from a laptop? Last I checked there was some manual export step to jump through.

link
goosedragons 284 days ago
What firmware do you have your Nova 2? The stock notes app has zoom as of 2024-01-03 at least. Not sure when that was added.
link
solarkraft 283 days ago
I haven’t used it much for a few years at this point, but it definitely wasn’t there when I bought it, making it a grossly unfinished product for my use case (taking notes - crazy on a device made for taking notes, right?).

Nice to know that it’s available now that I don’t really need it anymore.

link
RMPR 284 days ago
> It also has a full Android system, which comes with advantages for sure but invites distractions and leads to very disappointing battery life.

While some models have a disappointing battery life, it's most definitely because of BSR[0] not because of them running Android. I had a Note Air 3 and that thing got easily 2 weeks of battery life with heavy use while the BSR version (Note Air 3C) barely survived 2 days.

0: https://shop.boox.com/blogs/news/boox-super-refresh-bsr-tech...

link