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by mistercheese 4975 days ago
On a similar note, I've been waiting to see an Android tablet, without an anemic cpu, use a high contrast, fast refresh e-ink screen. The Kindle is great, but I find myself mostly emailing articles to it from services like Instapaper/Readability/Pocket and RSS/Google Reader and Flipboard/Google Currents. It would be great if there were a powerful enough e-ink tablet to access dynamic web content directly.

I find I use my tablet and cellphone mostly for reading (articles, books, texts, emails), and the e-ink screen is much more pleasurable for me. Also, I love having a laptop, cell phone, and tablet, but I hate having to charge 3 devices at the end of every day.

2 comments

I think the problem would be that e-ink would require special UIs that have no moving part, don't rely on scrolling, don't rely on colour, etc.

I think "mobile web" has taught us that. Increasingly we are finding that our toaster can run firefox and our heating system can run word but Firefox and the websites it displays weren't meant to run on a toaster.

Yes, I agree. "e-ink" optimized apps would probably have to happen for this device. (Pagination instead of scrolling, buttons instead of swiping...) However, these days some displays are getting 30fps (I don't know about latency), so at least animations might be possible. I don't know about the hardware limitations, but it seems hard to imagine the responsiveness of e-ink won't improve enough.
I'd love an e-ink android tablet too. Reading on an LCD tablet is painful especially if you are already staring at a computer all day. I almost decided to buy the Nook Glow because I've seen it installed with android 2.1 but it seems most apps are incompatible, so I went with Kindle Paperwhite which does web articles pretty fine with it's Send to Kindle feature.

Btw there's a chrome extension of Send to Kindle so you don't have to email articles. Also if you like reading Hacker News on the kindle browser check out http://bit.ly/hnkindle :)

Yes, I use that and also have Instapaper/Readability regularly mail me articles. It's helpful but these are still hacks. 1) It's horribly painful to organize the articles, especially when spanning multiple pages 2) I have to know about the article ahead of time to send to the kindle, rather than discover on the device itself 3) I can't "Mark as Read" on the device itself right after reading 4) For Instapaper/Readability, only the latest ~20 articles are shown. Also, the API Amazon provided used to frequently break.
I actually stopped using Pocket (phone/tablet) and just use Send to Kindle for everything. It doesn't bother me too much that I can't archive/mark as read articles, I just delete them from my kindle once I'm done. Also I just order the articles by most recent and just use search if I need to find a specific article. I wanted to avoid relying on hacks so I guess this setup will be stable for a while.

It's actually amusing that since back then I've used ipod touch, android phone, android tablet, and now the kindle, for specifically reading articles from the web.

When I was in college I was actually printing web articles in batch during weekends, I just paste the plain text to MS word arranged in 3 columns in uniform font so it looks like a newspaper. Those were fun times since everything was so new to me :) that's way before all the instapaper/pocket came out.