This blog post just got me so excited. I've seen what Pine started with and now in my head I just keep thinking "keep going keep going!!" This is hopefully the kick in the pants the tech giants need, a small company slowly eating up even a tiny percentage of their sales and doing it with cheaper and completely open (and arguably better?) products.
I am mostly all-in on Apples ecosystem because I've been so continuously disappointed by the fragmentation on the Android ecosystem, and this is something that's seriously giving me a real hit of excitement!
Yes. I couldn’t agree more. No amount of complaining at Apple will make them build an open ecosystem. It’s just not in their DNA. Supporting these guys will help them to do it.
Buy their stuff, but equally important - contribute to the software ecosystem to make these devices ready for regular users to adopt.
This is a pretty sweet looking device. Even despite this call out “As for the actual user interface, we’re currently talking to the good folks at KDE and trying to figure out whether Plasma Mobile or regular Plasma (with panel-specific tweaks of course) will be the best fit for this particular device. As you can probably tell, this is an uncharted territory for all parties involved, but we’ll figure it out. Needless to say, the software isn’t finished – indeed, we don’t really even know yet what will work well with this technology and what won’t. It is just the beginning of our journey with e-ink technology, and it will take a long time and much effort to make the PineNote end-user worthy.” This still seems worthwhile to pre order if you’re a heavy reader and note taker.
Anyone know how this compares with the remarkable?
The post doesn't go much into details of the effort that went into the firmware development for the PinePhone keyboard, but I've documented it along the way, for the curious, together with options of what may be possible thanks to me writing FOSS implementation of the whole SW stack for the keyboard, and the surrounding tooling.
Most of the last few month's worth of posts here are about the keyboard https://xnux.eu/log
Wow that's wild, really nice write up. I see this kind of post and feel humbled by the effort to create something that I take for granted. Is this normal procedure for integrating a new keyboard or this particular model was an outlier?
Anyway, the EM85F684A is a really obscure MCU, so there was no other way than to start completely from scratch, to have FOSS development/flashing tooling and the firmware itself. There's nothing pre-existing available online. I've never heard about Elan before starting this project.
It would have certainly been easier to support a more common MCU. Certainly more than half of the effort went into reverse engineering and figuring out the unknowns.
Was hoping for more details about their RISC offering. I briefly looked for an entry-level board and they're either vastly underpowered or way out of a "hobbyist" price range.
The only RISC-V board I'm aware of is the one used in the Pinecil, and it's definitely "underpowered" for a general purpose machine, though it's pretty beefy for a lot of embedded uses: GD32VF103TB 32-bit RV32IMAC RISC-V “Bumblebee Core” @ 108 MHz
Ok, Makes sense. It's the first version of the PineNote anyway so I would wait for the second revision to see if they have improved it. I'll give it another 8 months or a year and see; same goes for the Remarkable.
Looks like a direct competitor to the Remarkable[0] which I own, and is a great device. The Remarkable is also "mostly" open. The main binary running the UI of the system is proprietary, but the Linux system underneath is ssh-able, and the hacking community of the device is pretty active and large [1].
Looking at the announcement page of the PineNote I'm very excited! I'm hoping the open software running on the PineNote will be comparable to the Remarkable, and if it is I'm definitely going to be making the switch.
As a side note, I'm hoping maybe this encourages the Remarkable team to open source their proprietary binary. Their advantage here is definitely the hardware not the software.
I preordered the new Remarkable and ended up having to re-gift it
Tablets used to suck, doubly so when using them with pens. The screens were low res, low brightness, they were slow to respond to pen strokes, battery life sucked, I could go on.
So e-ink digital notebooks made a ton of sense. They solved a lot of these issues in exchange for some limiting general utility.
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Now fast forward to 2021 and a $300 iPad has one of the fastest responding pens in the industry, the screen is bright enough for daylight, it comfortably does a full day of work without charging...
It's an amazing piece of tech with huge amounts of utility, incredible drawing and plotting apps.
I feel like that muddies the waters for digital notebooks.
I know it used to be taboo to say that ("Tablets are tablets and eReaders are eReaders!!!") but I don't know anymore.
If you're someone who will tinker with your Remarkable (or PineNote), I seriously recommend trying an iPad.
The Remarkable still wins for distraction-free work in stock form, but if you're one to tinker for utility, the utility is just there with the iPad, and doesn't sacrifice that much in the writing department
Like I said, for some people it's not an advantage. They want something that is about as "dumb" as a stack of papers and so the iPad is not even an option.
But once you get into people who tinker and want to add features and integrations, like I imagine many PineNote owners might skew, well the iPad does that a lot better.
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It's also just a generally snappier device. In theory being barebones should make the Remarkable faster, but between the limitations of eInk and the low power hardware (which yes, I realize come with some great benefits) picking up the iPad for a quick thought always ended up feeling more fluid.
Also while the Remarkable is better in daylight the current iPads are much more usable than used to be. Meanwhile the iPad is useable in little-to-no light but not the Remarkable.
(side note on screens: pen feel is also a little oversold imo. A random matte screen protector made my $20 Apple Pencil knock off feel 9 tenths as the $99 stylus I got for the Remarkable and improves daylight performance too.
The 1 tenth is down to personal preference, I'd say the iPad felt like a nice pen, the Remarkable like a nice pencil.)
This seems right to me. I had an iPad Pro and it was kinda meh. Basically just collected dust. Got a remarkable 2 and basically use it every day for note taking and sharing between it and my computer. Annotate PDFs, make drawings like in a notebook. It’s so lightweight and hassle free, battery lasts ages, super easy to have alongside my MacBook to get stuff done. I’m super happy with it, haven’t touched my iPad Pro since I got it.
The only thing I would like on there remarkable, which seems to be more of an eink limitation, is the ability to create multiple colored highlights. I find myself drawing a lot of graphs and often need the ability to create different lines that can be distinguished when the graphs get complicated.
But other than that, remarkable has been basically a dream as a replacement for pen and paper (which I didn’t use that often anyways).
Thanks, you just confirmed to me that I want a Remarkable. This looks like it was written by future me.
I need a no-hassle, no-distraction, no-fiddling paper-on-steroids replacement. An iPad just seems like it is too much for this. I like that the Remarkable is "limited" in this respect.
For me it is the distraction free environment. I can deep dive into the material. It also feels a lot like real paper. Having all of my thoughts on various topics, school notes, books I've read, therapy notes, etc.
> but if you're one to tinker for utility, the utility is just there with the iPad
Listen, I think the iPad is a pretty versatile little piece of hardware. The amount of work required to turn it into a decent writing experience is almost comedic, though. I know a few artists who use iPads, and they cannot use it without the basic accessories: matte screen-protector, proprietary $100 pen (of course), battery bank, etc. On the other side of the spectrum, I see Mac users frustrated by how unintuitive their desktop is compared to their iPad.
If you want to fight your hardware to get it to do what you want, get the iPad. If you want to tinker, look elsewhere.
You realize I'm comparing it to my Remarkable right?
The Remarkable a digital notebook, not an alternative to a Wacom tablet.
Like if you think iPad drawing tools are bad... the Remarkable didn't even have layers until the new model
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To get my iPad to where my Remarkable was cost $25:
- $20 pen (which is a proper active pen, not a weird stylus)
- $5 matte screen protector.
That's $325 all in vs $450 minimum for a Remarkable (I think mine was a little cheaper with preordering, but the upgraded pen and case make it a wash)
Battery life without a battery bank has never been problematic. Even forgetting to charge it overnight is fine. It doesn't barely loses any battery in standby, and charges quickly enough.
It sounds like you have an ax to grind against the iPad for other purposes, which is fair. But for an alternative to a Remarkable, there's just not that far to go, it's a low bar that's been set.
Meanwhile, if what you want is a thing that will let you read ebooks and comics while maximizing value per dollar, I recommend Amazon's Kindle Fire HD10. For just over $100 when it's on sale (several times per year), you get a perfectly serviceable Android tablet with a 10.1" 1900x1200 full color screen, a WiFi connection, some storage, and enough processor and memory to run a comic-book reader, an ebook-reader, a web browser to control your music system, and Netflix if for some reason you really want to watch on a tiny portable screen. Add a bluetooth remote control and a stand that mounts to your headboard, and you have the perfect device for reading in bed even when you've got a fever and have difficulty turning pages.
As a gaming device, terrible. As a device to take around the world, mediocre -- it's not built particularly well. As a device to entertain yourself with in one spot, pretty much optimal right now.
Kindle Paperwhite is a much better book reading experience, IMHO.
(For comics, a large non-eInk tablet is probably better. The experience of panning around on small slowly-updating screen was not good for me, and you probably want colors too for comics.)
eInk displays are "in a league of their own" compared LCDs in very specific ways just like LCDs are "in a league of their own" in others.
It's fine if you strongly prefer one, but it's kind of weird to strongly disagree with recommending looking at another option.
Like I said, once upon a time I believed that it wasn't worth trying. On a whim I did, and it turns out it's great.
The point of my comment is to show what changed without prejudice, but apparently that's quite an inflammatory thing. I guess forgot about the "I'd replace every screen in my life with e-ink in a minute" cabal, which does tend to be pretty sure their opinions are The One True Way.
Yeah, I hear you. I got a Remarkable 2, but I just couldn't justify owning one besides my iPad Pro 12.9 inch, so I sent the R2 back. Didn't regret it. As an ereader the iPad Pro is superior in every way, it has a great screen, color, and can display PDFs comfortably. And I don't take handwritten digital notes, I prefer either keyboard or paper.
It's called curiosity. Maybe the R2 would be so good I would start taking notes on it? But the entire interface threw me off, it is just not nice and functional enough (for me).
> As a side note, I'm hoping maybe this encourages the Remarkable team to open source their proprietary binary. Their advantage here is definitely the hardware not the software.
I dunno, reMarkable’s low pen-to-screen latency is an important part of the device’s experience, and they’ve historically mentioned that as a key factor in not open-sourcing it, because they reckon they’ve done some fairly clever stuff in it.
The reMarkable experience is very much a combination of hardware and software.
Seems fairly different from reMarkable; they both use e-ink displays and they both support pens, but I’d say that’s about the extent of the similarity.
reMarkable has focused very tightly on its writing niche to the exclusion of other things, and it shows: the pen-to-screen gap is small, the surface is pleasant to write on (not paper but not awfully far off it and certainly not glass), pen-to-screen latency is finely tuned throughout in the software and hardware, it doesn’t have speakers, the processor isn’t very powerful at all, it has very little memory or storage by current standards, that kind of thing. They’ve done a good job with the experience; I really enjoy using my reMarkable.
Meanwhile, PineNote has a hardened glass surface, is at 7mm thicker than the reMarkable (6.7mm) and reMarkable 2 (4.7mm), has speakers, has lots of storage, has a powerful CPU, has lots of memory, has a frontlight (yay!), supports a pen but in a way that seems like an afterthought, and isn’t concerning itself with the software side of things at all. They’re producing a device for developers to see what they do with it, and maybe the developers will help them turn it into something suitable for normal humans.
IMHO, the huuuuuuuge Achilles' heel of the ReMarkable is no Bluetooth, which means no Bluetooth keyboards.
I want a pen about 10% of the time, for doodles. The rest of the time, I want a keyboard and mouse, or at the very least a keyboard and touchpad, and an e-ink tablet is just a low-power way to achieve that. ReMarkable is sort of famously hackable, but the Bluetooth chip is physically not wired.
PineNote has a sane pathway to being a low-power tablet with both Wacom and captouch input, and proper keyboard support. The only way to attach a keyboard to the RM2 is with a USB OTG dongle and external power pack, which is just bonkers.
I'm keenly aware that PineNote is a few steps beyond a figment of a designer's imagination, but still far far far from a finished product; they only just got the screen working to display a static image. It's not going to do everything the ReMarkable does for a long time yet.
But it's already as useful _to me_ as my RM2 is _to me_. And unlike the RM2, it's going to get better over time. I'm absolutely getting one.
> The 10.1 inch, 3:4 panel has a resolution of 1404×1872 (227 DPI), can display 16 levels of grayscale and is capable of a 60hz refresh rate
60 hz!? This + some paired keyboard + wifi-tethering + SSH (or even a remote session with VS Code!?) would probably be an awesome code-while-in-the-sun-setup.
at 60hz, an electro phoretic display (EPD) or eink will start to degrade very rapidly and consume more power than even a bright OLED panel will.
Eink is efficient only when you are NOT refreshing the screen constantly as it persists the last image drawn to screen, but if you wanna do any kind of scrolling, zooming etc, just use another kind of display tech.
E-Ink displays were declared having a lifespan of 10 million switches per dot: you would have to do a study about how often the average pixel is changed, but if that value were 5s, the lifespan would be "five years of short week 9-to-5" - that is not bad.
I am not sure if A2 mode or Greyscale Update with frequent dot switching is a stress that makes the dots degrade faster (not simply "decrease the life count going towards the max", but "decreasing the max"). I supposed not dramatically.
those switches per dot ratings are fair, but another assumption here is that EPD takes a non-0 amount of time to move the ink particles in the fluid they are suspended in with a magnetic field. when you try to move them more than roughly 8-12hz it already uses more power than a normal screen and if you run it at even higher voltages and speeds the ink particles start to burst and lose shape, leading to a greying out of the panel quite rapidly (within a few months)
60Hz for total, full screen refresh would indeed be a staggering feat, however I don't believe that's what these figures are.
One of the things that makes e-ink so hard in the first place is the multiple and proprietary algorithms for doing partial paints or clears on the screen in the most time-optimal way. I can only assume the 60Hz figure refers to a partial paint on screen, so "60Hz refresh of the line you're drawing", not "60Hz fullscreen video".
That, or it's 60Hz with incredible ghosting, which I believe has been done before.
"Multiple and proprietary algorithms"? It's just an ordinary control problem, how hard can it be to come up with an openly-available solution? Ultimately, quality/latency/etc. will be a matter of how much effort the user will put in calibrating the driver to their screen.
The waveform flash memory file contains temperature look-up tables (LUTs), waveform sequence data, algorithm data, voltage data, controller settings, and manufacturing data. Each AF waveform is specifically adjusted for a particular display module lot. This specification document is for use by E Ink Corporation and their customers under non-disclosure agreements. E Ink Corporation will be responsible for maintaining and controlling specification revisions.
To my knowledge, there are very few reverse engineered waveform files or custom controllers for eink displays, and those that exist have inferior display properties compared to the e-ink provided waveform tables.
Inputs: temperature, particular display's batch characteristics, what you want to draw, what was drawn on the display in the past, available timing options for how long you can leave gate open for each row, vcom voltage, other voltages (there are 4), how long since last full refresh clear, ...
It's not so much of a problem to have a nice output if you can always do a full screen clear and then paint your image. But that's quite power intensive thing to do and disruptive to the user.
Other than that, with no prior knowledge or know how from eInk, you'll be struggling with previous image reappearing from the dead in parts of the display even after "full screen clear" after a few updates, ghosting, grayscale support, and crap like that.
And you'll have to do all the calculations in real-enough time on a CPU so that you can keep up with raw refresh rate requirements (85Hz). On this high a resolution it will probably be quite a lot of work, and you'll need to code everything up in NEON C intrinsics or assembly.
So while it may be an ordinary control problem, it will be a bit of a struggle. I'm not aware of anyone going this deep. Most of the semi-open implementations are using proprietary waveform data/violating GPL (Pocketbook) with a closed source kernel driver/or hiding the complexity in the HW controller.
It will certainly be interesting to watch how will people deal with this, because it will need a unique intersection of knowledge and dedication.
I follow EPDiy, a project to drive ED097OC4, ED060SC4 and ED097TC2 displays with an ESP32 [0]. While I’m not going to shrug off Valentin’s work as trivial, it doesn’t seem like magic. The hype around the difficulty driving e-ink displays appears over-hyped.
There may be many details to get it perfect, but displaying a basic (pretty good!) image does seem to be quite doable.
eInk displays have 85-90Hz refresh rate. Just look up the datasheets.
Though it does not mean the same thing it does for LCD displays. It just means you can stuff raw data to the display at that rate. Pixels are sticky so you're either driving them towards white or black or not at all (individually). And you may need to drive them multiple times (or for different periods of time), to get the correct shade of gray, or whatever.
So you still need several full scans to perform what user would think of as a screen update.
so, in this case, a classic E-Ink display - not a miracle
(where "miracle" may be some technology similar of that of MIT/Taiwan E-Ink, but not quite the same, with some boosted feats but compromises elsewhere).
That's just some arbitrary number. :) Unless refresh is clearly defined, there's not much point throwing around arbitrary numbers.
450ms may be minimal time for a screen clear + update, just by the looks of it. That is the screen blinking black/white to clear the screen and then painting the final image. That's not something that will be happening all the time...
I’m a bit underwhelmed by the price. This costs as much as the current-gen Remarkable, with more power, but likely worse build quality and software and only slightly higher hackability.
That said I’m still excited for cool e-ink applications, like finally an optimized browser. Also: Competition to those Onyx devices with Android apps running through WayDroid (should be possible on the Remarkable, but I haven’t seen anyone try it).
… which raises an interesting point. Will these things come with a working Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) for modern Wayland compositors to run?
Looks cheaper than remarkable. For me (UK) it is £399 + £99 for a pen (!) which is in fact a consumable. If I want a book-cover type thing, that’s another £99. And it’s GBP not USD. So that’s probably altogether about 50% cheaper?
I love the idea of remarkable, but cant justify £600 spend on a better notebook.
The supernote may be of interest, the pen nibs don't need replacing.
No idea how it compares to the RM2, a lot of people seem to rate it favourably but very few people have owned both so I don't know if thats just buy in hype. Theres a few youtube comparisons, but I have no intention of watching a 45 minute video that will end with "its up to you".
Oh, this is exciting. The performance and latency is a huge variable though.
For a lot of these experimental hacker-friendly devices, I'm willing to tolerate a lot of compromises. Even here, the software, the out-of-the-box experience isn't really that important to me. Arguably, you can get away with even more compromise on a device like this than on something like the Pinephone. But it has to have amazing pen performance, or it's just not worth working with. Everything else except that is either fixable or something that probably isn't getting in the way of the core point of the device.
IMO Remarkable got this right -- their software support is by many metrics quite bad (although I guess it's slowly started to improve). Their device handles PDFs kind of poorly from what I can tell. It's expensive. The interface seems slower and more laggy than many other EReaders. But none of that really matters, what matters is they have arguably the best pen latency and physical texturing on the E-ink market, and that writing on the device feels good.
So the same thing applies here: the price seems completely reasonable to me, I have no issues with a $400 price tag. I'd pay $600, the price isn't the issue. But I need to see videos and testimonial that the pen latency isn't just "acceptable", but that it's really good. Otherwise it's not even worth $100.
Writing experience is one of those things where once you get used to a lack of latency/offset, and used to a more accurate feel, it gets progressively harder and harder to go back to anything that's worse.
The thing is, the ReMarkable isn't doing anything special hardware-wise to achieve that latency, as they're based on NXP reference designs with the same integrated EPD every other E-ink device is using (besides the Android-based devices, of course). The magic is essentially that they have nothing running on the device except a Qt app which writes directly to the framebuffer, and they have an extremely simplified framebuffer driver that allows the Qt app to implement the complex parts of updating an E-ink screen in userspace. The Wacom input is standard, the other kernel bits are standard, and they're even running systemd.
That's really positive if that's the case -- I was under the impression that some of this had to do with the hardware itself.
At the very least though, aren't they are doing some special stuff with how they mount the screen and where they're sourcing their plastic texture cover from? I thought that offset was one of the big reasons they didn't have a backlight -- which the Pinenote will have I think.
But this makes me feel a lot more confident about the PineNote if most of the latency at least comes down to framebuffer access.
Yeah - the big advantage they have is that they're not running Android. A greatly simplified and optimized stack is really all you need to get stupidly fast black<->white updates to small eink regions, and that fits absolutely perfectly with all their tools[1] and for writing purposes. It takes a fairly impressive effort and attention to detail to get to the "whole package" they have, but it's nothing that can't be replicated on other standard hardware.
[1]: They're all pure black and white and don't change once drawn (no smoothing a frame later), e.g. the pencil has varying fine texture but notably it does not use any actual grays for lighter shading - just pure-black texture density. Even the "gray" mode for tools is just a 50% black/white checkerboard regardless of zoom level, and tbh it looks sorta weird and shimmery because of it. Everything is relentlessly optimized for rendering speed. When you get into true grays like with text in ebooks, the page-turns are normal for e-ink, though it has a respectably quick "gesture -> start transition" time... especially if you compare to cheaper devices. Some of those can lag for a second or more before they respond. That has nothing to do with eink (and everything to do with bad optimization) and it contributes a ton to the slow feel of eink devices.
I’ve definitely come to appreciate the way in which straight black and white can achieve better results on an e-paper display than greys.
Actually it does use real grey in one place: the highlighter. While you draw, it renders in chequered black and white like tools in grey, except that where it overlaps existing black-and-white chequering it turns it into solid black so you can see what you’re doing, and then it redraws the full highlighted area afterwards, with highlighting-on-white being true grey, and highlighting-on-faux-grey becoming, I think (don’t have a microscope or sufficiently capable macro lens handy, and ghosting makes it hard to be sure anyway) darker-faux-grey, chequered black and light grey.
If you go using the highlighter extensively as part of drawing, you rapidly discover just how awful the ghosting is until you can trigger a full redraw, which admittedly happens more often once actual greys are in use.
reMarkable also uses true greys in antialiasing of its own UI icons and text.
Yep, good point on the highlighter! I forgot that one. When you overlap grays and layers of highlighter (as it gets darker with each layer... maybe in 1/8ths?), I suspect it's just doing a gray/black checkerboard - I can't tell for sure with one or two layers of highlighter, but it's pretty clear to me on the third layer that there are gray pixels between the black pixels.
And yeah, the highlighter's ghosting can get pretty extreme :) Since it clears up with a back/forward page turn I think it's a reasonable tradeoff... but it does serve as an interactive example of how much eink struggles with gray<->grey transition accuracy, which is why anti-aliased text is so much of a problem after a couple pages on literally every device.
It absolutely goes beyond just having the right hardware for pen optimization. I have an old rockchip based eink tablet from onyx here. Yes it's Android based but there are a few interesting things to observe here:
1. Onyx provides a few libraries that give access to a special surfaceview for pen input.
2. The pen drawing latency is completely different between this special input view and and any other native Android drawing app.
3. When sharing the screen from the tablet the surfaceview drawn lines have a delay from when they were drawn to when they should up on the shared screen (this is different from the network latency, it seems like the lines on an optimized surfaceview are drawn on screen before the OS sees it)
4. Remarkable has had its fair share of straight line aliasing problems as well.
5. Even more interesting is that there is a preliminary update to android 9 for the old onyx device and the same surfaceview has a lot of issues with initiating the drawing.
That said this device looks fantastic. I've been happily using the onyx devices but I'm glad I finally get a chance to improve the parts that bother me or collaborate with others that do.
EDIT: two things I am a bit unclear about is:
1. I wish the SoC was better. This is comparable to an snapdragon 450. It doesn't really matter for an SBC but for a tablet it would be nice to have something better. I'd gladly pay more.
2. At some point there were extra chips used for the display refresh. Is that nowadays part of the display assembly?
> At some point there were extra chips used for the display refresh. Is that nowadays part of the display assembly?
Yep, E-Ink has moved to an in-display EPD that accepts a more traditional framebuffer and leaves it up to the driver/userspace to perform the temperature/waveform/partial-update logic. This is partially why it's been so difficult to reverse-engineer the ReMarkable 2 display, because the closed-source ReMarkable app now owns the framebuffer device and handles absolutely everything related to refresh.
Short answer, you don't, you kind of force your brain to accept it. The writing experience on a tablet will (as far as I can tell) always be an inferior experience to writing on paper. It's not just latency, there are a thousand things that are almost impossible to replicate: jitter, texture, ink flow, pen nib texture/shape, offset, etc, etc.
But the other benefits -- instant digitizing, easier referencing, the ability to fully erase (I use a pen when I take physical notes, I refuse to take notes in pencil), layers/resizing/cropping, quick document transfers, the ability to quickly mark up PDFs or digital content, the ability to merge into my other notetaking/bookmarking systems -- are often high enough that it's worthwhile (at least in some situations).
So imagine that there are a series of thresholds for digital note-taking:
A) Take notes physically, print and re-scan PDFs/images that need to be annotated
B) Take notes physically, digitally mark up stuff that would otherwise need to be printed/scanned
C) take a mixture of physical/digital notes depending on context/mood, do any markup digitally
D) most notetaking is digital
Hitting each threshold of usage requires the writing experience to progressively stink less. This is different for everyone, it comes down to how much you can tolerate. With the older tablets I grew up with, I couldn't have forced myself to hit something like threshold C. IMO it's not really that you get used to the higher latency, it's more that you learn to force your brain to deal with it to get at the other benefits, and the better the experience the more that it becomes possible to do that.
That's for comparing digital notes to paper though. The different problem with comparing digital notetaking devices directly to each other is that once you're at a threshold where you expect a certain kind of experience, it's hard to go backwards. Every time the experience gets better, it's like a breath of fresh air, it makes it easier to actually use the device.
If my notetaking is at threshold C, and you give me a device that's only good enough for threshold B, then I'm going back to threshold B -- I can't force myself to pretend it's good enough for threshold C, no matter what your other platform features are. More likely, I won't even use the device at all, because I know threshold C exists, and the only reason I tolerate the current problems with texture/latency/offset/jitter/etc at all is because it's physically impossible for me to get a device that has lower latency.
In the digital vs physical debate, a digital medium with worse texture, offset, latency, and "flow" still has upsides over a physical medium. But if you compare two digital mediums, it's hard to tell what upside would would ever be big enough to justify using one with a worse experience. Tolerating any latency at all needs to come with some kind of wild benefit like "you can go get your printer recycled and never print another document ever again." There are some exceptions, but most platform-distinguishing features aren't big enough or important enough to overcome an inferior writing experience.
Waveshare's 10.3" E-Ink raw display alone costs ~200 USD, For extra input, compute and most of all open Linux platform extra 100 USD seems very reasonable as with all other Pine64 products.
Right, but I'm not really buying a Pinenote machine to strip it for parts. It's possible to build something that's worth less than its component parts.
The extra input, compute, etc... don't really matter if they don't work well together. My point was that optimizing for those things working well together is more important than trying to minimize the price tag. If it can be turned into a good notetaking device, and it's running an Open Linux distro, then $400 is completely reasonable, it's honestly pretty cheap. They could go higher.
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That being said, on reflection I probably could get some use out of a Linux-enabled remote e-ink monitor on its own. Maybe just as a wall mounted display for reminders/notes? People have retrofitted other tablets to support that, but being based on Linux and supporting wifi/bluetooth is a real selling point. But I'm just not certain I could get $200 (or even $100) worth of use out of that. Maybe $100?
Another way of looking at this is that even by itself, a 10.3" E-Ink raw display may not actually be worth $200 to most users, and it really only justifies its cost when it's combined with other hardware and drivers to make a compelling reader/notetaker.
Obviously other people will have different uses in mind and prices they would be willing to pay, but I'm thinking about "what functionality does this enable that would be worth $100/200 to get." If I can't come up with an answer to that question, then the raw hardware cost is kind of irrelevant to me, since I'm not buying a device in order to scalp parts, I want to actually use it.
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I guess also to be fair, there's a component to this of just paying Pine64 as much money as possible and buying all of their products to encourage them to keep working on the Linux ecosystem, and to encourage hackers to build on top of the devices. And that is also completely reasonable, and just the general attention from the Linux community towards E-ink displays and notetaking might be worth $100 regardless of anything else.
But I think that's a separate thing from "what is the device itself worth on its own?"
Seeing cypress touch controller used in PineNote... Mainline cyttsp4 driver is buggy, incomplete, sucks and there are no docs for the touch controller. You can't even do calibration with the mainline driver, which is necessary to have a usable touchscreen.
The vendor dropped the ball on that driver right after getting it mainline years ago - they didn't touch it ever since. It doesn't even support device tree.
So there's gonna be some pain, for whoever will want to get that thing working mainline.
Choosing HW components which are not supported in mainline Linux or don't even have an upstreamable driver ready is the main criticism I have, too.
I wish there was a way to have the hardware designed so that is works from day one with a recent Linux kernel instead of the mess with the PinePhone: the WiFi driver is of such a bad quality that it's not upstreamed, and of course totally buggy. Also, a similar situation can also be found with the device firmware: both the USB controller and the modem don't have a good vendor firmware and the community needs to debug this stuff - I wish only known-to-be-working components get selected in the first place.
Unrefined. Low build quality — remember when one of their product pages effectively said, “Don’t buy this if you can’t handle a couple dead pixels.” Their goal is to ship as much stuff as possible and then leave it up to the “community” to improve the software while the hardware is at-best third-rate.
Result is a bunch of releases people want to like but never measure up. Best reviews you’ll see are like, “It’s passable for the price if you can live with…”
I've found the PineTime to be extremely well-built and comparable to the original Fitbit Versa in terms of hardware quality. No dead pixels. For $27 plus shipping, it was an excellent deal.
For customers who are looking for a buying experience similar to traditional retail stores, Pine64 previously announced that they would launch online Pine stores selling products with longer warranties and broader customer support at a higher price point:
> The PineNote is one of, if not the, most powerful e-ink device available on the market. It shares in much of the Quartz64’s pedigree, sporting the same RK3566 quad-core A55 SoC paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage.
There's so much opportunity in the e-ink space just waiting for something to crack open. E-ink devices have felt so much like the TI-84 of the tablet world, or inkjet printers 25 years ago - overpriced and underpowered.
There's a lot of work ahead for the Pine community to get to performance on par with existing e-ink tablets. Remarkable's setting the example now, which is frankly quite an achievement on two 1.2GHz cores with 1GB RAM. Pine's twice as many, ~50% faster cores, with 4x the RAM should help.
reMarkable 1 is 1GHz single-core with 512MB of RAM, and that’s entirely sufficient for what it’s primarily designed for, writing. PDF rendering is the main thing that can be slow, agonisingly so in some cases. I imagine that’s the main reason why they boosted reMarkable 2 to dual-core 1.2GHz and 1GB of RAM. (It wasn’t for things like startup time—https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jfgpqw/rm... shows both 1 and 2 taking about 20 seconds, with 2 actually the slower by a second or so.)
Quad-core 1.8–2GHz and 4GB of RAM is, if used fairly sensibly, massive overkill for most purposes e-paper has been used for so far, with image-heavy PDFs being the most likely exception (incidentally, I’m not sure if such rendering can be parallelised or not). It’s easily enough to run full desktop environment stuff. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Screen latency is certainly the key to the whole puzzle.
They say they're deciding between plasma mobile and a customized full plasma as an interface so maybe hopefully they can actually provide a low-latency input layer which seems hard to do on Android.
This is really interesting. I was searching for something like that: big screen, no cloud or other services dependency, FOSS, nice price, etc. I just want to see its performance when dealing with old books and magazines that are 100% scanned graphics with no OCR, and/or PDFs with complex diagrams, schematics etc. Those usually bring to knees the less powerful readers and would probably require some serious CPU power along with more RAM and storage. It would also be nice if the software could sync with a NFS or SMB/CIFS local (or remote via VPN?) server plus local caching so users can have their entire library at hand without using USB keys or SD cards.
Also please, add one 3.5 headphone jack if it's not already there (from the article it seems not).
And the PinePhone keyboard also looks gorgeous!
The 5th gen iPod Touch (and 6th and 7th) is only 6.1 mm thick, so while I don't think just because Apple can pull it off Pine64 should be able to also, it seems like there might physically be enough space. I was going to note that the 5th gen iPod Touch is from 2012, but then it feels like much of the miniaturisation progress since then has involved removing the jack. Agree that it's probably not easy though.
I would kind of like Pine to focus on the supply chain for their current products. I’ve been looking to buy a pinebook for a while, but it’s been out of stock, or reserved for some kind of thing or another for a while now.
That’s not an uncommon occurrence when landing on one of their product pages.
If I recall correctly, their production has been hurt by the pandemic just when they were starting to deliver some of their most wanted products. Many businesses were hurt as well, but they're a lot smaller and will likely require more time.
They're also selling small quantities at low prices, which translates in lower margins. That's probably the reason they cant expose themselves with the risks of big volume productions. To me it's just a matter of time, hopefully short.
Surprised no one mentions the Dasung not-eReader, a shockingly capable eInk device -- it doubles as a monitor, both the 7.8" and the 10.3" sized version. It's very expensive though :( I wonder whether the PineNote could add a video input as well...
DHL sent all PinePhones to NZ, so we had to reship all orders (sorry for the delay)
DHL is the worst shipper I have ever used and the only thing they're good for is pissing off your customers. The savings aren't worth it when you start being sent videos of them bending cardboard poster tubes in half so they can shove them into mailboxes.
Long time e-ink hacker. This is cheerful news.
I'm a paper-fiend and adore my reMarkable 2 as a paper replacement. But let's get down to brass tacks.
Points to the PineNote vs. reMarkable 2:
1. PineNote has 128GB storage whereas RM2 has 8GB.
2. PineNote has frontlit eink display. RM2 has no illumination. (This is a big one.)
3. PineNote has speakers + mic. RM2 does not.
Points to the RM2 vs. PineNote:
1. reMarkable 2 is 4.7mm thin vs. PineNote "just over 7mm thick." I know it sounds like "spec wars," but this is a big deal, to me at least. My dream is an electronic index card, bendable and everything. 7mm is... smartphone and iPad territory. It's not bad, but it's not great. The promise of e-ink is that it is gloriously thin, like 65lb cardstock.
2. reMarkable 2 has the nice frosted tempered glass back. PineNote has plastic back with what looks like a... generous taper to squeeze the 7mm in.
3. Subjective, but the PineNote puts the pen at the top. I think the emergent universal style of magnetically docking the pen on the side is better. It's a little more friendly for left-handed users as they can always flip the pad and reorient it in software. With the pen at the top, now they have to reach for the bottom. If you rest the pad in your lap, now the pen becomes disconnected.
The reMarkable software is very good, albeit closed. I have struggled to build a decent e-ink focused desktop environment on my hacked Kindle. Pine will require a strong effort to build a first-class UX.
All said, as a hacker, I'd go for the PineNote in a heartbeat.
e-ink tablets are still somewhat future tech, so Joe and Jane Consumer would be better served by an iPad, or reMarkable 2 if they're feeling brave. The UX makes (and breaks) it.
I won't go into the iPad vs. eink discussion except to say I have an iPad Pro + Pencil for non-handwriting tasks. Writing on glass is fatiguing. I will check out the screen covers that give more paper tooth.
It would be great to see aggressive optimization on thinness in the next generation. Things can be open, and thin.
If you're new to the e-ink tablet scene, these price points are unbelievable compared with the state of the art 10-15 years ago. Don't think of them as iPads or Surfaces. It's different tech, not for everyone. But if you're a handwriter or have your nose in PDFs all day, it's a game-changer.
Just to point out that this isn't ready as a consumer device quite yet. This is from down the page:
> We’re seeing a lot of excitement and “shut up and take my money, I’ll throw out my other e-ink devices tomorrow!” responses to this post, but remember that we are a community of developers first and foremost. If you’re looking to buy a PineNote in the first batch, you must expect to write software for it, not to write notes on it. The software shipping from the factory for the first batch will not be suitable for taking notes, reading e-books, or writing your dissertation. It may not even boot to a graphical environment. However, we are excited for what you’ll create with this device and we’re ready to take the journey with you. We’ll be posting more updates on software progress on this blog as they come in.
I really wish there was a basic, cheap e-ink tablet on the market. Basic and cheap. We have basic but not cheap.
AFAIK e-ink isn’t pricey to make, it’s just that the E-ink company is a monopoly so they jack up the price. Which is a shame, because i would buy an e-ink if they weren’t so expensive.
Monopoly and patents, I believe. So yes, it's technically not expensive to make, but licensing. R&D costs money, take that to mean what you want. Unfortunately the laws in our world have not caught up with technology changes.
> Monopoly and patents, I believe. So yes, it's technically not expensive to make, but licensing. R&D costs money, take that to mean what you want. Unfortunately the laws in our world have not caught up with technology changes.
What monopoly? There's no monopoly on bistable displays or even electrophoretic displays. What patents? Please try to be specific. I work in the display industry. The only place I hear stuff like what you're saying is on HN, which previously got picked up by Boing Boing and then blogs and then comments on HN which referenced those blogs. Surely, if this patent hell or monopoly hell was true we would have heard about it. Surely I would have heard about this problem from colleagues, coworkers or even gossip at conferences. Could you elaborate on your claim ? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this. Hopefully this time I can get a positive data point where I can learn something unlike what I got the last time I tried to ask about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27980391
What is unsatisfactory about the patents that other commenters have repeatedly pointed out to you, and that obviously cover electrophoretic display technologies and manufacturing methods?
Perhaps these are avoidable, but could you elaborate how, as someone who works in the display industry?
For reference, here are a few more, easily found via Google Patents:
> What is unsatisfactory about the patents that other commenters have repeatedly pointed out to you
The same thing that I said in my past replies. See below.
"
And I have to point out that just googling for E Ink patents doesn't help us understand what point you are making. It is the equivalent of me claiming that Microsoft is blocking operating system progress and then justifying it by giving you a set of Microsoft patents. I hope the analogy is clear.
"
> Perhaps these are avoidable, but could you elaborate how, as someone who works in the display industry?
This is the equivalent of someone claiming "patents are blocking progress" and then when I ask "why is that?", they reply "elaborate how patents are not blocking progress".
so i want to know how much of this price is licensing costs? suppose today the e-ink patent goes public, is free to use, how much of a price delta can we see?
> so i want to know how much of this price is licensing costs? suppose today the e-ink patent goes public, is free to use, how much of a price delta can we see?
What licensing cost? Who is licensing what from E Ink? What patent? Please be specific. I work in the display industry. See my comment history for how many times I've asked this question and also have a look at the replies people give. So far, I've never found a satisfying answer. I'm starting to think people who say this stuff don't actually have a clue about the display industry, or are unwilling to acknowledge things like how volume is the main determinant of price in the industry today.
Goes over it in more depth. If such NDA's exist it would be hard to tell, but certainly we can see various things that suggest that those NDAs are real.
Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays? Technology wise they're very similar, and enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale.
It does not. You can see in that thread, I had asked there as well and the throwaway account never responded to me. I'm pretty sure it is fake as that narrative describes things like "strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays" which would cause uproar in the display industry and all of us would have heard of it.
> Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays?
Volume. Volume. Volume. The typical MOQ for an LCD order would be in the tens of millions of units per quarter. Even the highest volume E Ink panel presumably the one in Kindle, would be at best several million a year.
> Technology wise they're very similar
No, they are not. Electrophoretic displays are very different than LCDs which are again very different than OLED.
> enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale.
In order to reach lower prices, you have to reach higher volumes so that you get closer to the bare materials cost. If you're only selling a few million displays per year, you'll never achieve sufficient volume to justify building a fully custom production line in order to reach the asymptote of materials cost.
I am mostly all-in on Apples ecosystem because I've been so continuously disappointed by the fragmentation on the Android ecosystem, and this is something that's seriously giving me a real hit of excitement!
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