Pine64's 'PineNote' E-Ink Tablet Now Available for $399 for Developers

"The PineNote is a tablet with a 10.1 inch grayscale E Ink display and pen support," reports Liliputing.

"It's designed to be a hackable, Linux-friendly device and it's one of the latest products from the makers of the PinePhone and PineBook line of devices." First introduced last summer, the PineNote began shipping to developers in limited quantities in December. Now it's available for anyone to purchase for $399 — no invitation required. But it's probably only a good idea to buy one if you're a developer or very early adopter because there's very little software available for the PineNote so far. At this point, Pine64 is shipping the PineNote without an operating system installed. It will have only a bootloader, allowing developers and enthusiasts to load their own software... [D]evelopers have already made some progress in getting builds Alpine and Debian Linux to run on the E Ink slate, and according to Pine64, there are ports for NixOS and other operating systems on the way.

There's already a partially working display driver, but it's still a work in progress. The goal is to allow developers to port mainline Linux operating systems and applications to play well with a monochrome display with a slow refresh rate. Developers have also figured out how to enable support PineNote's touchscreen, audio playback, and USB port, making it possible to use USB keyboards, storage devices, and other peripherals.

I wouldn't mind this.

[bjwest]

I would use this for reading books and things like that, but I highly doubt Amazon will port their Kindle app over.

Re:

[eseri1111]

You can always convert files. It could run Calibre, for example.

Re:

[caseih]

There are already a few Android tablets on the market with E-Ink screens that you could install the Kindle app on. But if all you want to do is read Kindle books, Amazon sells a dedicated device that works quite well for that!

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[bjwest]

Yes, I have a Kindle Paperwhite, but I abhor the small screen, limited sorting and constant trying to sell me books I'm not interested in, but I also can't read on a tablet for extended periods at night when I usually read.

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[caseih]

Well like I said, there are a few Android tablets on the market with *e-ink* screens, in a larger form factor than Kindles. However I suspect the Kindle app would still try to sell you books you're not interested in.

Kindle itself was once available in a large form factor, but there was no demand for it. Probably the idea of reading in bed holding a large slate over ones chest didn't sound great to a lot of Kindle users.

I still run my old Kindle 3s. They never try to sell me anything, and I hacked them lon

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I wouldn't mind this.

[caseih]

There are several modes that the e-ink drivers can work in that can get faster refresh rates at the expense of some ghosting and other artifacts. I believe the PineNote does support these other refresh modes, although I'm not sure how you interface with the display, whether there's a wayland driver for it, or if you have to use some kind of specialized drawing API.

I used to have a Yotaphone 2 which had a color screen on one side and an e-ink screen on the other side. You could put the regular android display on it and by choosing a suitable refresh mode you could actually almost watch video on it (maybe 10 fps). Certainly it refreshed fast enough to swipe and interact with apps normally. I really miss that phone, but with two fragile screens it didn't survive more than a year in my pocket. But I loved using it outside in the bright sunlight.

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[angel'o'sphere]

The kindle app is one of the worst ebook readers.
Bottom line I always would by DRM free *.epub books.

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[BardBollocks]

Fuck DRM.

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[smi.james.th]

The cloud-based reader is now working on mobile browsers. You don’t need to have an app installed.

Beware, it doesn't work

[eseri1111]

The notebook/tablet can't do anything as of now, it's just meant for developers to see what they can do with it. An e-ink notebook/tablet sounds awesome though, it's just what I need, at least. A computer that can run for whole days of use, as you should know, e-ink readers make batteries last incredibly long - so you can travel or go around with it for intense note-taking or reading, for example.

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[nospam007]

"The notebook/tablet can't do anything as of now, it's just meant for developers to see what they can do with it."

If it can run PDFs that should do it for millions of people.

Re: Beware, it doesn't work

[IdanceNmyCar]

No OS, so that eliminates what 95% of the population?

Then again you might get a nice side business going pre loading these and adding a mark up.

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[ArchieBunker]

PDFs look like garbage on e-ink displays. Markup files like mobi or epub are much easier to read.

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[unrealmp3]

It depends of the physical display size and the page size of the PDF. I personally receive many PDFs that I need to reed at work and they're not available in another format. If I can grab a Letter/A4 sized eReader that'd make those document much easier to read that on a regular computer display, otherwise the alternative would be to kill trees and print it out which would be a huge waste.

Re: Beware, it doesn't work

[Miamicanes]

Another nice thing about A4 aspect ratio... if it's sufficiently large & high-resolution, you can display two 8.5x11 pages side by side in 2-up rotated orientation with a lot less wasted space lost to margins than you'd get from a display with the aspect ratio of 8.5x11 or 11x14.

I actually bought a few reams of A4 paper for printing PRECISELY because 2-up 8.5x11 looks so much better on A4 than on either standard US size for paper.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[angel'o'sphere]

Then you probably had a faulty PDF?

I have half a dozen e-ink readers, and PDFs are all just fine.

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[itsme1234]

If it can run PDFs that should do it for millions of people.

On a 16 Gray-scale 10" display? No, it's literally the worst possible format from the mainstream ones. For small-ish E-Ink displays you don't need something graphical that doesn't support re-flow, you just need basically text; that it has a tiny more (meta)data in it like boldface for something or titles/chapters or similar fancies it's fine of course, but everything else but plain text will look like the 50th generation of a black and white copy f

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[nospam007]

"On a 16 Gray-scale 10" display?"

How about 10 Gray-scale on a 16" display? :-)

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[ChunderDownunder]

A4 PDFs are useless on my XGA 6" e-reader but the idea of a bigger 1404 x 1872 screen is it shouldn't need re-flow.

I could see this being useful in reading academic papers where the output device is still assumed to be a black and white laser printer.

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[Rhipf]

e-ink devices have good battery life because the screen only needs power to refresh the screen. This works great for e-readers or to view static websites and read email. If you are trying to use an e-ink screen to run videos or highly interactive programs then the battery life will not be as great. Also, e-ink screens don't have great refresh rates so content that needs a high refresh rate probably won't be very enjoyable on e-ink based devices.

Sailing charts

[RoccamOccam]

I've always wanted a good e-ink display to be used for navigation charts when sailing (although color support would be helpful). This might be worth looking at.

We have tablets

[wakeboarder]

I'm stoked to buy a eink device, until I see the price. At 400$ I could buy a cheap tablet, or just use the 400$ to buy a better tablet if I was going to buy both a tablet and eink device.

Another thing is most people could buy enough paper products to last a lifetime for less than 50$, which isn't environmentally friendly, but building electronics is probably worse.

I'm hoping that someone will bring the price lower than 100$

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[CaptQuark]

With the low end of a ream of paper costing about $5, you could buy about 10 reams or 5000 pieces of paper for your $50.

Last year I read about 72 e-books. If I guesstimate about 8 book-pages per sheet of paper and 200 pages per book, that means I read the equivalent of about 2000 sheets of paper. Round up the cost of toner and paper to about $25 per year to print the equivalent pages and your ROI is only about two years for the paper products, five years if you include the cost of the e-reader.

But I agree

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[q4Fry]

Point me to the "better E-Ink tablet" you were going to buy for $400.

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[wakeboarder]

What I'm saying is if I were going to buy a regular tablet AND an e ink tablet, I could buy a higher end tablet for the same price (I could buy an ipad and an e-ink tablet OR an ipad pro, then I carry one less thing around with me).

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[q4Fry]

iPad Pro [apple.com]
The ultimate iPad experience.

Starting at $799

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[wakeboarder]

Ok let me explain this to you in numbers since you seem to be struggling with this:
You have 800$, you can buy a regular ipad (~400$) and an e-ink display (400$)
or you could buy an iPad Pro (800$).

Re:

[q4Fry]

Okay. I got you now. Thanks for spelling it out. I wasn't getting the "this is an extra $400" you apparently intended.

What I want with e-ink:

[davidwr]

I want a "normal" phone/tablet/laptop that has an "e-ink" mode that turns on when the OS puts the screen to sleep.

The "e-ink" mode would be a limited-color or even just 1-bit-per-pixel black-and-white version of what was last on the screen, or an "out of battery" message if the battery is all but dead.

This way, I could read an e-book using my regular device, but have the computer put the screen or entire system to sleep between pages, saving battery.

Remember the Noteslate?

[thatkid_2002]

Years ago there was a product in development called the noteslate. I really liked how (the design, at least) had everything you could want for a well-focused writing/drawing experince. It was like paper + digitised features, not paper + a-whole-fucking-operating-system. I believe despite a lot of promises the noteslate has ultimately been vapourware.

The hardware seems like massive overkill in terms of processing and memory - which I think will unfortunately encourage development in a direction that does not

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[q4Fry]

It does indeed remind me of the Noteslate. But that was vaporware. Pine has a pretty good track record of doing what they say they're going to do. This tablet also implements the Wacom APIs, so you can use it as a peripheral for your Photoshopping.

Re: Remember the Noteslate?

[Miamicanes]

The problem is, e-reading is a perfect example of something that needs really fast hardware that spends 99% of its time asleep. The rendered page might be static, but rendering 8" x 10" at 300ppi in 8-bit grayscale with hinted anti-aliasing, or 1200ppi with 1-bit halftone-emulating grayscale, at a speed fast enough to be perceived as 'instantaneous', is surprisingly demanding.

Even if you pre-render offline to static page bitmaps, 8x10 inches @ 1200ppi requires shoveling around 120 megabits. "Big deal," you

Re: Remember the Noteslate?

[Miamicanes]

Incidentally, e-ink displays have slow updates, but their performance could be MASSIVELY improved by simply improving their controller designs to work in parallel. Simply dividing the screen in half & having two controllers updating it in parallel cuts update times in half (think: 1990s DSTN displays). It takes more power, but because it's a "run to idle" task, it's more of an instantaneous-power draw than a sustained-power draw. I think Sony actually DOES this with their e-ink tablets. I think their ~

What is it good for ?

[bsdetector101]

What is it good for ? Never heard of it and how does it compare to an iPad ? No where near capable to functions ?