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I tried searching and came to the conclusion this does not exist. I would like a tablet with the following features:
- Easy to install (or pre-installed) LineageOS, or some other open source OS that doesnt require any fighting with bloatware or control over updates (please give your opinion on what is best)
- Easy to open up and repair (and mod) the device hardware myself without any special tools (ie, standard electronics screwdrivers, etc)
- Matte screen with dynamic range that allows the screen to be bright enough to use in the sun but dark enough to use while falling asleep.
I don't plan on using it for anything besides basic web browsing and pdf reading, so it should be cheap. However, price is no object if it has those features. There was one other soft criteria but it sounded like an ad so I removed it... See if you can guess.
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Ask the Community: In the Market for a Modern Tablet
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You love peace.
(Score: 1) by ptman on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:27PM (14 children)
e-Ink screens are very readable in the sun. Do you need color for web browsing? I have a reMarkable e-Ink tablet, but I know there are android alternatives. The reMarkable does not have a web browser, but the android ones do. E.g. The Onyx ones: https://onyxboox.com/product#actual [onyxboox.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:33PM (1 child)
To submitter: Was the soft criteria "long battery life"?
ptman: E-ink is going to be pretty bad for both web browsing and PDFs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:51PM
I actually don't care much about battery life since it wont really be leaving the house. The soft criteria was actually having an amd cpu, which I wanted to try out. But that isn't so important.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:43PM (8 children)
This isn't a bad idea actually... I check a couple that run android, they only have 512 MB RAM. So I don't think the web browsing experience would be very pleasant.
https://onyxboox.com/boox_darwin3 [onyxboox.com]
Perhaps something like this (2 GB RAM) would be better (a little pricey though):
https://onyxboox.com/boox_max2 [onyxboox.com]
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077GVLMJN/ref=psdc_2642129011_t1_B074DYHF4V [amazon.com]
Web browsing in black and white seems like it would be a bit strange though. Have you tried it?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:50PM (4 children)
Black and white isn't the biggest problem. It's the slow refresh rate/sluggishness. I have used the web browser on a Kindle and it was tedious.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:56PM (2 children)
You're saying that is a property of the screen? They are claiming the Onyx boox max 2 can be used as a monitor, so perhaps that problem has been overcome?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)
It's not like there was ever anything stopping a company from adding an HDMI port to their e-reader.
The "SNOW Field" they mention might improve refresh rate slightly, and the quad core + RAM could help with loading detailed PDFs (less lag). But the refresh rate is still going to be very low.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Disadvantages [wikipedia.org]
Here's a recent e-ink "monitor" [digitaltrends.com].
The low refresh rate is a property of most e-ink technologies. High refresh rate e-ink screens haven't made it out of the lab, to my knowledge, although they have been hyping them up for years [e-ink-info.com].
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:33PM
I recall seeing an early Kindle software-modded to play video fast enough to maintain the illusion of motion. I suppose it's possible it was actually a hardware mod posing as a software mod, but it didn't have that hoax vibe to it (and a hardware mod would have been worth boasting about in it's own right)
Of course that might "only" have been 20-30 fps, but that'd be plenty for most uses.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:28PM
I remember seeing an early Kindle e-ink device software-modded to play video, the problem (as I recall) being that such fast refreshes drained the battery much more rapidly - e-ink is extremely efficient at displaying a static image, not so much during the normally-infrequent updates. (There might also be some long-term endurance issues, that would be worth researching).
The point though, is that there's nothing about e-ink that makes it inherently sluggish, that's down to the software decisions made by the manufacturer. I rather wish someone would make an e-ink screen laptop for outdoor use, maybe we'll get that once they'd got color working reliably. A shame that nothing much ever came of Pixel Qi's transflective display.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:56PM (2 children)
Same story with image-heavy PDFs. Lack of color may be impediment there if you wanted to look at drawings, comics, photos, graphs, etc. in the PDFs. And they load and refresh slowly in my experience. That's something that should get slightly better on newer generations of e-readers, but the refresh rate is still fundamentally slow. Maybe we will have a display that combines the benefits of E-ink and LCD/(O|Q)LED/et al. one day, but I haven't seen it yet.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:15PM (1 child)
Transreflective LCDs, see fancy 90s era marine GPS units etc.
Expensive, not good color rendition, backlit trad LCDs for smartphones pretty much killed the technology. Its all about best image quality in the showroom not real world, and transreflective will always be worse for some fundamental optical reasons in a dim-ish indoor room. Its a pity because transreflective will always look better pretty much anywhere else.
You can buy small "arduino project" style LCDs that are transreflective. They'll be monochrome alphanumeric and small, not 300 DPI truecolor the size of a page, but they're available.
Most of ops list of requirements are difficult to simultaneously meet but really easy to meet a subset, so the real question about the topic is what gets thrown under the bus. You could savagely 3-d print some horrendous frankenstein that uses an arduino with 100% open source firmware and a tiny little low res screen and nightmare UI, but OP probably wants something that'll actually work and not look hideous. Or dump the open source full ness and easy to repair and just buy a kindle reader although its really slow refresh rate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @04:53PM
What is so extreme about the requirements? The only technically demanding one is a wide dynamic range for screen brightness. The others are just design decisions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:26PM (1 child)
As best I'm aware, nobody has yet come out with LEDs that produce enough light to overwhelm the sun's light. If OP wants something that can be read in daylight, s/he has eliminated all of today's tablets from consideration.
What we really need is progress on the e-ink front. (I use the term generically, not as a brand name.) We need colour and we need faster refreshing. Colour has been "right around the corner" every year since at least 2012, based on some recent Googling, so I'm not holding my breath there.
Personally, I would love to see a large display (12"-13") flexible (fold-in-half-able) lightweight (non-glass) full-colour e-ink reader with adjustable front-light. The common 9.7" tablets are a little too small and 7"/8" tablets much too small for comfortable full-page document reading (*cough* comics *cough*) and the tablets are too big and heavy to comfortably slip in a pocket or purse to carry around. The current e-reader 6" standard display, slightly smaller than a paperback page, is too small. The weight is nice and the size for transportability is nice. The e-ink is much more comfortable on the eyes than LED screens, but it's only greyscale.
If someone comes out with a full-colour, fast-refreshing e-ink-like reader that's offers a display comparable in size to A4/letter size paper that can be folded (rolled?) down to the size of a Kindle or oversized pen, they'd have a license to print money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @06:28PM
I have a device that is supposedly ~220 nits and is barely visible in the sun. This should be 6x brighter so perhaps that is good enough:
https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/08/28/displaymate-analyzes-note8s-display-1200-nits-brightness-great-color/ [androidpolice.com]
However for some reason they went for the glossy display...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 10 2018, @08:55PM
How is the remarkable for installing other OS's? If it's OK, are there any Linux-compatible window managers that will work sweetly with e-ink?