Productivity in eye-friendly color with the PocketBook Eo e-note

The PocketBook Eo color E Ink e-note announced back in April is now available. We’ve spent the last few weeks being kinder to our eyes while makes notes, reading and planning – and have even taken the odd photo. Let’s have a closer look.

Folks looking for the full color reading and writing experience while out and about can opt for a tablet or smartphone running appropriate apps. But battery life is always a worry, glare while outside can be an issue and the digital screens can be fatiguing for the old peepers.

E Ink technology can help with all that and more, and now that color ePaper tech can support bigger displays the fairly recent influx of grayscale productivity focused devices have been joined by e-note slates that can make your Manga more enjoyable, help highlighted text stand out and even add personal messages or ideas to photos.

PocketBook told us that the Eo is the first fruit of a partnership with China’s Bigme, in which the Swiss company has now become a shareholder and co-owner. In fact, the Eo hardware is strikingly similar to the InkNoteX but the Swiss company has “significantly re-worked and enhanced” the firmware and user experience.

The user interface has been overhauled to make it more user-friendly for folks in the EU and US. The set-up wizard, settings and Notes application were reworked, and that Notes app was treated to performance and handwriting quality optimization as well.

A useful send-by-email feature was added, allowing users to fling Notes direct to their inbox without needing to worry about additional logins. The PocketBook reader app was added to enable syncing with the company’s cloud services and online store. And the device was recently given OCR (text recognition) capabilities, too.

A look under the hood

Before we dive in further, here’s a closer look at the key specs of the Eo. The e-note is built around 10.3-inch Kaleido 3 color e-Paper technology that has grayscale resolution of 1,860 x 2,480 pixels at 300 ppi, and 930 x 1,240 at 150 ppi for color – with a 4,096 RGB color depth. And it’s surrounded by a SmartLight that makes everything onscreen pop.

The device goes with a wide rectangle for the overall shape, which puts an inch-wide solid bar down the left, rather than position that block to the bottom for the thinner/taller layout seen on the reMarkable 2 tablet. Otherwise the display is flush with the bezels for a sleeker look than others with a border in addition to bezels.

Inside is a 2.3-GHz octa-core processor supported by 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of onboard storage with microSD expansion – the internal storage at first power-on showed 22% already used by the OS and pre-loads. The e-note runs Android 11 rather than the more common Linux OS, which is a few steps behind the latest iteration of Google’s mobile operating platform but is considered fit for purpose.

Paul Ridden/New Atlas

The 4,000-mAh battery should last and last thanks to the E Ink display technology, but exactly how long will depend on things like camera usage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth activation, how much the SmartLight is used, whether third-party apps push the processor to the max and myriad other factors. PocketBook reckons that users could get around a month of productivity per charge according to in-house testing.

There are two speakers for audiobook or music playback, and four microphones for voice input. A USB-C port is included for cabling to a laptop as well as charging. The device lacks a headphone jack, but supports audio via USB-C or pairing over Bluetooth. There’s 802.11ac dual-band Wi-Fi cooked in as well.

The Eo lacks the 5-megapixel front camera of the InkNoteX but does come with an 8-megapixel rear camera. That resolution isn’t the highest available in the world of mobile gadgetry, but it’s likely enough for this use case – with PocketBook telling us that “it’s not to make high-res images, but to make photos of text pages or spaces and make notes or sketches on them.”

It ships with a Wacom digitizer for touchscreen input (the InkNote X mentioned earlier comes with a different stylus input that can double as an IR pointer). Usefully, this worked straight out of the box, without the need to calibrate. But unlike the reMarkable setup, this one doesn’t magnetically attach to the side of the device – which we found a handy addition.

It’s a simple, buttonless affair that features a fine tip at one end and a virtual eraser at the other. There are four different input emulation choices, each offering 12 color choices for your “ink” as well as line thickness control. In addition to doodling or scribbling, the pen can be used to annotate documents, highlight text, create notes in the margins and so on. I found input response to be pretty much instant.

Getting down to business

PocketBook

Setup was a painless affair, confirming options and entering Wi-Fi credentials followed by a number of pop-up guides as each default application is opened for the first time. At first power-on, the Eo’s front light is active in Daytime mode but this can be changed to Night, eye-friendly Bedtime or Other (custom) modes via the down arrow along the top of the screen.

Each mode can be tweaked for brightness and color temperature, and the front light can be disabled to save the battery while using under bright ambient light or direct sunlight. With the LEDs off, the color E Ink’s white background has a somewhat gray hue to it rather than a brighter and cleaner white offered when the SmartLight is powered on.

The drop menu is also home to other settings/controls such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, Miracast screen sharing, speaker volume and E Ink adjustment. That E Ink Center allows for tweaking of refresh rates, color modes and image quality – with possibly the most interesting option for avid note makers being the HD256 mode, which offers 256 levels of grayscale instead of 16.

Among the preset modes here is a video mode, which pushes refresh to extreme. Curious, I tried to watch a YouTube video with this mode enabled, but I don’t think E Ink is quite ready for streaming primetime yet. The audio through the onboard speakers was smartphone quality (loud enough but a little thin) but the visuals were pretty poor, with some image ghosting evident along with nasty pixelization.

However, it’s a nice feature to have if you’ve got nothing else and simply must watch an online tech explainer before attacking an interview or hands-on demo at a tech expo.

Paul Ridden/New Atlas

Apps from the get go include a web browser, an audio player and folder packed with Sherlock Holmes audiobooks, two ebook readers, a calendar, notepad and camera. Users can purchase ebooks and audiobooks from Pocketbook’s own store, or sideload via other online libraries (Adobe Digital Editions can be activated through the Pocketbook Reader app for protected content). Running Android also means access to the Play Store for third party downloads should you find yourself wanting more productivity tools.

Gestures such as swiping to move to the next page and flick scrolling are supported, with options enabled/disabled by the user. One of the available sidebar tools allows the user to read office documents in docx, ppt, xlsx and so on. And file transfer over Wi-Fi is possible, provided both source device and e-note are on the same network.

In a recent update, PocketBook added an OCR feature that allows users to convert handwritten scribbles in the Notes app to text documents or PDF in a few seconds. Quite a timesaver. The device needs to be connected to Wi-Fi for this feature to work, and the conversion defaults to English – though other languages can be installed. Even though my handwriting is really scratchy, the feature got most of it right and errors can be corrected using the onscreen keyboard before saving or sending on. Also worth mentioning are a number of Note templates available to help keep your jottings tidy, including a blank black page, a calendar grid, to-do list and plain lines with a margin.

The bottom line

What you’ll get out of the Eo will depend on your expectations. If you’re looking for something that offers the kind of visuals you’ll get on a 2024 tablet or laptop then you’ll be disappointed.

But if you want a portable device for jotting, scribbling and doodling as much as typing, reading ebooks, PDFs and documents that’s kinder to your eyes, comes with a host of productivity tools with the option to hit the Play Store for anything else you need, brings some color into the more common gray e-note party and has excellent battery life – then I’d recommend giving this device a try.

At US$599.99, the price of entry is on the high side, but Bigme’s InkNoteX rolls in even higher and hasn’t been specifically tweaked for western users. The video below has more.

Product page: PocketBook Eo