Spyfree hardware and software together is compelling.
This looks great but I don’t want to solder anything, when can I buy an assembled and ready to go unit?
Good. Anything that says, “fuck you”, to Amazon. Kobo is okay though.
I love my pocketbook, their ecosystem is far from perfect but open enough for me
It’s interesting to see the generational shift from every device being an ARM SoC running Linux with BusyBox and a bunch of daemons (i.e., the Kindle, Kobo and ReMarkable) to every device being an ESP32 microcontroller running a (more or less) monolithic application firmware.
It is really all you need for a basic e-reader. However, I am not convinced that it will survive feature creep.
Esp32 runs out of headroom extremely quickly once audio processing (TTS) and screen annotation/highlighting are involved. Especially if they are implementing high quality partial refreshing.
I hope they can stick to the basics and make it a great, polished software experience because that is probably be the difference between failure and success of it, not featute-packing.
Maybe I’m the weird one, but I’ve never used any of those features (TTS, highlight, etc) on my Kindle.
No I think that is normal, but trying to cover all edge cases and accessibility are quite common reasons for feature creep.
Sorry, what does that mean in layman’s terms? It sounds like a step backwards?
I see it as more of a simplification of things. An e-reader was just supposed to be a digital book reader with an e-ink screen, good battery life and possibly a backlight. Current e-readers OTOH function more like a phone with a screen that wasn’t meant to support such an experience. I’m not interested in browsing the web, playing games, and listening to music on something like this when there’s already a perfectly functional phone in my pocket.
Using an ESP32 just shows that we can strip away all the bells and whistles to keep the core experience of reading a book with an energy efficient architecture.
Thanks for the enlightenment. I hope things like TTS are treated as first party citizens though rather than an afterthought as that’s primarily how I consume novels.
