I'm desperately awaiting the perfect eink device for this.

I've got a great writing setup on Obsidian that really works for me, a royal kludge mechanical keyboard...just waiting on the next gen of eink

The Boox One Note Max was sooo close, but they almost immediately discontinued the product and probably won't be supporting it long.

Suggestions are welcome

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dv35z 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

My dream device is the "Solar A5 e-ink computer" - It's A5-sized laptop, so it fits in a leather zipped case for journals. If you're familiar with HP Journadas / Sony Vaios from early 2000s, that's roughly the form factor. There's a solar panel on the back of the screen / outside of the enclosure. The screen is e-ink, and the operating system is Linux Mint Debian Edition. For console mode, a good "writing station" applications are "mc" (Midnight Commander) and "ranger" - simple GUI for editing text in folders, like a blog/knowledge base.

Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.

If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.

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dredmorbius 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Onyx iterates on its BOOX tablets fairly rapidly, but tends to continuously offer something in various size classifications. You'll find 13.3" tablets typically named as "Max" something or other.

I do see the Note Max as presently available, FWIW: <https://shop.boox.com/products/notemax>

I've had a previous iteration of their 13.3" tablet, the Max Lumi. Slightly lower resolution, and has a frontlight. It is a very nice display, though with an Android OS which I see as a net negative.

I'd really like an e-ink display option for the Framework 12" or 13" laptop.

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chunkyks 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My wife bought one of these: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler

Reviews are wildly polarised. * Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions] * While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]

You can find a selection of alternatives, and homebrewed options, here: https://www.writerdeck.org/

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3eb7988a1663 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That looks really cool, but that price point. I could get a Steam Deck + travel keyboard and still come out ahead.

Is that the true price for a low volume, niche product? Eink monopoly continues to make the world worse?

Looked it up, and the original One Laptop per Child came in around $200

	▲	1shooner 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was gifted a Traveler several years ago. It is overpriced and bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality. You can read and write off of it via USB, but it doesn't actually use a true filesystem for your text files, it writes them into the main app's sqlite DB, which in the past has had data loss issues. My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow. I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.

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daoboy 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That homebrew page is pure gold. Thank you for the suggestion!

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drakonka 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use the Onyx Boox Palma for a portable eink drafting setup. It's worked pretty well. I wrote about it here: https://liza.io/portable-writing-setup-with-onyx-boox-palma/

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daoboy 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's very similar to the setup I'm working on, including the stand. Thanks for sharing!

One of the appealing features on the Note Max was the screen size (13.3"). How do you find working on such a small screen?

	▲	drakonka 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For me the small screen is fine as long as I can maintain the mindset of this being a _drafting_ tool, not an editing or structuring tool. I generally don't need to see more than a couple of sentences at a time, and my drafting process is almost stream-of-consciousness as I just focus on getting the words out. If I needed to navigate more to edit or regularly reference prior sections, the small screen would be a hindrance.

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The keyboad

Perhaps you should have chosen a better one?!

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drakonka 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I chose the keyboard I wanted :)

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It was a joke on the typo.

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drakonka 6 hours ago | parent [-]