I have had a reMarkable E-Ink tablet for a couple years. It works great and fulfilled a need to be more organized than 1000 PostIt notes littering my desk. What I have found over the years is that I want something much smaller, more portable, and preferably less costly.
The E-Ink dilemma.
There are quite a few E-Ink phones on the market right now. Offerings, from Minimal, Light Phone III, and others. These all have an E-Ink display and offer almost the right size platform for what I would like. Notably the Light Phone III is probably the closest to perfect size. None of these options offer the ability to write notes and have text recognition, they all run on Android of some flavor, and I don’t really want another phone. As a photographer I prefer to have a full featured iPhone that I can take, edit, share, or manage my photos on.
What is an E-Ink display?
I’m not going to talk very deeply or offer a real serious tech dive into E-Ink. There are plenty of better resources for that. E-Ink is an electronic paper display that was originally created in 1997. E-Ink has a couple of advantages over other displays. They only use power when rearranging the display unlike LED or other competing tech that draw power any time they are on. E-Ink is also easier on the eyes with its high contrast display and lack of pixels. E-Ink is also glorious to write in compared to a traditional hard LED display on most devices.
What do I want from a device?
If I can’t have an iPhone with an E-Ink display that allows me to operate as usual with the added benefit of using the Apple pencil and a real keyboard I will settle for a small form factor note taking device that does text recognition and syncs seamlessly with all my other devices. Take my reMarkable tablet and shrink it to iPhone 16 Pro Max size, give it wireless and BlueTooth but no cellular. Price it at $199 or less and sign me up. The Palma 2 from BOOX is almost the perfect device. If it only allowed writing and markup.
What’s your take?
Do you want a smaller form factor device like I described or am I alone in this desire?