I recently bought a new e-ink tablet, the Viwoods AIPaper Mini and it is the inspiration for my recent essay, Personal Computing Using Tablets. I am working on writing my impressions about this device but felt that to start I should write about what it is, why I bought it, and level set expectations.

​What Is It?

The Viwoods AIPaper Mini is an e-ink tablet with an 8-inch black and white, front lit, screen. The screen supports handwriting by using a Wacom EMR stylus and the combination of screen coating and the stylus tip provides a “feels like writing on paper” experience. The bezels around the left, top, and right of the display are about .25 of an inch and there is a larger, nearly 1 inch bezel at the bottom that has three integrated buttons that are not back lit, not stenciled in black, and therefore hard to see. Two of the buttons provide navigation, back and home, while the third launches the AI chat function.

The AI Paper runs Android 13 that can run the Google Play store and therefore other Android apps. The AIPaper Mini has a home screen and a bundle of apps developed by Viwoods that reflects their opinions about how an e-ink tablet is used. My understanding is that there are similarities between the software experience of the AIPaper and the Remarkable tablets. The applications that provide the core functionality of the tablet are:

  • Paper for writing notes in notebooks with pages that are created from one of many templates provided on the device.
  • Learning for reading and annotating PDFs and ePub documents
  • Daily for a calendar and writing tasks and daily notes. You can sync Google and Outlook calendars to the device and add events that sync back to those services

The AIPaper also has a file manager and the ability to view and transfer files to cloud storage services including Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and Dropbox. You can also sync pre-defined folders, which are where one’s notes are stored, to one of the cloud storage services and also specify whether to sync the writing files in PDF and the Viwoods own note file format. Also included is the ability to transfer between a computer attached to the same local network as the tablet via a web service that runs on the tablet by entering the IP address and port into a web browser address bar.

Viwoods is a relatively new competitor to the e-ink tablet market and their software and hardware is a work in progress. The AIPaper comes in two sizes, a 10.3-inch known simply as the AIPaper and the AIPaper Mini that has an 8-inch screen. Both tablets run the same software and Viwoods has been releasing software upgrades nearly monthly. Each upgrade has added new features reflecting prioritization of effort balanced against feature requests made by users. One coming to the AIPaper from using other tablets will find features expected to be fundamental parts of a tablet missing. Anyone buying a Viwoods tablet needs to be aware of and patient with it’s work in progress status.

Why Did I Buy It?

The reason why I buy tablets is to read and write and I use them as replacements for paper books and notepads. A good reading experience means being able to read for several hours without hurting my wrists and eyes, and I want to be able to hand write on a tablet just as I would on a pad of paper.

I have owned Apple iPads ever since the first one in 2010 but I found it too large and heavy to read for several hours. I bought the first iPad Mini in 2012 and used it to read many books, but it wasn’t until 2015 that Apple made it possible to write with handwriting using the Apple Pencil. Despite improvements Apple has made, writing with the Apple Pencil is a slippery, plastic on glass experience that is not at all like writing on paper.

I have also bought and use e-ink readers from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which provide good reading experience but are specialized only for that purpose and do not provide a way for handwriting. When I first read about the Remarkable tablet, which was the first e-ink tablet optimized for handwriting, I found it too expensive for only writing and not being able to read my Kindle books.

A few years ago I bought the Onyx Boox Note Air 3C that has the same handwriting experience as the Remarkable and can run any Android app and therefore can be used to read Kindle books. The 10.3-inch screen makes the Note Air 3C equivalent to a pad of paper and I use it write meeting notes when I am at work. While the Note Air 3C is light enough to hold, I think it is too large for reading books while it is perfect for reading PDFs.

When I was considering buying the Note Air 3C I also considered the Supernote Nomad, but while it is smaller in some ways better for writing, it does not have the Google Play store and thus is limited in the number of third party apps it runs. I also think because you have to buy a stylus and folio cover separately the total cost of the Supernode is high.

At the end of the year my need for meeting notes will go away and I determined that a smaller e-ink tablet would be my best option going forward so when I learned about the Viwoods AIPaper Mini I bought it. It costs a little over $400, includes a stylus and folio cover, and can run Android apps. In short, the AIPaper Mini checks all the boxes of my requirements for an e-ink tablet.

What Is In A Name?

We are in a time when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is drawing tremendous attention in tech and therefore almost every company seems to be bolting on those two letters to their product names and in their software feature set. Many hardware vendors, including Viwoods, are including buttons dedicated to launching an AI chat app. The chat app Viwoods provides works with six different LLM models, two OpenAI, two Google, and two Sentient AI.

For now the AIPaper does not require an account to use these LLM models, it appears that they are relying on free API access and I haven’t really used it much to see any time outs that I have encountered when using “free” versions of Google Gemni and ChatGPT.

AI features exist in nearly all of the apps that are included with the device. I have mostly used AI in Paper to translate handwriting to text, which is done using the GPT-4o model. You can select up to five pages of writing to be translated to text but I am told that the translation quality diminishes after a couple of pages. I have selected on page of a notebook at a time to translate to text then copy and paste that text to Obsidian after which I made edits to correct errors.

I have not used all of the AI capabilities Viwoods provides with the AIPaper and I wouldn’t consider them to be the primary reason for one to buy this tablet. It does make sense to me for Viwoods to try and take advantage of them for translating handwriting to text rather than trying to do that on their own. I personally would not have included the “AI” in the product name, Viwoods Paper Mini would be good enough, but I understand their reasoning.