Yesterday I discovered that the Amazon Kindle app on my Viwoods AiPaper Mini had been updated and now supports handwritten annotations. It looks like this update is currently only available on Android and is due to Amazon’s recent release of its Alexa tablets. The functionality appears to be the same as has been available with the Kindle Scribe.

The Kindle app has long supported highlighting and adding notes via the device’s keyboard. Notes are typed into a small window that, when closed, leaves a small note icon to the top right of the highlighted text. I have long used this to save important passages and associated notes in Readwise Highlights.

The new annotation function provides a way to handwrite notes in a Kindle book much like one would with a physical book. To use the function you first have to show the writing toolbar, which you can move to the left or right edge of the screen. With the toolbar displayed, you can write a note directly on the page and once the note is saved, the text of the book flows around the writing “canvas.”

You can also write in a virtual right margin that appears when you tap the button at the top right of the screen. A split screen appears in which the book text displays to the left and a blank column for handwriting displays to the right. Write a note near the text and tap X to close, and the note icon appears next to the associated word, which you can tap to display the note.

Annotation performance on the AiPaper Mini is pretty bad. There is a very noticeable lag between writing the first character of a word and the display of that character and others, to the point where the annotation is only useful when writing larger letters. I think this feature highlights the deficiencies of the device’s MediaTek Kompanio 500 processor, GPU, and 4 GB of RAM.

I expected the annotation performance to be better on my BOOX Note Air3 C because I find it to be faster overall than the Viwoods, but I saw the same lag when writing on it. I would expect performance to be better on BOOX’s newer tablets, though I doubt Amazon has optimized the app for tablets other than its own.

So far the Kindle app for the iPad does not have the writing toolbar. When I open a book on the iPad that I annotated on the Viwoods, all of the handwritten notes are indicated by note icons that I can tap to display handwritten and text notes, but the inline handwritten notes do not display on the book page like they do on the Android tablets. I expect this handwriting support will come to the iPad version of the app in the future.

Given the poor performance, I doubt that I will use this handwriting feature much with my current E Ink tablets, and I don’t think this feature alone is compelling enough to make me want to purchase a newer tablet. I find the new BOOX Note Mini C attractive, but I hesitate because I have actually grown accustomed to the Viwoods Daily feature and would miss that functionality if I switched back to BOOX.