Tablets on Routine Revelations

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:57:04 -0400

Just got the Ugreen HDMI wireless extender transmitter and receiver and I am using it to connect the Pixel 10 desktop mode to the Innoview portable monitor. I’ve watched some video on YouTube and although this is only 1080P the video looks good enough. I am thinking this is an easier way to connect my iPads to a television while traveling but I was curious about how well this works with the Pixel 10. There and been some brief disconnects and it looks like the connection is more solid while I have the transmitter plugged in to power, otherwise it pulls power from the phone.

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:20:12 -0400

Boox has released second generation of their 10.3-inch Go series e-Ink tablets that appear intended to compete with the Remarkable 2. There are two versions of this generation, a $400 without a front light and a $450 model with a front light. A major negative, in my opinion, is that Boox has replaced the Wacom EMR stylus support with their InkSense capacitive stylus is that is less accurate and requires charging. I would not buy this tablet due to this choice by Boox.

I would wish that Boox would release an 8-inch e-Ink tablet with Wacom EMR support but that appears to be less likely to happen as time passes.

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:45:03 -0400

I am watching a video overview of Inkwell, which is Manton’s RSS app released last week. I’ve tried using Inkwell but find it doesn’t fit in to my web reading triage workflow. I send everything to Readwise Reader where I do all my reading, so the blogging and quote blogging of Inkwell would be more useful for me in Readwise. One thing that I am intrigued by is the Reading Recap feature in Fading, but I don’t know whether I would really use that feature a lot or not.

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:37:56 -0400

The 2026 iPad Air M4: Early Impressions:

The second change is memory. The M4 brings 12GB of unified memory, up from 8GB on the M3 model. More RAM means better multitasking and more headroom for demanding tasks. Transcription in Voice Memos and background removal in Pixelmator happen almost instantly. I feel it in Lightroom as well.

My primary concern about the MacBook Neo is that I don’t think the 8 GB of RAM is enough in the current AI era of personal computing. While the quote above is about the new iPad Air, I think the point about the benefit of moving from 8 GB to 12 GB is apt.

Later in his post Om also ponders whether the Neo is a better value than the Air given it includes a keyboard. I do wonder whether Neo will affect iPad sales.

My Thoughts About Android Desktop

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:19:08 -0400

I watched XDA’s presentation of the Android desktop mode available in the Android 17 beta. Desktop mode is available with Android 16 too and I’ve tried it out and it’s not bad. I’ve long been intrigued by the idea of using a smartphone as my only computing device, and I honestly think this is best applied to foldables.

As I see it, the main impediment to such an all-in-one device is the lack of wireless connectivity to monitors, keyboards and mice. Imagine being able to use the desktop mode of your phone while the phone is still in your pocket.

It does appear that while desktop mode is available with all Android devices, it’s primary purpose is as a replacement to Chrome OS. For Google, Android desktop mode is a consolidation of operating systems. Google seems convinced that it’s worth it for them to offer a desktop computing user interface for their operating system, even though Chrome OS only has a small percentage of the desktop market, per Wikipedia.

I am not convinced that Android Desktop offers anything for the desktop market, and rumors are Apple may be soon announcing a low cost Macbook built on their A-series processors that will be hard to compete against.

The one scenario I can think of that might be interesting is Google pitching the idea of the Pixel Fold being the computing device that is all one will need, and therefore try to justify the greater than $1,000 price tag for the Fold. The math works when compared to the sum cost of a phone, tablet and desktop if the device fits all these use cases. However, I think for this to work there must be wireless connectivity to keyboard, video, and mouse or at the very least an easy to use drop-in docking station.

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:35:55 -0400

In this video on YouTube, Kitt Betts-Masters shows the technology behind Wacom’s EMR pens. I currently primarily use felt nibs in the EMR pens I use with my Viwoods AI Paper Mini and Boox Note Air 3C, but I am curious about how the ceramic nibs feel. My concern has been with the effect of using ceramic nibs, even the ones provided by Viwoods, on the life of the screen.

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:38:40 -0400

As I imagined it would be.

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:27:22 -0400

I personally use tablet computers and generally promote their use. During the last couple of years I have mostly used e-Ink tablets because of their emphasis on reading and writing, which are my primary use cases. I find that writing things down by hand helps me to remember and to focus on a given topic. Vojislav Dimigtrijevc has produced a video on YouTube that provides a wonderful overview of how e-Ink tablets combine analog and digital processes, and because of that I think the video is a wonderful explainer of benefits of these type of tablets.

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:30:18 -0400

In 2010 I wrote this in reaction to the first iPad announcement. It really didn’t age well.

For myself, I am waiting to learn more about the HP Slate, which HP and Microsoft announced at CES. From what I can tell, it will run Windows 7 that supports touch input, however, what I really want is a slate that supports both touch and stylus (digitizer) input because I want to write notes in digital ink and store them in Evernote.

Using Obsidian With Viwoods AI Paper Mini

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:48:37 -0400

Ever since I got the Viwoods AI Paper Mini I have been developing processes for using it with Obsidian, which I use for my second brain. At present I have Obsidian installed on the tablet but I do not use it for writing on the tablet. I do have Obsidian Sync running on the tablet but not syncing all of my oldest notes imported from Evernote.

Have three Papers (notebooks) that I am exporting from the tablet in to Obsidian and I am doing this in two ways. I am using a Viwoods Sync Obsidian plugin, which is currently in development, to import PNG images of the notebook pages in to Obsidian which I can then view and link to from other Obsidian notes. The plugin uses the Viwoods native .note file as input, creates PNG image files of the pages, and then creates an Obsidian note (markdown) page with the image embedded.

For the second export method I am using the AI Text Conversion function of the Viwoods Papers app to create ASCII text of my handwriting. The AI feature uses the Gemini Pro Version 3 model and I manually select one more more pages for conversion. I find the Gemini Pro does the best job of converting my handwriting. I copy the result to the clipboard, switch to Obsidian on the tablet, open the note in which I am storing the text version of the notebook and paste the text in. After the updated note syncs to my desktop computer I then edit what I pasted to correct what is usually a small number of errors.

Finally, in the correct areas of the text version of the note I insert links to the image file, created by the Viwoods Sync plugin, that is the source of the text. I can then open image side-by-side with the text with a right-click of the link and Split Pane right.

In feedback I provided to the developers of the Viwoods Sync plugin I asked if they could do OCR of the notes as part of the sync process, which they suggest might be a feature they add in the future. The issue for that part of the plugin might be the quality of the handwriting recognition.

Productively Retired

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:18:53 -0400

I am less than a month in to my retirement and I am still feeling my way around. One thing I am noticing about myself are changes in some of my interests online. Over the years, like many people in tech, I have had an interest in productivity apps, particularly ones built around processes like Getting Things Done or PARA. Inevitably that leads me to installing an app or two and checking them out. Over the years I have tried so many todo apps!

Now that I am retired I think that my definition of productivity is not consistent with how most people on the Internet define it. Right now I am thinking retirement is less about getting things done and more about the best ways to spend my time, and none of the apps I’ve seen has this focus.

Since I started using an e-Ink tablet a couple of years ago, my primary todo app has actually been a PDF that has been a digitized version of the Franklin Planners I used when I started my career. Unfortunately, the PDF planners have a problem with finding information because there is not an embedded index that enables one to search for handwritten words. For example, I can search for handwriting on the Boox Note Air 3C but when I export my notebooks as PDFs to my laptop computer I cannot do that same search. On the laptop I am left to flipping through pages just I did back in the day with the Franklin Planner.

I did not purchase the 2026 version of the PDF planner that I had used the last two years because I don’t think I need it, although I still find myself checking out free versions shared by developers who post about them on Reddit.

Right now to the extent that I do planning, I am using the Daily app on my Viwoods AIPaper Mini. Events (appointments) sync from Google Calendar, Tasks is a simple checklist template on which I write whatever I might want to do on a given day, I check off those I complete and manually copy/paste any items I write from one day to the next. Any notes I want to jot down go on the Notes tab.

To keep track of things I think I want to do at some time in the future I use Google Tasks, which is really a kanban. I have some topical lists like Home Lab, Home, Blog and Want To Watch. The benefit of using Google Tasks is that it integrates with my Pixel phone so if I want a reminder about an item I simply give the entry a due date.

Getting Things Done aficionados will note that am violating it’s recommendation for a single trusted source for information. I am spreading things between two “apps” and two devices although both are on Android. It gets worse, because I am also putting things in Obsidian.

I view Obsidian as my second brain as many others do, but I am not forcing myself to only use it. However, it is where I have nearly all of my digital information I have accumulated over the years: notes from Evernote, notes from Roam, and all of my ebook and article highlights gathered by Readwise. Obsidian is where I go to search for information. Ideally, I could paste searchable versions of PDFs with my handwriting in to Obsidian, but for now I can at least attach the files and I am monitoring the development of a plugin that just might provide the search function I seek.

I think that over time how I use these tools as a retiree will likely change and I am still keeping an eye out for the tools that will help me make the best use of my time rather than be designed to produce most “things” during my time. It might be the case that I have to build the tool for myself.

E-ink Tablet Lock-in

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:24:43 -0400

In a YouTube video the developer of My Deep Guide, which is a robust PDF organizer template for e-ink devices, talked about the issue of e-ink device lock-in. The issue is that when you use a brand of device, say Remarkable or Boox, there is not a way to move your data from one device brand to another. The only file formats common to all device types are PDF and ePub but that does not provide for extraction of the information within those file types.

The problem is not just with moving from one vendor to another, but affects searching for one’s writing, which requires some form of indexing of the handwritten data such that a search can be run. I touch on this issue in my recent post in which I describe using Google NotebookLM to search for what I write on my Viwoods AIPaper Mini tablet.

As I understand it, what one writes on the Viwoods tablet is translated to vector graphics data that is stored in a file on the device. Viwoods, like Boox, uses a “.note” extension for these file names and those files even sync to my Google Drive. The problem is, there is no application provided by Viwoods to read those files and thus provide a way to search within the files.

The problem here is very similar to about 40 years ago when word processors like Microsoft Word and WordPerfect were developed and used proprietary file formats. Back then the only way to view and thus search within your writing was to open the files in their original application, you couldn’t read Word files in WordPerfect or vice versa. Years later this issue became moot as application vendors reverse engineered the file formats so that files could be moved between word processor brands. Many people vow to avoid any possible word processor vendor lock in by only storing their writing in plain text that may use markdown for formatting.

I think the ideal for tablets would be a standard data file format for handwritten notes that either the tablet providers used natively or at the very least provided for exporting. PDF exports are the equivalent to printing a document and saving that hardcopy as an archive/backup, it provides a bare minimum but quickly becomes unwieldy as the number of documents and pages within them increase. We really need fully searchable formats to allow us to retrieve information from our writing.

Use Google Drive And NotebookLM With Viwoods AIPaper Mini

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 13:45:34 -0400

I recently started using the Viwoods AIPaper Mini, which is an e-ink tablet with an 8-inch black and white display that is optimized for reading and writing. The reason I bought this device is that I wanted a smaller and more portable tablet for reading and writing than the Boox Note Air 3C I have been using.

The AIPaper Mini, like most e-ink tablets, is designed to provide the ability to write notes by hand in a manner that feels like writing on paper. The handwritten input is usually stored as vector graphics data in a format known to the software on the tablet. Unfortunately there isn’t a standard file format for this data and Viwoods does not provide a way to read those files, which have a .note extension, via a desktop or web application. Fortunately, Viwoods does generate PDFs of notes that reproduces the handwriting as seen on the device display, so exporting or syncing of the generated PDF files is primary means for archiving and retrieving information captured using the device.

Nearly all tablets today can work with the popular cloud storage providers like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox. Apple iPads default to Apple’s iCloud but also work with other providers while Android tablets tend to default to Google Drive. The PDF files generated are the only way you can view on other devices what you write on the Viwoods tablet, so they provide a small degree of backup by being able to open and view the files. Unfortunately, in order to search the files you need an app that can do handwriting recognition and I discovered that Google Drive search can and will search through PDFs, including those that contain handwriting. I enabled Google Drive as the default sync account to and tested search and found it will list the files that contain the search term but it does not jump to the location of that term within the file.

Gaining the ability to search within the PDF files the Viwoods tablets generate is reason enough to use Google Drive as the tablet’s Cloud Drive, but I think NotebookLM is the real reason why Viwoods users should use this setup. NotebookLM is a web app from Google that enables you to use Google’s AI tools against a narrow set of sources that you specify and those sources can be one ore more files in your Google Drive. I created a new notebook in NotebookLM and added ten of the PDF files (each corresponding to a Viwoods Paper) generated from my tablet as sources. As each source is added character recognition runs and you can click the file names to see the results.

I use the chat in NotebookLM to ask whether I have written anything about an item or topic, here is an example:

Have I written anything about the Day One app? Yes, the sources contain a specific entry regarding the Day One app.

On 11-16-2025, you documented testing a feature related to the application:

You were testing email to Day One Journal.

The condition for success was noted: “If I see this in Day One then it worked”.

The answers include links to the source files that contain the information. You can save the answers to a note for future reference. For example, at the end of October I merged all of the Daily app PDF files in to one monthly file using Sterling PDF and added that file as a source to my Viwoods NotebookLM notebook, then I asked what were my accomplishments for the month of October and the response included a run down of the completed tasks for each day, which I can then save as a note. (tip: On the first task line on each day write down the date)

The final benefit of using NotebookLM that I want to highlight is that it will generate a mind map based on what it finds in all of the source files, which provides a structured way to see and drill down in to the information. Here is the high level view of my source files, which I can click to expand each node.

While I am referring in this article to my use of the Viwoods AIPaper Mini tablet, I believe almost all other tablets provide the ability to sync files with Google Drive and most likely produce PDF files or perhaps a graphic file of your handwriting which you can also use as a source for Google NotebookLM. So my recommendation, if you are willing to sync your handwritten notebooks to a cloud provider, is to use Google Drive as it provides an easy path to use them in NotebookLM. I have Auto sync configured for every 24 hours and for now you have manually update the synced files in NotebookLM, which gives control over which version of the file is being used as a source.

Translating Handwriting To Text

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:46:00 -0400

I learned this weekend that I can use a LLM running on my Macbook Pro to translate notes that I write by hand on a tablet to a markdown text file that I can import in to Obsidian. The benefit is that allows me to securely produce the translation that I can then later use to search for the notes.

My first experience with handwriting on a computer was with the Newton MessagePad, which translated handwriting to text near instantly. The handwriting translation technology in the early 90s was not very good and the Newton’s translation failures earned it ridicule and appearance in the Dilbert comic strip, but I found it did a good job with my fairly neat printing.

Ever since Steve Jobs canceled the Newton upon his return to Apple, there has been no other computing device that defaults to translating handwriting to text. Today most of us who hand write on tablets see their writing stored in its original form, although the graphics is translated to data to be reproduced by the tablet whenever the document opens rather storing the writing in relatively larger bitmap graphics files.

A reason why the Newton translated handwriting to text is that made it possible to search for what was written. Ironically, it seems current tablet makers don’t think it necessary to provide one with ways to search for what they have written. Either the search capability is not provided at all, such is the case of my Viwoods AIPaper Mini, or the on-device search is painfully slow such as on my Boox Note Air 3C.

Microsoft provides an ability to search for handwriting in OneNote on certain platforms. I’ve written hundreds of pages of notes using OneNote on my iPad that that I can search for when the notebooks sync with my notebook computer running OneNote for Windows. It appears that OneNote for iPadOS translates the handwriting and creates a searchable index of the words behinds the scenes but that feature does not exist in the version of OneNote that runs on Android and which I can run on the AIPaper Mini and the Note Air 3C.

Both the AIPaper Mini and the Note Air 3C provide a way to export handwriting in their notebooks to PDF files you can copy to other computers that serve as a simple form of backup, but there is no way to search within those files without having an index generated. I have been on the lookout for any third party tools that I could install on MacOS or Windows that I could use to either convert the “flat” PDFs to searchable forms or at least do a good job of translating the handwriting to text files that I can store in Obsidian.

I recently came across an article written by Jorge Arango titled Transcribe Handwriting Using a Local LLM that describes the steps for performing the translation of handwriting in PDFs to text files using a LLM running on a local computer. If you have personal information in your notes you might not want to send that information to a third party cloud service, which makes this process appealing. This past weekend I tried out the steps in the article on my Macbook Pro M4 with 16 GB of RAM.

My test file was a ten page PDF created on the Viwoods AIPaper Mini that I exported to my Macbook. Arango describes a nearly completely automated workflow of which I manually executed the key steps of splitting the ten page PDF file into ten PNG graphics files and then using the recommended mistral-small3.1 LLM to do the translation into ten markdown files.

The translation of my handwriting to text was pretty accurate but did need some light editing. It took about 70 minutes for the LLM to translate each page. Keep in mind that the VIwoods AI Paper Mini is a smaller, 8-inch tablet so each PDF page is about half the size of a what one considers to be a standard 8.5 x 11-inch sheet of paper that would probably take longer to translate. Arango noted that he uses a 32 GB M2 Max Macbook Pro for the translation and I think RAM was the primary cause of the my longer processing time because the model running under Ollama on my Macbook used 21 GB; more than the 16 GB of RAM it has thus requiring a fair amount of disk swap usage.

The goal of this experiment was to produce a markdown text file copy of my handwriting in a multi-page PDF that I could then add to my Obsidian vault where I could search on it in the future. After I edited each page I used the Unix cat command to produce the single markdown file that I then imported to Obsidian. Finally, I attached the source PDF to the bottom of the file.

I think the benefit of securely translating my writing on my own computer is worth the longer processing time. Now that I have the first ten pages translated, I can go forward by just translating additional pages and concatenating them to the end of the markdown file that I had previously produced. I am certain that if I had used cloud-based version of the LLM that the translation would happen much faster, as no doubt a local computer with more RAM would also perform faster, but I wonder whether the mistral-small3.1 model is the best one for this task and if I could find another LLM with lower RAM requirements that could do as good a job of translation.

The Viwoods AIPaper Mini

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:12:00 -0400

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.

Foldable Phone Or Tablet

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 12:59:00 -0400

In my essay Personal Computing Using Tablets I make the claim that we should think of foldables as tablets rather than phones. I think a new article in 9to8mac.com reporting that the iPhone Fold could be thinner than the iPhone Air supports my claim.

First off, I think the title of the article is misleading while consistent with the foldable as phone thinking. It is misleading because the speculated dimensions of the foldable are only thinner than the iPhone Air when it is folded out, in other words when it is a tablet.

Further down in the article is a table that shows that at the projected 9-9.5mm thickness the “iPhone Fold” will be thicker than all previous generation iPhones. The size and weight matters when one thinks about carrying the device in a pocket. The only reason why one will carry that large and heavy a device is because of the benefit of using the foldable when it is folded out, or when it is a tablet.

How do you make a sales pitch for one to spend more than $1,000 to carry a thicker, heavier phone? Wouldn’t the sales pitch work better if you say that the foldable is the most portable iPad ever, one that can even be carried in a front pant pocket?

Of course the dimensions of a possible foldable from Apple, particularly in light of the iPhone Air, is going to draw the most attention, but I propose what is a more interesting question is, which operating system UI will Apple put on the device? When you open the Apple foldable, is that iOS 27 or iPad OS 27? And if that is iPad OS 27 when folded out, what is it when closed?

And if Apple decides to go with iOS 27 inside and out of the foldable, how soon will those who want the iPad OS 27 experience, such as windowing or at least side by side windows, start complaining? Will users want to be able to use their Apple Pencil with the foldable?

I have no doubt that Apple will nail the foldable hardware and that it will be expensive, but the software experience of foldables matters and at a price north of $1,000 users will expect a premium experience.

Personal Computing Using Tablets

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 13:55:00 -0400

I think that tablets are the most interesting of all the current styles of personal computers because unlike smartphones and notebooks there is no widely accepted use case for them. Opponents of tablets say they are not needed because either one can use a large screen smartphone or a light weight notebook for ho/wever one may use a tablet.

The opponents make a valid point if one settles on the most widely understood use case of the tablet as a media consumption device. Honestly, up until this year the most successful tablet, Apple’s iPad, was probably most used by people to watch video than anything else even if the iPad can do much more. Apple has sold many iPads despite it being labeled as only a media consumption device.

Apple clearly believes the iPad is useful for much more than watching video and the changes it has made to the software in iPad OS 26 are intended for people who want to do more. The latest changes to the iPad software is Apple’s claim that the tablet can be the most utilitarian personal computer because it has the hardware and software capable of performing all personal computing use cases. I think iPad OS 26 is the latest evidence for why tablets are so interesting.

You might think that the iPads are the only tablets that exist, but that is far from the truth. True, if you look at Apple’s primary competitor, Google, you find a very underwhelming Pixel tablet in their store. What you might not know is that there are many other tablets available that run Google’s Android, and in particular there are interesting e-ink tablets from Remarkable, Boox, Viwoods, and more.

The majority of all personal computers, be they notebooks, smartphones, and tablets have a backlit LCD or OLED display. E-ink is a reflective display technology with no backlight intended to mimic paper, which is why it is used in the Kindle eReaders so that eBooks look like paper books.

E-ink displays have a lower refresh rate than LCD and OLED, and when they first became available in 2004 there was a very noticeable refresh of the display as one changed pages. Today, the technology has improved such that the refresh of text is instantaneous though still too slow for video.

E-ink tablets are optimized for reading and writing. The Remarkable tablet was not the first e-ink tablet but it was the first to appear to a broad consumer market. Remarkable focuses on replicating the experience of writing on a paper pad while taking full advantage of technology. If Remarkable is on the “most specialized” end of the e-ink tablet spectrum then Boox is on the “most general” end by providing access to all the apps in Google’s store while also providing the same, feels like paper, writing experience of the Remarkable.

Other e-ink tablet companies provide products that fall toward one end of the spectrum or the other. For example, Supernote is most like Remarkable in mainly providing a writing experience whereas Viwoods is more like Boox because it provides the Google Play app store. None of the different e-ink tablets are exactly the same, unlike the different model iPads or for that matter “traditional” tablets running Android, and it is these different ideas about how an e-ink tablet works and does that I find so appealing and further evidence of why tablets are interesting.

If you are interested in seeing what I am describing, I recommend you watch some YouTube video reviews of the different products produced by Jeffrey Moss and Kit Betts-Master.

The final way that tablets are interesting is in foldable phones. Now, the name implies that these foldables are smartphones, but I think foldables are better thought of as tablets that fold in to a smartphone size rather than as a phone that folds out to a tablet size. My reasoning is simple, one does not spend the money nor carry the additional weight if they don’t want the larger display that requires application tablet UI design for the best experience.

Foldables will never be small or light enough to replace smartphones. As evidence I point to the new iPhone Air, which I claim is about as thin and lite a smartphone as one can get, plainly a foldable of two iPhone Airs is larger than one iPhone Air.

The screen size that a a foldable folds out to will always be larger than the largest size smartphone because there is a point at which, and I will say it is 7-inches, that screen turns the device from a smartphone to a tablet. Some people might put a 7-inch tablet in a front or back pant pocket but not the majority, and “pocket-ability” may be the defining trait of a smartphone.

In my opinion what Apple has done with iPad OS 26 and the different available e-ink tablets alone make tablets the most interesting of the personal computer styles, but foldables seal the deal. Apple may release their own foldable in the upcoming year and they may even call their foldable an iPhone, but may be, just maybe, they will call it the iPad Mini or the iPad foldable. Regardless, I recommend thinking of Apple’s foldable more like an iPad rather than an iPhone.

Smartphones and notebooks are proven, users now have entrenched expectations about them and therefore they will stay the same while improving over time. Tablets are not yet completely defined and there are many companies with different ideas about what one can do with a tablet. Perhaps some time soon the clear use case for tablets will be settled, in the mean time I think they are what to watch for changes in personal computing.

Current Thoughts About Tablets

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:08:00 -0400

Last week the Remarkable Pro Move was released; it’s a 7.3-inch eInk tablet. An eInk tablet has an eInk display that also supports input via a stylus and Remarkable made the first eInk tablet that earned success. It’s advertised writing experience that is as good as writing on paper is what first caught my eye, but I always felt the Remarkable too expensive for only being an electronic equivalent to a pad of paper. Last year I bought a Boox Note Air 3C that I am very happy with, it has the same writing experience but comes with the Google Play store so that one can install and run any Android app.

The problem with the Note Air 3C is that while it’s larger size works very well for replacing paper notepads to write, it is too large for reading books. When it comes to reading I prefer the size of the iPad Mini, and I like eInk so I have been using the Boox Go 7 as my primary reading device. The physical size of the Remarkable Pro Move looks perfect for my needs but it does not have the ability to run the Kindle or Readwise apps that I need for reading. I am not going to pay $500 for a single function device, at that price I expect to device to have more ultility, but I would pay $300 for it.

The Boox Go 7 does support stylus input but it’s not the same writing experience as the Note Air 3C, the capacitive stylus has a plastic nib so it has the “writing on glass” feel of the Apple Pencil and iPad. I also think the screen size is a tad too small for notetaking, at best the equivalent paper experience is post-it notes. The best thing about the Go 7 is that it only costs $249 and comes with the Google Play store so you can install whichever Android reading app you prefer. If it had the same Wacom EMR stylus support as the Note Air 3C it would be nearly perfect and worth $100 more in price. I think Boox sees the Go 7 as an alternate to a Kindle that can do more and it fulfills that description perfectly.

The Remarkable Pro Move looks like the perfect size for a portable electronic notepad that has the best writing experience. I probably would be all in on it if it at least had the Kindle app.

My most current tablet is the iPad Mini 6, which is an N-1 generation device. I also have the fourth generation iPad Air that for the most part has been replaced by the Note Air 3C. I don’t plan to replace the iPad Air, I expect my needs for large sheets of “paper” to write notes will diminish greatly after the beginning of the year so I am thinking my future tablets will be smaller in size. I expect to replace the iPad Mini 6 with a new iPad Mini, I just don’t know when, mostly to be able to run iPad OS apps, and I am also thinking about replacing the Boox Note Air 3C and the Books Go 7 with a single smaller screen tablet. Right now that might be the iFlyTek AINOTE Air 2 or the VIWOODS AIPaper Mini, the AIPaper Mini is the front runner due to price. I wonder whether Boox will make tablet equivalent to the Remarkable Pro Move given that the Go 10.3 is clearly intended to compete with the Remarkable 2.