Obsidian on E-Ink Pad?

Mobile
#1

[Question]

Platform

Android 11
Obsidian Mobile version: N/A

I’ve been obsessed with taking notes for years, particular having them in a single, consolidated system. Been using obsidian for over a year now. I got both a kindle e-ink reader & a remarkable 2 e-ink pad for christmas.

Kindle just for reading … because my 7 year old one finally died a month ago. The remarkable 2 I’ve been watching for years, but hadn’t pulled the trigger on because I don’t like their “closed” ecosystem. I don’t often buy myself things, so girlfriend pulled the trigger for me as a surprise (with full knowledge of how picky I am, and that i’d likely return it, but wanted me to try it out).

I can take notes on it … but … there’s zero integrations with anything else. Everything is isolated. Can’t read kindle books on it. Notes I take are just stored flat. It can do basic OCR, but anything other than letters is not utilized. Can’t integrate with any services I use (google calendar, office calendar, todoist, just as the very minimum basics).

I’m 99.9% sure I’m returning it.

I’m actually considering returning both, and getting a BOOX Max Lumi 2. It runs android 11 under the hood with access to play store … so lots of possibilities.

  • I’m wondering if anyone has tried one of these.
  • Has anyone tried obsidian on this, or a similar e-ink platform?

Thinking way ahead though … I imagine I’m probably pretty far ahead of the curve … are things like following present, or on the roadmap?

  • Will the stylus work with obsidian?
  • Is there the possibility of OCR or drawing directly in obsidian?
  • Is there any possibility of drawing images / diagrams directly in obsidian?
  • Possible to record audio directly into an obsidian note?
  • Possible to do parse audio recordings stored obsidian into text?
  • Possible to parse drawn entities like tags, lists, or tables into markdown?
4 Likes
#2

I have a boox nova for 1 year, interested for obsidian on boox.
obsdian mobile is not optimized for eink device for now, but I think what can be done through css and plugin.
draw directly in ob? I think need cooperation of both sides: ob & boox.

#3

I bought a boox for this purpose. It’s a horribly clunky experience. Native handwriting to text on Boox is horrible in my opinion and third party apps like nebo are unusable.

Until an eink device allows for some native integrations with other apps, it’s not going to be a smooth experience. Simply running android isn’t enough.

#4

Maybe support touch screen to turn page in view mode and cancel all the animations, will be more smooth for reading.

#5

I have a the BOOX Note3 (Android) tablet, and I think Obsidian works very well out of the box.

I do have a few E-ink specific wishes though:

  1. In-app buttons for pageup and pagedown (the tablet doesn’t have physical buttons)
  2. A theme that is completely grayscale, with respect to the limited number of shades an E-ink screen will show.
  3. Basically an alternative to any kind of scrolling in the Obsidian UI

And I believe that with a little work I can accomplish point 1 and 2 pretty quickly.

Otherwise my wishes are the same of anyone else using an android tablet.

But please note that I’m not using my tablet for content creation - I use it almost exclusively for reading content.

1 Like
#6

Hi nicoflot, thanks for sharing your experience with Boox Note3. I’m a new Obsidian user & am really excited by it’s capabilities for capturing e-book quotes along with my in-the-moment notes (a key brilliance of the Zettelsten note system IMO) and organizing them as I read. I also find e-ink much easier on the eyes.

So my follow-up question to your offering your experience is, if you mostly use the BOOX Note3 as an ebook reader – what do you do with Obsidian on that device, and what has that experience been like?

Specifically, I’m curious how running Obsidian on the same e-ink device that I’m using to read a book will streamline the process of capturing both the book quote AND the notes/writing/idea it sparks in me as Obsidian notes. Would you recommend the BOOX Note3 for that? Do you think Obsidian running on the BOOX Note3 would work well for that use?

Thanks for any experience you can share on this. :pray:t5:‍