The 5 finest E Ink devices that are not an Amazon Kindle

Amazon’s Kindle might have popularised E Ink units, with their monochrome shows and lengthy battery life, however there’s a fantastic world of different devices on the market that use the paper-like display know-how – and I’ve lengthy been infatuated with them.

I received my first Kindle in 2012 and though I nonetheless purchase bodily books, my love of E Ink hasn’t wavered. I’m fortunate sufficient in my present position to have the ability to try and take a look at a few of the newest and E Ink improvements, from telephones to notebooks and past.

Here are my 5 favorite E Ink devices that aren’t something to do with the Kindle.

My foremost criticism of all 5 is the distinct lack of color choices – black or white throughout the board! It’s excessive time the E Ink business embraced some color for its system designs.

£149.99

Buy from Amazon

It’s nonetheless owned by a company (Japan’s Rakuten) however an alternative choice to the Amazon Kindle is the Kobo. The newest Kobo Clara Colour provides a color display, compact measurement and terrific battery life for lower than Amazon’s black and white Paperwhite mannequin.

In reality, together with the Kobo Libra Colour, the Clara beat the Kindle Colorsoft to market in 2024 with their color E Ink screens. Both are nonetheless higher worth than Amazon’s providing – the Clara Colour is a big £90 lower than the most affordable Colorsoft, and has a extra transportable, light-weight design.

Read my full evaluate of the Kobo Clara Colour.

£149

Buy from Amazon

E-readers don’t should be linked to an enormous tech firm’s e-book retailer. If you might have a group of e-books in your PC downloaded from free authorized sources such because the Gutenberg Project, you’ll be able to switch them to the Pocketbook Verse Pro Color, another reader that’s open to any file format, in contrast to Kindle and Kobo which solely work with e-books from their respective shops.

But shopping for a tool like this implies diving right into a world of tinkering. Although Pocketbook has simply launched a UK e-book retailer, the vary isn’t nice and costs are a lot larger than Kindle or Kobo.

Instead, that is an e-reader to purchase if you wish to be freed from monopolistic constraints, with assist for 25 totally different file and doc varieties together with PDF and Microsoft Word’s DOCX. It’s additionally nice for comedian books due to its vivid color display.

$69

Buy from Xteink

For a particularly transportable e-reader possibility, you would attempt the Xteink X4. When I opened the parcel, I couldn’t fairly imagine how tiny it was, with a diddy 4.3-inch display and simply 5.9mm thickness.

It’s far smaller than a smartphone and might show all of your suitable e-book assortment in probably the most compact type I’ve ever seen. A disadvantage is the software program, which is complicated and unintuitive, and took me days to get used to. Set up can also be a ache – the X4 comes with a 16GB microSD card and a USB-C dongle to plug it into your pc so you’ll be able to click on and drag e-books onto the cardboard.

There’s no frontlight or touchscreen, with controls all finished through buttons. It even comes with a MagSafe ring if you wish to carry it connected to the again of your telephone to encourage you to learn on the practice as an alternative of doomscroll.

But the X4 has a passionate Reddit community, with nice love for its diminutive design and choices for customized software program tinkering. It has quirks and bugs, however for simply $69, you would possibly forgive its flaws.

£299

Buy from Mudita

Fed up together with your telephone? There’s an E Ink different, if you happen to can stay with its limitations.

The Mudita Kompakt is small and pebble-like, providing calls and texts in addition to easy apps similar to calendar, music playback, an e-reader and notes. The solely internet-connected apps are climate and maps for a really stripped down expertise. The digital camera viewfinder appears odd on the monochrome display, however snaps are full color while you obtain them to a PC.

You additionally get multi-day battery life, plus a bodily {hardware} change on the facet prompts ‘Offline+ Mode’ that kills all connectivity.

I loved utilizing the Kompakt, however identical to any minimalist telephone such because the Light Phone 3, it requires an enormous adjustment so that you can be away from trendy apps and providers. And it’s not only a determination that impacts you – you’ll most likely have to inform household and mates you received’t be on WhatsApp.

Mudita does supply a desktop programme so that you can sideload Android apps onto the telephone if you’d like, but it surely’s very difficult, and type of defeats the purpose of a quieter system.

$299 plus $59 stylus

Buy from Supernote

If you want the concept of carrying all of your notes in a single system, the Supernote Nomad is a wonderful alternative. It has a 7.8-inch display, which is the candy spot between transportable however massive sufficient to put in writing longhand onto. I’ve used it for a number of months as my work notepad, and it has been a pleasure.

Compared to rivals reMarkable or the Amazon Kindle Scribe, this E Ink digital pad is suitable with a pen whose nib by no means wants changing. Battery life is days-long, and you’ll snap the again panel off to exchange elements if and once they fail later down the road – a sustainability alternative the agency needs to be praised for.

It lacks a frontlight, so notes at midnight are difficult, however I didn’t miss it an excessive amount of. The software program is a bit of fussy and exhausting to navigate, leaving me feeling like I don’t know half of what the Nomad can really do.

But as a notetaking system it’s close to excellent, with a number of further apps together with e mail and Google Calendar integration, plus OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox, and assist for the official Kindle app so you should utilize it as an e-reader. I choose the Nomad to the Kindle Scribe for its utility, type issue and repairability.