cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39848038
I bought myself a fancy new TLC 11 Nxtpaper Gen 2 with a cool e-ink type display. It’s an android tablet and I’m breaking free from Apple. That means no more Apple Books for my epubs. That also means, I’m now looking for a good solution to annotating epubs/pdfs (mostly highlights) on Android. I’d loveeee it it had some bring your own storage sync (webdav) or just plays well with the local storage for using syncthing etc. What are the best options?
I see, yeah there is something about it in the blurb. How do you like the tablet? Is it responsive? Is it full of Android bloatware? Do you know if it is rootable?
I see there is a 14 inch version that’s about $300 and that starts to get interesting. It’s not “2nd gen” though. And, I had thought of TCL as a lower tier manufacturer with quality issues, but I hadn’t looked into it much.
I like that the tablet has an SD (probably microSD) slot. Don’t like that there’s no headphone jack. There’s plenty of space in those things compared to a phone.
So I’ve gotten to use the tablet a bit now and I would say it’s fine. I might expect a bit more for $170 but because it’s so big I can excuse it. Um, it’s a little laggy, um, just out of the box. It doesn’t have much bloatware, maybe two or three manufacturer apps, but not like Candy Crush and all that junk. My very basic research tells me it’s not rootable. I’m really not sure if there is actually a special technology to the screen or it’s just like a matte screen protector but I sat in the park in full sunlight and was able to read a book perfectly well not quite as good as a paperwhite but pretty close so overall it’s decent and the pen works pretty well for writing and drawing. Compared to how much an iPad costs, I think the quality is fairly close.
Thanks, it is kind of intriguing though I keep telling myself to just use normal Linux stuff instead of Android. I’d want the 14 inch one which is around $300. Is there any trouble installing F-droid and apps from there?
Alternatives I’m thinking of include Lenovo Yoga laptop (16 inch) and a Raspberry Pi thing with an HDMI monitor (that would be plug-in only but I mostly read at home).
F-droid is working great. Hard to say this vs a linux setup. It’s not super lightweight but more than a laptop for sure if that matters for you. The 14 inch one seems pretty monster so at that point maybe a laptop is worth it.
My sister has a 13 inch ipad and it’s a nice size, 14" should be fine. I have some doubts about the big Lenovo though. My main interest is reading full page PDFs so anything less than 14" will be annoying. Ok I’ll give it more thought. Laptop prices are going to go up because of the dram shortage too. Sigh.
Speaking of laptops. I’ve been kicking around this idea for almost a year now. I wanna make a tool that takes ebay listings for ThinkPads and basically shows them on a table that’s super easy to filter and includes benchmark scores. Kinda like what lab gopher used to be. Lots of people want a good deal on ThinkPads but ebay search for them can be rough because of the fuzzy search. Like if I just want the best deal on a Thinkpad from the past 3 years that’s not easy to search for on ebay. Main thing stopping me is ebay API requires an application and I’m sure they block scrapers to some extent.
I’ve bought most of mine on craiglist but either way you sort of have to know what you’re doing. I’d say just sort by price and scroll through the results in the range you want to pay. You might also filter on “within 25 miles” or whatever, and get a unit that you can pick up in person. Or at least, try to talk to the person on the phone to get a sense that they know what it is that they are selling.
Thinkpads forum is still around and has a forsale section. It has slowed down but is still active:
https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum.php?f=11
I’ve bought stuff from there in the distant past.