The maker of the inkBook line of eReaders is planning to launch a new model featuring a 10.3 inch E Ink display and digital pen input.
The new inkBook Infinity should be available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign soon, with early bird backers getting a 30 percent discount off the list price… although the company hasn’t said how much that is just yet.
You can sign up at the inkBook Infinity website to be notified when the campaign goes live.
The device features an E Ink display with 227 pixels per inch, a capacitive touchscreen for navigation, and a stylus that you can use for writing or drawing. The inkBook Infinity weighs about 12 ounces.
Under the hood it features an NXP i.MX6 Solo Lite processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. There’s also a microSD card reader for up to 32GB of removable storage, a USB Type-C port, 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.
The inkBook Infinity has a 3,000 mAh battery which is kind of massive by eReader standards, but which will probably be taxed a little more than Kindle-style devices thanks to the large screen and pen support.
The writing & reading tablet runs an operating system based on Android 4.4.2, which may seem ancient… but which is as close to state-of-the-art as you’re likely to find on eReader-like devices with i.MX6 chips right now.
The inkBook Infinity isn’t exactly the first device in this category. Sony and Onyx both launched their own 10.3 inch E Ink writing slates earlier this year.
via The eBook Reader
I do not get the benefit of this. Passive matrix screens are great for reading, because the batteries a long longer and are not as taxing on the eyes. For writing, the screen will constantly be updating. That will remove a lot of the power savings. It will update less frequently than active matrix, but if I am going to use a tablet mostly to draw then it will mostly be off the rest of the time.
Android support is plainly ridiculous. This device doesn’t seem to even include 4.4.4 fixes such as “CVE-2014-0224 fixed, eliminating an OpenSSL man-in-the-middle vulnerability[168]” and “Stability issues patched”. How can they assume people want to use unsupported legacy OS from 2013 in 2019, with CVEs from 2014 unpatched?
In other news, mainline kernel apparently has full support for Android on i.MX 6 so they could just use Android 8 or 9 instead. Apparently they’re just lazy and using the years old BSP pack instead of the latest, which is freely available.
I used to get annoyed by stuff like this but in reality when small companies use really old versions of android on specialty products, its because recents SOCs can’t be purchased in orders of less than 100000. iMX might have kernel support, but who knows about things like standby and wifi drivers.
no way in hell a single core A9 with one GB of ram is gonna run any 6,0 OS or over well at all
takn, seen this?
https://news.softpedia.com/news/it-s-now-possible-to-boot-android-on-i-mx6-platforms-without-proprietary-blobs-516364.shtml
You could run a stripped down version since the eink product doesn’t need all the features. My issue with these is the lack of security patches and the lack of maintenance in any way. The vendors couldn’t care less.