When Amazon first introduced the Kindle Scribe, it was a quantum leap for E Ink. It brought one big feature that nobody else had: a stylus to scribble annotations or notes on documents, and the ability to save them and forward them to other people. I got one early and loved it, but it didn't take long to find the limits. Most of that was down to how locked down the Kindle software is, as I could only use the stylus where Amazon wants me to, which often wasn't where I wanted to use it.

That's most of my issues with the Kindle range; the hardware is often great, but it's intentionally hobbled by Amazon's OS. And the market has leapfrogged that position, with companies like Boox that run their E Ink devices on mostly vanilla Android. I've got a small stack of Boox devices, with the Boox Go 10.3 being the latest addition. It's everything I wish the Kindle Scribe would be: thinner, sleeker, and more open, and I absolutely love it.

The Kindle Scribe was groundbreaking

But it's now buried under the earth it shattered

When the Kindle Scribe first came out, all those years ago, I was hyped. I've always loved E Ink, and being able to write on it as if it was truly digital paper? Sign me the heck up! But the initial crop of writing features was not a bountiful harvest, and I was left craving more. Being able to annotate PDFs was good, and so was adding notes to the books I read, but the options were limited.

It took a while to get different brushes or the ability to create subfolders for organization, or a two-column view for reading books with two pages in view. Things that are table stakes for both note-taking devices and e-readers. Honestly, things that I expected at launch, not a year down the road, especially for a company with virtually unlimited resources like Amazon.

Boox built an E Ink tablet that gives me more

Building on top of (mostly) stock Android was smart

I've used a wide variety of E Ink devices over the years, from Kindles to ReMarkable, but any device for writing on the screen tends to dig into that niche and keep you from doing other tasks. Boox is one of the few E Ink manufacturers that deviate from that, building its devices to run on Android with a very basic launcher to highlight the note-taking and e-book reading aspects.

It's a new level of freedom, and while it's no good for YouTube videos, considering E Ink refreshes at 15 Hz or so, it's perfect for almost anything else, and it stops me from getting distracted by all the bright colors on my iPad. I can take notes, sketch pictures, and do anything I can think of with the millions of Android productivity apps.

I can use my usual apps and subscriptions

I still have a Kindle subscription, but I can read it on the Boox thanks to the Android app. And that works as well as the native Kindle, except I can use any other e-books I own. Which is fantastic, but I can do so much more without jailbreaking the device.

I've got my password manager installed, and Microsoft 365 to work on, well, work. I can't do that on a Kindle, and I love the freedom. There is one thing about Boox, though, they use a closed kernel and devices are often left on outdated versions of Android. They don't stop working, but it's annoying that they aren't keeping support for older devices to update them to modern Android kernels. Maybe that will change, but it's still a step in the right direction compared to how locked down Kindles are.

I love E Ink, but I love open ecosystems even more

I've had Kindles since they were the only E Ink devices you could get to read ebooks. But over the years, Amazon has done more to keep them locked down to its own storefront, which is fine. But they recently started removing store access from older devices, which turns them into paperweights and the books you've purchased into digital dead weight unless you buy a new Kindle. And I don't like that.

Boox offers a minimal custom UI on Android to enhance the core experience, making it easier to use as an e-reader and note-taking device. But you still get access to the full Google Play Store, so you're not reduced to only taking notes and annotations over other documents. It can be a sketchbook, hold your passwords securely, pinch hit as a web browser for research, and more. It's so far removed from the base Kindle experience, and it can use any digital documents you own.