Inkpad X was released it's new e-ink reader Inkpad X at July, 2020. The specs
listed is:
It costs me RMB 1699 (340 SGD) to buy from Taobao on 7, Aug. Due to Covid-19,
air shipment is unavailable to ship to Singapore and sea shipment took three
weeks with higher costs (due to GST tax). Inkpad X features a large 10 inch
e-ink screen with 1600x1200, which is not unpar with Kindle technically. But be
honest, I can't differentiate it much from 50cm away, my usual reading distance.
Quite satisfied with the overall building quality and its powerhouse rendering
books, especially its PDF handling much better than Kindle Oasis. For Android
8.1 under-hood, it theoretically supports almost all apps. But after two days
use, I resisted attractions to use them and here you go some tips to make it a
better tool for you, who just want to indulge yourself in reading.
- Use Calibre
- Install Koreader
- Solve Problems
For whom would read a lot of PDF, there are obvious reasons to follow these tips
for you. Before showing the evidences, let's have a look at Inkpad X default UI.
After unboxing it, you could see the default calendar ScreenSaver, and Inkpad X
provides a very convenient scheduler app. Unfortunately, the events added in
scheduler won't appear in ScreenSaver. Good news is Inkpad X allows to change
ScreenSaver.
Pressing the beautiful red button on top of Inkpad X would bring you to its
default UI, with four items in left menu:
- Reading (this is to use DuoKan, the default reading app for Inkpad X)
- Scheduler
-
Applications, listing all apps installed. I loaded Wechat Reader, Kindle,
Overdrive to borrow NLB library books, KOReader. Please be noted the
floating ball app I enabled to make navigation handy.
- Settings
The floating ball was used to take all screenshots here. All the screenshots are
colorful, including DuoKan's reading interface, except for Koreader's. This is
the first reason I recommend not using DuoKan when reading PDF. I guess Koreader
pre-processed the PDF to greyscale and rendered better graphic effects comparing
with DuoKan, side by side. Second reason is Koreader's PDF rendering is much
faster.
DuoKan seems able to scan at backend to pickup books copied to Books directory
when you connect Inkpad X to Windows PC. However, it didn't list all the books
copied, while Koreader recoganized all of them except for AZW3 format. So I
converted all AZW3 to Mobi so make Koreader to list all. This is the 3rd reason
I don't like DuoKan for its weaker format support or whatever reason not listing
copied books. A very different between Koreader and DuoKan/Kindle is the
organization of books. Koreader does not reorganize books according to metadata
in categories, instead, it just displays the books as how they are saved in file
system structure. This sounds a bad thing especially when the books are not well
organized before hand. Calibre saved my day and make it even better with its
customizable file system structure when copying books into devices based on
embedded metadata. I tend to use Inkpad as pure reader and not use other apps or
take notes on it, which could be killer app for many though. For my kids,
dictionary is the key to learn. But Koreader v2020.08.1 dictionary does not work
out of box. After
asking Koreader's developers, it's a bug causing downloaded dictionary uncompressed. The solution working
for me is to uncompress the dictionary downloaded at koreader/data/dict. Now my
kids are happy.
