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Onyx Boox Note 3

I have been using the Onyx Boox Note 3 for a couple months now and wanted to give some feedback. To give you some context on my use case, I decided to go with the Note 3 over competition because it allowed me to read and mark up documents on an eink device with the ability/freedom to sync these documents to all my other devices (running on android). So I am storing all files on my own file server and syncing with an android app using Webdav.

I read all my books using PDFs because it is the only format that allows saving to the original file, allowing me to sync back to my server.

Overall I have really liked my experience with the tablet, but have found some bugs and misses in the software that I'd love to call out. I'll first call out my top 3 requests, then list everything categorically. I would like to point out that 2 of the top 3 have to do with navigation which has been most frustrating.

My top 3 requests

  1. No back button after clicking links in PDFs!! After clicking links (either on purpose or even worse on accident!) you are stuck. This makes links in PDFs and ebooks TOTALLY useless and I can never use them.
  2. Swiping is too small to be useful in most cases. I would love some ability to adjust the distance it takes to notice a swipe.
  3. Can't search scribbles on pages! This seems weird because it should be the same data set as a note and would be so helpful.

Other gripes

PDF Bug?

  • Bookmarks don't save back to PDF files. This is a huge bummer. I would love to see my bookmarks when I am scrolling through the book on my laptop.

Search

  • If I'm not mistaken, searching within a directory still searches all files. Searching hand written text takes a long time and there should be some way to filter the files being searched to reduce search time. There does seem to be caching which helps, but would still like some way to reduce search time rather than essentially re-indexing every search.

Reading Annotations

  • Highlight color is too dark, not enough contrast on black text forcing change to white text which is not ideal. I'd love another, lighter option for highlight color.
  • Highlight should capture surrounding punctuation like quotes or period. Almost every one of my highlights is missing the period at the end of the sentence.
  • There is no way to own raw note data with simple webdav. The only way to sync these notebooks is to export them as PDFs which loses all the functionality (I believe).