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.

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.

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.

Do you have it setup to sync highlights/annotations? how does that work for you?

https://github.com/readest/readest is looking quite promising

I’m not that techy on the screens front but it’s not totally a regular lcd but not as good as e-ink either. It’s kinda something in between. I’ve only gotten to play with it a for a few minutes so far but it’s hard to describe. These pictures do it some justice though: https://www.androidcentral.com/tablets/tcl-nxtpaper-4-fixes-one-of-the-technologys-biggest-hidden-issues

Does the pocketbook app/device let you annotate books? It seems quite interesting but not generally available in the US. Read era does look interesting though.