Wednesday, March 17, 2021

e-book gets colors!

I decided to pick the expensive-but-easy road and to give the Nova 3 Color a try. It's been too long I'm trying to 'repair' web access on my N96 boox.

 Since the device comes with Chinese manuals, I've took some time to review

The personal note data will never be shared to any third party or internal staff 
[we] may collect info about installed applications, SDK version, system update settings

There are a good deal of things I've had to do to get the device in a usable state.

First, the device is initially couldn't use Google services. I had no "Play Store" around, but even the few google applications that were available through Boox's "Application store" (containing mostly alternate ebook viewers and book collections) -- like Google Drive -- wouldn't work because "the device was not certified". 

Fixing that one wasn't too hard. Just below 'Enable Google Play', there was a cryptic 'GSF ID' box and tapping it (as suggested) took me through the process of telling google I trust the device and so should they (if I understood things correctly). I guess I couldn't expect more from a Chinese device right now.


Second, many of the 3rd-party applications I installed once this was fixed rendered weirdly. They seemed to believe that, as soon as text is large enough, it should be shown with outlined white characters.

I couldn't find any settings menu to change the system font or whatever and I started to get worried. Hopefully, this is tweakable, but not just with a system-wide configuration as I expected (or were told). 

Instead, we can tweak this application-by-application by means of the '°¨_o_' button of the ring-menu. The thing I had to disable was 'whiten the background', something that is certainly a good feature in many places but for some reason leads to weird-looking text.

I can also lie to applications about the device's resolution (actually 1872×1404 at 300dpi, which is über-amaZing) so that it doesn't throw huge fonts at me. That made Wordpress and Twitter back to normal rendering (with the stunning handscript recognition added ^_^)

As far as the device is concerned, my last regret is the lack of a micro SD card support and of an audio jack. So far the over-provisioned 32GB of internal flash sounds enough, but I don't like having to rely solely on some soldered, fated-to-fail storage on my device.

Now, I'll have to understand why the device cannot render my code-in-epub properly, and why it seems to be unable to browse completely my (huge, I must confess) epub files.

Until then, I think I'll populate '#booxread' on twitter ...

2 comments:

PypeBros said...

first inking on boox from a sketch previously sent to CJ over twitter. Massively relying on screenshot feature.

bookeen said...

We finally have a similar device too. No colours, though.