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

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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". 

Bon, c'est pas la voie de l'économie, mais je jette l'éponge: je ne crois plus au fait de remettre en service le navigateur web de ma liseuse Boox N96 et je prends une Nova 3 Color à la place. Les conditions d'utilisations m'ont l'air ok, mais je resterai quand-même à l'écart du booxcloud, vu que l'appareil nous arrive de Chine.

Activer le PlayStore à travers l'application store du constructeur en entrant un GSF ID, désactiver la fonction "blanchir le fond" pour avoir des polices de caractères utilisables, c'est à peu près tout ce qu'il m'aura fallu faire pour arriver à me servir correctement de l'appareil. Je regrette qu'il n'ait pas de slot micro-SD ni de prise jack, mais un affichage 300dpi capable de me montrer quand les choses sont en couleurs avec une reconnaissance des traîts sans faille ... ça mérite quelques compromis.

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 ...