The E-ink Kindle-competitor Android should have made a long time ago

A cross between a Kindle, a Wacom, and an Android Tablet, the E-Pad is something that should’ve been launched years back… by Amazon, Samsung, or perhaps even by Adobe. Designed to be a touchscreen tablet with an e-ink display and a stylus, the E-Pad closes the gap between owning a digital device, and a notepad and pencil, and conceptually, that’s a pretty remarkable thing. Here’s why…

Tablets (or even folding phones now) always promised to be one thing. The evolution of laptops and notebooks, downsizing your work productivity to a device you could carry under your arm, rather than in a bulky, elaborately padded laptop bag. However, tablets really failed to deliver on that promise. The Kindle was only a book-reading device, the iPad for the longest time was dragged down by the iOS operating system that wasn’t made for office productivity (and then the iPad Pro turned out to be way too expensive), and Android tablets… well, the less that’s said about them the better. They became the default hardware at coffee-shop kiosks and supermarket-feedback-machines. In short, they just didn’t get the larger picture. At the end of the day everyone went back to keeping actual, physical notebooks they would jot down their plans, ideas, notes into with a real pen. That interaction, which tech promised to displace, never went away to begin with. The E-Pad, however, sets out deliver on the promise and to not make the same mistakes its predecessors did.

The E-Pad is a fusion of two experiences. The comfort of writing with a pen or pencil on paper, with the convenience of a digital tablet. Designed with a touchscreen e-ink display, the E-Pad even packs a stylus that allows you to write on it the way you would on paper, with the output looking stunningly similar to ink on paper too. Flip the stylus over and you’ve got an eraser that erases what you’ve written, completing the experience in every way. At the heart, the E-Pad is an Android-based tablet that lets you use it the way you would a digital device. Built with Android 8.0, the E-Pad lets you do anything an Android tablet would do, and even access and download apps on the Play Store. While the b/w display isn’t particularly made for binge-watching Netflix, you can pretty much do anything you would on an Android device, including browsing the web, checking your mail, sending texts, using Photoshop, and obviously, taking notes and reading books. The E-Pad even comes with Object Character Recognition that converts your handwritten notes into editable text, allowing you to save/edit/send transcripts of your notes. And yes, it can connect to a wireless keyboard for seamless typing too.

The E-Pad packs a pretty remarkable Ultra-HD e-ink display, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage that collectively should blow your Kindle out of the water. With its stylus, sketching on the E-Pad is remarkably similar to doodling on paper, and the absence of perceivable pixels gives you crisp strokes of your pencil, as well as of text, when you’re reading a book, newspaper, or magazine. Finally, conquering the final frontier of tablet design, the E-Pad packs a SIM card slot, giving it 4G connectivity, making it better than A. the Kindle, B. the run-of-the-mill Android Tablet, and C. pen and paper. The E-Pad delivers on the promise of making the tablet useful in the way it intended to be. The tablet promised to be a device for productivity and just ended up becoming a larger version of your phone that didn’t see much use apart from gaming and media-viewing. The E-Pad, on the other hand, does what tablets (or at least some of them) should have done a long time ago.

Designer: Eewriter

Click Here to Buy Now: $474 (E-Pad and Stylus).

Click Here to Buy Now: $474 (E-Pad and Stylus)