BenJackson
举人
I just got one of these and I'm happy to answer questions about reading Chinese on it (or using Pleco). It's a little rough around the edges, but as long as you're a little technically inclined it's pretty easy to get set up. You can activate the Play store and install basically anything.
Pleco itself works fine. After importing my phone settings, all I really did was manually choose a black & white theme and disable some of the BOOX "optimizations" that were hurting instead of helping.
I've tried several readers on it: The built-in one, Kindle, Google Play Books, 豆瓣阅读, and of course Pleco. They all work fine. The built-in reader is really the best one, offering the most text spacing options (which can make Chinese much more attractive and easier to read) plus the native pen support allows nearly zero lag on pen annotation. All of them work best with their settings adjusted (avoiding animations) and the BOOX "optimizations" which override some rendering for better E Ink behavior.
This E Ink is much, much more responsive than the older Kindle E Ink readers I've used before. Scrolling, pinch zooming, dragging, etc are all possible when the panel is in one of its faster modes. However, the experience with things like readers, menus, etc is nicer if the animations are minimized and you use the slowest/cleanest refresh setting. The tablet has a pretty capable CPU, so most of the time when things feel laggy it's down to the way the display is updating.
The other readers are so much nicer to use than Pleco's that I find I do not use Pleco to read ebooks despite the nice dictionary integration. Instead, there are a couple other ways to interact with the dictionary from other readers:
Pleco itself works fine. After importing my phone settings, all I really did was manually choose a black & white theme and disable some of the BOOX "optimizations" that were hurting instead of helping.
I've tried several readers on it: The built-in one, Kindle, Google Play Books, 豆瓣阅读, and of course Pleco. They all work fine. The built-in reader is really the best one, offering the most text spacing options (which can make Chinese much more attractive and easier to read) plus the native pen support allows nearly zero lag on pen annotation. All of them work best with their settings adjusted (avoiding animations) and the BOOX "optimizations" which override some rendering for better E Ink behavior.
This E Ink is much, much more responsive than the older Kindle E Ink readers I've used before. Scrolling, pinch zooming, dragging, etc are all possible when the panel is in one of its faster modes. However, the experience with things like readers, menus, etc is nicer if the animations are minimized and you use the slowest/cleanest refresh setting. The tablet has a pretty capable CPU, so most of the time when things feel laggy it's down to the way the display is updating.
The other readers are so much nicer to use than Pleco's that I find I do not use Pleco to read ebooks despite the nice dictionary integration. Instead, there are a couple other ways to interact with the dictionary from other readers:
- Turn on Pleco's "automatically look up clipboard" feature, cut the word, then launch Pleco. The BOOX "navigation ball" makes it possible to launch Pleco with two touches from anywhere, so this works okay. Cutting is awkward (using your finger to select on a tablet is always fussy and the latency of E Ink makes it worse). Cutting is improved by using one of the faster panel modes, but those leave more noise on the screen, and are not normally needed for readers.
- Share to Pleco. This is handy in readers like 豆瓣阅读 which include it in the cut & paste popup menu. You can also be sloppier about cutting because it shares it to the clip reader so you can then re-select the target word.
- Pleco's screen reader (whichever one OCRs the current screen into the clip reader): This is pretty terrible because it turns the current page into a wall of text in Pleco with zero formatting and you have to find the word you're interested in again.
- Pleco's screen OCR: This is a little rough around the edges, but my general preference. You can add this to the quick actions menu in Android (like where the Wifi button is when you drag down from the top of the screen). You need to set the "basic overlay color" to black in Pleco settings. Ideally you'd set it to "none", but that's not possible. Pleco will OCR the whole screen, and then you can click on the words you want to define. Because of the unavoidable overlay, the text will be less legible than it was, but setting overlay to black basically makes it "ugly bold". The main issue with this is getting out of it requires clicking "back". The Pleco overlay covers the "navigation ball" overlay (although it includes the image of it, which is confusing) so that option is not available. If back is still bound to the main physical button, that works great. Otherwise you have to swipe down to get to the soft back button there.
- It has good Chinese support (in fact simplified Chinese is the default language option) but it doesn't have good mixed language support. You can set the built-in note app to be searchable in Chinese (independent of system locale) but then the English searching is not as good. Also switching modes resets the cache so the next search is very slow as it re-does all the recognition. The handwriting recognition of the notes is good in both languages, though.
- Similarly you will want to install gboard or some other replacement keyboard that has quick access to switch between English and Chinese.
- Pen input in non-native pen apps (like Pleco, or OneNote) is much, much laggier than the native apps. Pleco is generally usable for single character input, although a few times I've seen it get in a state where the lag is 10x worse and unusable. There are many refresh settings that interact, so I suspect it's due to one of those.
- It will easily read a PDF textbook. There are lots of videos of these tablets working with PDFs (including exportable annotations) if you look on youtube. You might prefer the larger (10") tablet for that, though.
- No speakers, no microphone, and no headphone jack. It does have USB-C, and the adapter that came with my Pixel 2 worked. It also has bluetooth.
- Did you know you can only be logged onto WeChat from one device at a time? Can be awkward if you used it as a single sign-on for other services like 豆瓣.