It’s a tablet but it’s also an ebook reader and above all it’s a digital notebook: it’s called Lenovo Smart Paper, it’s among the products we liked the most among those seen at CES 2023 in Las Vegas and now that it’s available in Italy we decided to give it a try.
Con 10.3” e-ink screenbrightness sensor, 4 GB of Ram and 64 GB of storage space, the new Smart Paper it costs 499 euros, which seems to be a fair figure if we consider the build quality and above all the fact that both the pen and the cover that holds it in place are included in the price.
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How the Lenovo Smart Paper is made
In Lenovo’s intentions, the device fits in the market segment of the ReMarkable (our test)which is the same one she slipped into also Amazon with the Kindle Scribe (proof): the Smart Paper is a bit between the two from an economic point of view and actually seems a bit halfway between the two.
It is thought more for writing than for readingwhich is something that can be done very, very well and with great simplicity: allowing you to take notes by hand, to write on them, even simulating more or less intense and thick strokes, add notes or annotations to books, hear a voice speaking (for example during a lesson, a meeting, a conference) e transcribe his words.
Weight, 430 grams detected being tested (including the cover and the pen), it is small enough not to make it tiring to hold it for long in your hand or on your knees: you can vary the stroke of the pen supplied in 9 ways, use the eraser, there are fifty pre-set templates and you can too change the hue of the display from white to light yellow. It really is like having a notepad, only not made of paper.
It also (and this is something competitors don’t let) allows you to make notes in a book that you are reading, creating a sort of supplementary layer that does not modify the book but overlaps it. That’s a good thing, but it’s just with books that the Lenovo Smart Paper has some problems.
The case of the missing ebooks
The device uses software borrowed from Android, but does not have Google Mobile Services: there is no Play Store and therefore there are no apps nor is there a convenient place to download them. It can be done with the so-called sideloading of APK files, but it is not a very elegant solution and above all it is not said that it is within everyone’s reach.
This means that the Kindle app is not there and therefore there is not even access to the largest digital library of all, that of Amazon: Lenovo says that the Smart Paper provides “more than 2 million ebooks to choose from,” and indeed the eBooks.com app comes pre-installed on the device. Just that on eBooks.com, there are practically no books in Italian.
The absence of the apps also causes other problems: there is Google Drive, but the files in your folder, those created with Google Docs, are not read by the device. There is WPS Office, which however communicates with Drive with no small effort: if you write a note by hand and then convert it into text (a very simple operation), the file will be saved in WPS and then you can edit it upload to Drive, where it will open as txt. As said: it can be done, but it is cumbersome. Or at least more cumbersome than we would have hoped.
In a nutshell: the Lenovo Smart Paper does very well what the ReMarkable already does, compared to which it costs about ten euros less, but both are deficient in terms of reading of ebooks, something in which the Kindle Scribe excels, although it is less effective from a writing point of view. The ideal would be a tablet as good as the Smart Paper in this area but with Android apps, so you can read ebooks properly. Just that such a device does not yet exist.
If the purpose is to have a digital notebook, e you already have a Kindle at home (even the basic one is fine), then Smart Paper or ReMarkable are a great choice and more or less equal (Lenovo’s product perhaps wins on points). If, on the other hand, you want to do a little bit of everything and are willing to accept some compromisesperhaps it is better to move towards the Amazon Scribe.
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