Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 37

I’ve been using the Poke3 as my main ebook reader for a couple of years now. It’s the same 6-7-inch form factor as the Kindle Paperwhite or the Kobo Clara, which makes it easy to carry around whether you’re reading on the go, in bed, or anywhere in between. It’s an e-ink display, which means its battery lasts longer and you can read it easily in bright sunlight. The display is sharp enough to minimize eyestrain.

What makes it different is that it’s not a single-purpose device. It’s an Android tablet. That means I’m not limited to the built-in software for reading side-loaded DRM-free books. I can hook it up to Google Play or F-Droid and install other ebook apps like KOReader or Librera…and the Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and eBooks.com readers and read books from any eBook store. (It occurs to me I’ve never used the Onyx store/cloud connectivity.) I’ve built up extensive libraries on Kindle and Kobo over the past decade-plus, along with books direct from publishers, in Humble Bundles, from public domain sources and so on. It’s nice to be able to find them all on one device. And of course it’s not limited to just ebooks: RSS readers, Pocket, viewing websites or Gemini capsules, email, you name it!

The built-in e-reader app, Neo Reader, is optimized well, and a lot more responsive than anything else except KOReader (which is also designed for e-ink displays), so I end up using one of those when possible. The built-in Chromium-based web browser, Neo Browser, works well enough.

• Kindle, Kobo, Libby, Nook and eBooks.com reader apps all work, with display tweaks. (Nook’s video splash screen looks terrible, but book pages are fine.)
• Hoopla works, though you have to enable background activity in the system’s Optimize dialog to download books. (The Android app setting for background battery use doesn’t do anything when you try to change it directly.)
• Bookshop.org’s app has trouble with basic actions like turning pages, making it more or less unusable. It’s pretty new as I write this, though, so I’m hoping either the app will improve or it already works on newer e-ink hardware.
• Lagrange works really well for Gemini capsules.
• Firefox and Vivaldi both work, but are slower than Neo Browser.

Battery life is surprisingly good, especially with it set to freeze apps when they’re not in the foreground, and auto-shutdown after a period of inactivity. (The downside is that it doesn’t put you right back where you left off if it’s powered down all the way.) And it charges and syncs via USB-C, which means I don’t have to go hunting for a micro-USB cable!

Display

The pre-installed apps are all well-optimized for e-ink displays. The resolution is high enough to minimize eyestrain. And there’s a frontlight with adjustable brightness and color temperature, which is nice!

Now, e-ink displays update slowly to begin with. But the touchscreen responsiveness on the Poke3 is way too slow for anything highly interactive. The on-screen keyboard can be painfully slow. Even tapping on an app icon or flipping through pages can be hit-or-miss sometimes.

The bigger problem is that most Android apps aren’t designed for e-ink. They’re designed for full-color displays where gradients look good and you can choose off-white or off-black for your background to reduce eyestrain…when what works best on this kind of display is mostly solid black and white, with the occasional grayscale for photos. The built-in apps are designed with this in mind. There is a tool for tuning the refresh rate, contrast, fonts and so forth per-app, which helps a lot, but there’s only so much it can do with an app or website that’s designed with dark gray on light gray or colors that contrast each other just fine, but work out to nearly the same shade of gray.

I wouldn’t use it for games, and I don’t do much web browsing on it. My son managed to get YouTube running once, mostly to see what it would look like on the display, but of course the refresh rate was abysmal! But for reading, the display issues are minimal, and the versatility outweighs it.

Update: Longevity and Newer Models

The Poke3 was already old by the time I reviewed it, but it was still doing the job well enough that I didn’t feel the need to replace it for quite a while.

Now, after almost five years, it’s showing its age. The already-poor touch responsiveness has gotten worse. Kobo has been crashing and freezing, and I can’t get the app to change the font size anymore. This was a problem one time I brought it to read in a waiting room but forgot my glasses.

I’ve been happy with Boox overall, so I looked at their current (late 2025) line and decided to pick up the Go 7 Color. So far it’s been great! It’s much faster, and the touch screen is more responsive than the Poke3 when it was new. Apps that I couldn’t get to run usably on the Poke3, like Wallabag and Bookshop, work fine on the Go 7. And it has physical page-flipping buttons, which can be made to work with third-party apps. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and working on a review, which I hope to post soon.

I got nearly five years of use out of the Poke3, which I can’t hate. That’s longer than most manufacturers want you to wait between upgrades!

Then again, we have a Kindle Paperwhite and a Kobo Clara that are both older, and both still run about as well as they used to. Of course, neither of those is running a general-purpose OS with annual updates built for faster hardware, or apps run by companies that feel they need to constantly update (and also use that faster hardware) to stay relevant. The Kindle and Clara don’t exist to sell you hardware, they exist to give you something nicer to read on so you’ll buy more books from Amazon or Kobo. That changes the planned obsolescence calculation.

Updates

It works. More stable than the desktop version. Handles mail, calendar and contacts, offers the focused/other inbox view.

Outlook tries to keep you using Microsoft’s apps as much as possible. It tries to get you to install Edge for opening links. It keeps its calendar and contacts to itself instead of sharing with the system. And of course it wants you to add your other email accounts and use Outlook for them instead of something else.

On the other hand, if you’re using Outlook to access your work email on your otherwise personal phone, that’s actually kind of convenient for keeping them separate.

I’m still amused that this place is still going strong 15 years after Starbucks closed an “underperforming” location.

Back in the day, this was an early location of Diedrich Coffee, a small local chain that grew to a regional chain. It was always busy. Great coffee, and a great place to hang out.

Fast forward a couple of decades: Martin Diedrich stepped back from the company to run a single indie coffee house (the original Kéan) instead of corporate management, and corporate sold the chain to Starbucks. Once this location was converted, it wasn’t worth going to. It was just another Starbucks. And I never saw it full. Never. It closed after only a couple of years.

And then Diedrich picked up the empty storefront and made it a second location for Kéan Coffee…and not only is it really good, it’s worth hanging out at again…and it’s been busy every time I’ve been there since then. And they still roast their own coffee. Whenever I’m in the area, I try to hit either Kéan or Lost Bean. Even if I’m coffee’d out for the day, I’ll grab a bag of coffee beans to take home.

I recommend the Mayan Mocha and the Turkish Latte.

Works well with multiple accounts. Easy to set up with Gmail or with any IMAP-based email provider. Handles both light and dark mode, and is good at detecting when a message was designed for a larger screen and adjusting the layout so you can read it.

But it tracks you more than it should. In particular, any outgoing links are modified to route through Google’s servers first. And I have no idea what else it might be doing with info it gets from my other email accounts – never mind what they do with the actual Gmail account!

Between that, and just generally trying to reduce my dependence on Google, I’ve switched to using K-9 with a third-party email account.

The “Simple Mobile Tools” suite used to be a great source of basic apps that didn’t slurp up your data, clog up your apps with advertising, or charge exorbitant prices. They aren’t anymore.

At the end of 2023, the suite was sold to ZipoApps, a company known for acquiring existing apps and bloating them with all of those things. (Their TrustPilot reviews are an interesting mix of 5-stars from devs who sold them their apps, and 1-stars from customers complaining about unauthorized charges.)

Fortunately, the apps were GPL-licensed.

Forked!

Fossify forked the entire suite, cleaning up anything that’s not compatible license-wise, re-branding the original privacy-focused apps and picking up development.

The forked apps started making their way into F-Droid a week or two ago. The calendar, file manager and gallery were the first.

That was a relief. Back when I started moving my calendars from Google to Nextcloud, I settled on Simple Calendar. That went out the window when I read about the sale. I used Google Calendar for a few weeks – it least I knew what they were collecting – and installed Fossify Calendar as soon as I could do so without side-loading it.

Not Simple Anymore

In the meantime, ZipoApps has indeed started destroying the apps they bought, judging by the reviews. The top one for Simple Calendar today:

It originally said there would be a one-time payment of 2.99 after the free trial. I thought I’d gladly pay that so I continued to use it. When the trial was up I was given the option to buy not for the single payment of 2.99 but for $15/week! The app itself is exactly what I want over other calendars I’ve tried. And I would pay for adless, but over $2/day is insane. Banner ads would be tolerable but it has video ads when opening the app and adding an event. Wish I’d read the reviews.

(Emphasis added.) Before the sale, Simple Mobile Calendar did in fact have a single one-time payment option of a couple of dollars. $2.99 at the most.

The company replied:

Sorry to hear that the price for the Premium subscription seems high to you. Please, note that the App on the Premium version opens up many exciting features and opportunities for you and it is definitely worth the price. The Premium version has no ads. Thank you!

“Seems” high"? $15/week for a simple calendar is exorbitant.

Video advertisements on a basic tool are insane.

And who knows how much data they’re sucking up from your device and probably selling?

I hate this sort of business that purchases something only to strip it for parts and sell off the broken pieces at inflated prices. Destroying things for short-term gain only works until you run out of stuff to destroy and have to start over again. Building something? That’s got long-term potential.

It’s especially galling since the whole purpose of Simple Mobile Tools was to not do this.

Fossify Roll-Out

The Fossify apps are continuing to roll out on F-Droid and the Google Play Store. Update: As of July 2024, Gallery, File Manager, SMS Messenger, Phone, Voice Recorder, Music Player, Notes, Contacts, Calendar and Clock are available on both, with Keyboard on F-Droid and in beta testing on Google Play.

My Experience Using the Apps

I’m continuing to use these:

• Contacts works great with phone, texting and email apps.
• Calendar also works well for scheduling and reminders.
• Voice Recorder is good for taking audio “notes” and then following up on them later.
• Gallery does most of what I want with local photos on my phone.
• Phone is sufficient for making and receiving calls, but lacks transcription and accessibility features.
• File Manager does everything I need a local file manager to do.
• Music Player handles audio that’s stored locally on the phone.
• Calculator does the basics, so you can split a bill or calculate a tip, but probably not write up your lab report.

I’ve extensively tested these, but switched back to Google or to another app:

• Keyboard doesn’t work with my typing style, at least on my phone. I gave it three weeks to see if I could get used to it, but no such luck.
• Camera does OK in good lighting conditions.
• Messages handles SMS/MMS fine, though it lacks RCS support.
• Launcher mostly works, but dosen’t rotate and still has trouble with widgets.