The Penstar eNote is a new E Ink notetaking device that doubles as an ereader, and it has some unique features that set it apart from other eNotes.
The first thing that jumps out about the Penstar eNote is the fact that it has nine physical buttons along the side of the screen, which can be used for a number of different things, including turning pages. Most eNotes don’t have any buttons at all, other than a power button, so that’s pretty unusual. And there’s a good reason for it.
The Penstar eNote comes with a stylus, and the screen supports stylus input (obviously), but it doesn’t support finger touch, so it doesn’t have a capacitive touchscreen layer.
The device also lacks a frontlight layer—there isn’t a built-in light. It sounds like they wanted to make the screen as clear and paperlike as possible, so they did away with the extra layers. The only thing that doesn’t add up about that philosophy is the Penstar eNote uses a standard 10.3″ E Ink Carta screen with 227 ppi, instead of a newer 300 ppi screen like on the Boox Go 10, but nonetheless the screen probably looks really nice without the added layers.
The built-in Notes app offers a solid set of features, including converting handwritten notes to typed text, audio recording, there’s split screen, native office editing, and there are various pen types and colors to choose from. It also syncs with Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
They say the stylus supports 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity, which is higher than other Wacom-equipped eNotes that support 4096.
The software is based on Android 11 and the device supports installing apps, so that opens up a lot of possibilities as well. The built-in software supports 35 document types including PDF, EPUB, MOBI, TXT, Word, PPT, etc.
Specs-wise it has a 1.8GHz quad-core CPU, with 2GB of RAM, and there’s 32GB of internal storage. It supports dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0. It has a USB-C port and a rotation sensor. There’s also a speaker and a mic for recording. It has a 6000mAh battery. The weight is listed at 390 grams and the measurements are 198 x 226 x 5.5mm.
The overall specs aren’t quite up their with Onyx’s eNotes, but the Penstar eNote is a little less expensive. It’s currently selling for $369 on Amazon.
Can the screen be rotated 180 degrees so that the buttons are on the other side (for left-handed people)? Having buttons only on the left side — is almost a deal breaker.
Yes. It has a gravity-sensing feature that adjusts screen orientation.
This looks like an interesting device, but I couldn’t find out much about the company that makes it (i.e., Penstar Innovation).
Yeah, I’ve never heard of them before either. But the software looks like it has a decent amount of features for a 1st gen model.
Oh, that looks hot.
I’d like a larger bezel(function over form, sue me), but that’s most of what I actually want.
What the time lag like been powering on and actually being able to use the device? I’ve got a Boox Note Air 2 and I find the time to wait really annoying, it feels like it takes over a minute, which isn’t long in the great scheme of things but is if you’re in a meeting or call and want to quickly jot some notes down.
I don’t have this device so I don’t know, but there’s a setting on Onyx’s devices where you can set it to never turn off. Then you only have to boot from sleep mode and it’s much faster. Battery life will take a slight hit but if you’re using it all the time the difference is negligible.
Ok thanks. Out of interest, have you tried Remarkable 2 or Pro and if so, what’s the boot time like on them?
It’s been awhile since I used the RE2 so I don’t remember exactly, but they all take awhile from a powered off state, except Kindles since they don’t ever power off—they do a deep sleep thing that takes like 5 seconds to turn on.