A couple new Veidoo ereaders/eNotes have turned up for sale on Amazon, and the prices seem pretty reasonable, but it looks like there might be a good reason for that.
There’s a Veidoo 10.3″ eNote for $268.99, but it’s temporarily unavailable, so we’ll focus on this Veidoo 8.2″ model for now, which is currently available to order for $248.99 and it’s expected to ship within 1-2 months.
Normally I’d be hesitant to post about these kind of obscure ereaders from China, but the same company has been selling this $59 5.8″ Veidoo ereader on Amazon for a couple years now. It has terrible reviews, but it is a legit product, and you can’t expect much from something that sells for half the price of similar devices.
These new models are probably rebranded clones of similar products from some manufacturer in China, and they’re probably not very good either, but there are some interesting details to consider.
First off, an 8.2″ E Ink screen size is very uncommon. And the Veidoo 8.2 actually has a high resolution screen (1440 x 1920, which equates to 292 ppi) unlike the 10.3″ model and 5.8″ model. The first red flag, the title for the product says E Ink and IPS, which obviously doesn’t make sense (IPS is a type of LCD screen).
The second red flag is the fact the listing says it runs “Android”, but nowhere does it say what version of Android is on it or if it supports Google Play (it probably doesn’t).
Another red flag, the picture of the library view shows a bunch of ugly generic covers instead of the actual covers—that’s not a good sign. And it almost certainly doesn’t natively support ebooks with DRM. They say it supports EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats.
The description says the Veidoo 8.2″ has a frontlight with warm and cool color temperature control, along with dark mode for white text on a black background.
As far as specs go, it has an undisclosed quad-core CPU with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. It supports dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0, and it has dual speakers. It has a USB-C port, but there’s no mention of OTG support, and it has a 3000mAh battery.
The Veidoo 8.2″ ereader comes with a case and a stylus pen. One of the product pictures says it’s a Wacom pen that supports 4096 levels of pressure, which is a big plus (I would’ve expected a cheaper alternative at that price).
There used to be more ereaders and smaller eNotes in the 8″ range, but now there aren’t very many at all. It’s interesting to see this one using an 8.2″ E Ink screen with 292 ppi. Maybe we’ll start seeing more ereaders and eNotes with 8.2″ screens in the near future.
(Normally I’d be hesitant to post about these kind of obscure ereaders from China, but the same company has been selling this $59 5.8″ Veidoo ereader on Amazon for a couple years now. )
I think it’s great that you will post about something that an unsuspecting consumer may consider a good deal without any knowledge, Yet here you are providing knowledge about it, both possible negatives and positives. This (if someone follows your blog) gives us ways to make more of an informed decision.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks, Nathan.
.mobi?! Can you even buy a .mobi ebook anymore?
Pocketbook I think (natively, but probably not DRM). Any ebook reader where KOReader can be installed (Kobo and Android devices).
I can see in a brochure in Amazon that the device runs Androd 11. Google Play is not mentioned. The brochure says e-ink (IPS is not mentioned, albeit it appears in the title of the product in Amazon). The battery is 3000mAh. The aspect ratio should be 4:2, but this is clearly wrong (likely 4:3). According to Amazon (not the company bronshure), the weight is 392 grams, which is quite a lot (but it may be the weight including the cover and the pen or even the boxed product). It has wifi, BT, stereo speakers. It is tempting, as an alternative to the Kobo Sage, but first I want to see some review.
So I went ahead and bought it. The weight is correct, it’s surprisingly heavy – seems to be all-metal?
The screen is 124x165mm which is indeed a 4:3 (well, a 3:4).
It offers a Google Store app but I haven’t tried using it – I stay away from the entire google ecosystem as much as possible. I’d also not be 100% sure of what app I’d be typing credentials in.
Fortunately F-droid and the Aurora store both work and I didn’t have to enable any hidden settings in order to install them – just went to f-droid with the browser
Speaking of the browser – it ships with (or auto-updated to?) Chrome 141.
The screen is surprisingly good even though the controls are a bit weird – there are a moon and a sun icon which respectively control a cold frontlight and a warm frontlight.
Apart from the built-in book reader, there is another built-in app for drawing/writing with the supplied EMR stylus and it seems these 2 are the _ONLY_ ones which respond immediately to the stylus. Anything else I tried (DrawNote, INKredible, Sketchbook, a couple more) has about half a second of delay, your drawing lags weirdly behind. There is a (per-app) e-ink preference widget where you can choose the tradeoff between quality and refresh time – but it only brings the pen input lag down by a bit.
Overall…. I like it. I could put KoReader on it, which is 75% of my entire planned usage. The built-in book reader is clunky but allows stylus annotations, which covers another 10% of my use cases.
The display is really, really crisp (I just returned a Remarkable Paper Pro Move whose screen was a big disappointment – even in B/W mode it had very visible jagging when rendering any text – and it was close to triple the price of this one)
I still have to find an app launcher I like (the built-in one is ugly although functional), and a few apps occasionally got stuck leaving me no way to get out of them (the home icon sometimes won’t receive my input if the app in foreground is really dead? Not sure) so I had to reboot.
…which takes me to the only really considerable negative aspect so far: battery life and boot time.
It has a “screen timeout” mode (more like a sleep) and a full shutdown one. When sleeping it wakes up reasonably fast, but the battery keeps draining and it’s not huge, so I can’t really disable the shutdown. This means I am often, often having to wait for it to boot. It’s not a super long wait, but it is a bit offputting
An update after a few more days of usage:
Whatever battery drain was occurring in the first day or 2, maybe it was related to the device just having updated itself and doing some kind of internal housekeeping? Anyway it’s now gone, it hardly loses 2-3% over a full day in standby, so I disabled the auto-shutdown and I’m quite happier with the device waking up instantly.
While my use has been limited (work’s been quite pressing), I haven’t stumbled into anything I didn’t like. It… just works, and I’m happy with it. It’s amazing value for money – does way more than a kindle scribe or a Remarkable (except handwriting recognition, which I imagine can be meaningful to some). Thanks to einkbro I have a very enjoyable browser I wasn’t even expecting to have – the provided chrome was already sufficient although suboptimal.
To my complete amazement, youtube is usable on einkbro! Once I set the e-ink preference widget to “speed”, it resulted in a fairly tolerable experience! I tried it just out of curiosity and don’t plan to be using it beyond that, but that was still a nice surprise.
My return window is about to expire, and I decided I’m keeping it. I’m happy with it, it does more than I had planned using it for, and does it well. I only wish it was lighter, and that 3rd party apps didn’t have this lag when using the stylus, then it would be perfect.
Good to hear it’s worth keeping. There are a lot of options out there for eNotes nowadays and it’s hard to know what to get.
Contre toute attente c’est une excellent liseuse. Le contraste est excellent et la Ram aussi car elle gère très bien ma bibliothèque de 3500 livres. La lecture à haute voix (TTS) marche à la perfection, et le Google play store fonctionne aussi très bien pour l’installation d’applications via Android 11. De plus, la liseuse gère très bien la lecture des PDF (pdf reflow très performant). Franchement cette liseuse mérite le détour !
So far I am liking it, but the case is not good. Has anybody found a compatible case for this system? Most of the universal cases I have researched have horizontal kick stand, which wont really work for this.