Quick Summary
Fancy a Kindle Colorsoft but wish it was as big as the Kindle Scribe? PocketBook's InkPad Eo is a 10-inch Android e-reader/notepad with colour E Ink.
Priced at £449, it's available now.
We've seen some interesting new electronic readers in recent months, that keep the convenience of Kindles but add extra screen size, features or colour. But they've typically offered some, but not all of those features.
For example, Amazon's Kindle Scribe has an excellent large screen but doesn't deliver colour, whereas the Kindle Colorsoft gives you colour but only on a 7-inch screen.
That's where the PocketBook InkPad Eo comes in. It's a colour device and bigger than both the Kindle Colorsoft and even PocketBook's own Verse Pro Color.
The inkPad Eo is 7mm thick, weighs a relatively titchy 470g and has a 10.3-inch colour E Ink display. The Android-powered device is also a productivity device for note-taking and editing, and you can use it for drawing and writing too.
How does the PocketBook InkPad Eo compare to its rivals?
Colour E Ink isn't quite up to the standards of monochrome when it comes to resolution (without breaking the bank, anyway), so while devices such as the Kindle Colorsoft can display at 300 pixels per inch in mono, they only deliver 150ppi in colour. It's the same here, albeit on a significantly larger scale.
Both the Kindles run Amazon's own software, but the InkPad Eo is powered by Android 11 with support for third-party apps from the Play Market.
It supports 17 ebook and graphic formats natively, and it's built for Google Play Books as well as third-party reading apps. Those apps may also offer additional format support.
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The processor is a 2.3GHz octa-core model, but of course the bottleneck in terms of speed is E Ink, which is significantly slower than normal tablet displays – this is not a device to play Doom on.
Like the Kindle Scribe, the InkPad Eo offers handwriting recognition to create and save editable text, and the InkPad goes further with the addition of a camera that you can use to capture photos for embedding, commenting or annotating.
The InkPad is more expensive than Amazon's devices. Its RRP is £449 ($550 / about AU$927), which is £180 more than the Colorsoft and about £20 more than the closest Scribe rival, the 64GB model at £429.99 (which is currently out of stock on Amazon's website). And that's before the usual Amazon own-brand discounting.
However, the InkPad Eo is much bigger than the Colorsoft – a good thing for comic book reading, PDFs and note-taking – and offers the same size of screen as the Scribe plus colour E Ink too. It'll be distributed in the UK via Laptops Direct.