Lenovo Smart Paper: In-Depth Review of Lenovo's First 10.3" E-Ink Notetaking Device. Can It Deliver?

hello my name is Voya and welcome to my deep guide in today's episode we are finally finally finally taking an in-depth look at the Lenovo smart paper now if you guys recall I have received a pre-production unit way back when in March now since that time uh there has been like lots of things going on between Lenovo like web page being pulled and then like 404 and no information then a delay then it was supposed to come out in May it didn't come out now it finally came out in June and now it came out but in yeah Europe not in America and we don't really have uh information of when and if it's going to be available in North America so it's a bit of like a chaotic kind of a story and a launch affordable Lenovo smart paper but it's finally here and that is a very nice thing to see before we begin with the view I would just like to invite you to visit mydipguy.com shop if you like the work that I do then check out the products out there which are the mdo and MMP my daily organizer hyperlinked PDF file which is your organizer yearly quarterly monthly weekly daily organizing needs and MMP is MDG meeting planner which is also a hyperlinked PDF file that helps you centralize organize and simplify your meeting needs if you are interested to find out more about any or both of these products you can check out the links down below for dedicated playlists and if you want to support the independence of my deep guide or the purchasing of these products directly supports that cause so let's take an in-depth look finally at the Lenovo smart paper and see what it has to bring to the a Inc table and here is the Lenovo smart paper finally the official released version so no longer the Prototype or anything like that this is what you actually get when you buy it in the store first the overview what is Lenovo smart paper well no smart paper is an Android 11 powered e-ink 10.3 inch tablet that uses a monochromatic screen and uses a standard resolution that gives you 227 BPI not the 300 PPI that we are starting to see emerge as a new standard for 10.3 inches as such it is a little bit different than what you would expect from either the devices that we have on either end so let's say super minimalistic and digital paper focused types of devices such as the remarkable or on the other end of the spectrum you have like a full-on Android Google Play enabled tablet that just happens to be using an e-ing screen which would be all of the books devices on the other end the Lenovo smart paper would fit somewhere in between these two with a little bit more of an emphasis here so it is focused to be a digital paper replacement tool or a notebook replacement tool with some added functionalities and benefits of it being an Android when compared to an uh remarkable device but it's far more minimalistic and distraction free like the remarkable is than it is on a books device so each this device just happens to be running on Android 11 underneath but it doesn't have a Google Play Store you can't sideload apps you can't do any of those things it doesn't have a camera it doesn't have all any of these distraction things it's a focus device but with just a little bit of kind of sprinkled spices on top to make it more accessible and one more thing this device seems to you have been geared designed and focused with students in mind or study in mind of any kind of sort and this is something that you will see throughout the device and that's kind of the accent that I will be coming back through because you will just see that while it lacks some really obvious things it has some things that no other device has and it's like and it's really really geared like specifically to the um yep to a student taking notes so that's basically the overview of the Lenovo smart paper the initial appeal of the Lenovo smart paper was its priced as its original price when it was announced way back in February March this year was quoted to be like at 399 US Dollars and that you would get like the whole shebang the device a really really good pen and a magnetic folio or a carry yeah Carrie folio that comes as a standard with it and also so a USB cable and a charger which is a difference so all that was supposed to be available for 399 US dollars but it's not when it actually came out the price is 499 euros and that places it firmly into the all of the competitors uh categories granted you do get a fairly comprehensive package but that main advantage which was the price that you would get so much for so little money that actually is gone so let's start with the design and the build quality well right out of the bat this is a Lenovo design and a Lenovo build quality and what does that mean well it means absolutely perfect execution of the uh the proposed design that they have for their device and I'm happy to say that they haven't really changed anything which is a good thing because there was pretty much nothing wrong with the design and the hardware execution of the Prototype device that I had earlier what you have here is a wonderfully manufactured and executed tablet that is of a very very beautiful design yes we have the standard metal bucket design but everything is metal the whole bucket is metal and even this side here is metal and even the pen is metal so it's really really really feels premium all over the place unlike the tab Ultra which does have Edge problems this is how it's supposed to be done so the screen itself the surface of the screen should be flush with the bucket Edge so that when you actually rest your hand on it you do not feel that edge poking into you whatsoever furthermore the edges are chamferred in a very very nice way and the execution is just absolutely Flawless from every angle that you actually take a look at this device it is absolutely Flawless and it looks gorgeous the device weighs at around 408 grams which is actually really really good for an all metal and glass device because that's what Lenovo smart paper is it's all metal and just a glass panel on top but to top it all off this is something that they're not touting but they certainly could if they wanted to Lenovo smart paper is 5.5 millimeters thin this is less than one millimeter thicker than remarkable two but it does have a front light this is a really really important consideration to kind of keep in mind because if you recall note air was the thin list front lid device in the world which actually it was but it was also marketed as such because it was a direct competition with a remarkable but that one was 5.7 millimeters this 5.5 that's very very sweet and you can actually feel that difference definitely when you're holding it in your hand so that kind of combined thing and plus this really really nice uh wider section here for use does lend itself for it to be like a digital notepad or a digital paper replacement tool overall I think that it's a gorgeous looking device it's modern it's extremely well built and I think that the thinness and the weight everything is just like snap on point and it is a very very beautiful device so as the layout goes on the top you have the power button on the side we don't have anything on the bottom we just have this is for Service Tool so nothing that you are going to be concerned with and on the other side we have the USBC for power and data communication dual microphones here on on the back we only have the Lenovo logo legal mumbo jumbo on the back and we have this uh brushed versus somewhat matte side of the uh yeah matte side of the aluminum back and this here is a plastic uh line that is allowing transmittance of wireless communication in the front I don't know if the camera can't pick this up but under the glass panels you will see actually two little kind of see maybe the camera picks it there we go that's the one that's sensor number one this is sensor number two and that actually allows the Lenovo smart paper to sense the lighting conditions around it and auto adjust brightness according to what the sensors see as far as the specifications go go well it's using a rock chip processor which is using a quad core arm cortex a55 so the standard thing that we've seen in the jacobo ellipse and everywhere else so that one actually has a 1.8 gigahertz and the built-in Apu uh GPU in this whole APU unit is the arm Mali G55 so fairly standard stuff it has four gigabytes of non-upgradable of course lpddr4 Ram which is quite sufficient for this kind of configuration has 64 gigabytes of emmc 5.1 uh storage non-expandable but you do get 64 gigabytes of it which is really really good to see it does not have any speakers but it does have a dual microphone array here um so then you're kind of wondering like what's the whole point well this is a bluetooth enabled device so you can attach a Bluetooth periphery audio periphery of any kind that you choose so Bluetooth speaker bluetooth headphones or anything or earbuds and then use it with the smart paper that way it has no camera and it does not have voice call support important to know as far as sensors goes it has an accelerometer so it's able to kind of sense oh I'm now I mean landscape mode now I am in portrait mode we have the ambient light sensor and the whole sensor and I believe that these two combined it is equipped with a 3550 milliamp battery it is saying that we have the uh 10.3 inch 227 PPI monochromatic screen E Ink screen multi-age capable and a contrast ratio is 8.0 it is equipped with a dual front light with 24 brightness level and 24 adjustable temperature tone temperature tone so it has cold and warm front light enabled very importantly it has an anti-glare surface which is exceptionally good like the anti-glare surface and the paper like surface that it actually gives is really really really good so that's something that you can definitely keep in mind it is of course capacitive touch and most importantly depend it's a pro that's supplied is an EMR Wacom standard so that means that if for some reason you don't like this pen and there is a reason it has no eraser it has no button right so that is a perfectly very valid reason to say like hey I don't want that pen I want my Samsung S6 or S7 or regular or light pen which has that button and it has a magnet and it can't fit there but it can fit on the side so that kind of replacement stuff you can do but you should be aware that the uh yeah the the placement of the pen magnetic wise they're gonna move it but if you don't care about that you can flip it around and it's going to be there and it's going to be held by the really cool little pouch that D flip cover has so yeah uh EMR where compens supported on the smart paper it has Bluetooth 5.2 Dual Band Wi-Fi you get the installed clock calculator calendar convert handwriting to text document support ePub PDF Microsoft Office that's it uh ebook ebooks.com app record live dictation email search all handwritten notes and content however more stuff like PC and mobile data synchronization is supported with Lenovo smart paper app but there's a caveat for that but we'll get to that a little bit later so those are the specifications of the device and as I said super thin very nice weight so yes on paper it delivers a lot especially with the 64 gigabytes of storage for that price tag so even though it is priced higher it is something that kinda still makes sense but it is definitely on the pricier side of things so in package is included the standard Lenovo EMR smart paper pen and this is a really really pretty pen it is again executed to Perfection this is all aluminum and is painted in a beautiful beautiful kind of metal gray like the device and it matches it absolutely perfectly which is very very nice to see and most importantly it's using the standard nibs I can't take them out now but it's the standard names that you have with the remarkable books and all the others so if you don't like the feel of the nib which is good but a little bit on the harder side but it's quite quite a good feeling you can actually replace it with something that is more to your liking this is a magnetic pen so the magnet is very strong let's see can you pick up the device via the pan magnet loan easily can you swing the device now this I don't know of any other device that actually can do that so really really strong magnetic hold here but you don't really need to worry about that because you have a dedicated space here for the pen and in combination with the protective cover that actually uh makes sure that you won't lose your pen even if you hold it uh if you hold it here uh if if it can't really get kind of knocked out as you will see when we check out the cover the pen itself feels wonderful to write with the balance is perfect the the the weight holds in the hand is really really good so everything about the pen I really love but it has one huge flaw and one huge emission and that is that it does not have the button it does not have the Eraser I would understand if Lenovo would Supply like an alternative pen as well but I really don't get it if this is aimed at a student who is taking copious amounts of notes during research lectures etc etc the very last thing that should be on that person's mind is to Fumble around the menu to just find the Eraser so that they can erase it instead why why doesn't this pen have a button to actually just support that I I really don't understand I for me this is a very very glaring omission and an unfortunate kind of uh Omission because otherwise this pen would have been absolutely perfect but yeah it has that one massive problem this is made so that it works perfectly in conjunction with the flip book cover which is also magnetic so you just simply put the device and It Centers itself exactly where it needs to because of the magnetic polarities so let's do it again it just kind of and kind of centers itself and you have this indentation here which is basically holding your pen secure so even if it gets hit or anything like that doesn't matter your pen is safe and sound in the pouch itself the cover itself is of a very very nice smooth kind of faux leather type of quality it has follows that same design that we saw on the back of the device so once two-thirds of the of the surface of a certain quality one third of another quality just a discrete Lenovo here and that's it nothing on the back really really lovely execution and quality no stitching however so that's something that I don't know we will see how those Corners are going to survive uh you know frequent taking out of the bag putting it into the bag and uh yeah all all Transportation all that kind of stuff but it seems okay however stitching would have been a nice thing to have seen it has an auto wake up and auto sleep functionality which is great and how does it hold the device the magnet itself let's see okay so it holds it okay so I would grade that at around C plus B minus B minus I think because I really do have to kind of pull a bit higher to to actually get it to drop off so I think that for normal use case scenarios this flipper cover will do its job really well but please keep in mind that this the the name of the product is flip book cover cover being the keyword here so that means this is not a case so do not expect uh case level protection uh for your device from a cover because this is a cover not a case battery life on uh Lenovo smart paper is actually quite okay it's not amazing it's not bad it's actually very very good I would give it a b so uh with the 3550 milliamp battery I believe that it has that big of a battery um I've performed the standardized set of tests which means that for the reader performance I would put the device into three different states front light is 100 intensity 30 in intensity and zero percent intensity and then I would manually flip pages every 20 seconds one page flip and I would do that for one hour in each of the settings average out values and then basically see what kind of performance we are looking at and then for the note taking I would do the same thing except that I would be writing for one hour continuously and in this case I was testing only the realistic options such as the 30 and zero percent with the front light mainly because when we're talking about notes taking the primary battery consumption is going to be the system itself the CPU processing because the input of processing and note taking is the most processor intensive task that Lenovo smart paper will be doing and in that case the front light really doesn't make that big of a difference so the results the battery life results are for reader performance with the front flight at a hundred percent uh intensity it was spending around four percent battery per hour which roughly averages out to around 25 hours of continuous reading time with the front light set at maximum and this is all the tests are done with Wi-Fi on with the front light bumped down to 30 percent that average goes down to three percent per hour or 33.3 hours per charge and when you turn the front light way off then the consumption was actually way way down to around one and a half percent at that point I can't really measure out a precisely knife I would have to do manual flipping for about three to six hours to get it precise but I think that this is around one one and a half percent which means that we're talking roughly about 66 to 100 hours of reading time per charge without the front light which is really really good as far as note taking goes the battery performance was identical and that's expected because of the stuff that I talked about before so at 30 or a zero percent front light the um uh smart paper was spending around six percent per uh hour which means that we can expect something around 16 hours of continuous writing per battery charge with Wi-Fi on and that is an excellent excellent type of a performance as far as image quality goes it's okay I'm gonna zoom in so that you can actually see um things but you need to understand that this device is not made for uh yeah outstanding image quality and things like that and as such you will see um yeah there's there's no color banding and things like that so that's good and black is rendered kind of nicely and precisely but when you actually get to the content itself and the words or in this case notes for example you will see that while they're perfectly legible and readable let's zoom in to the maximum uh that really good uh uh screen surface that gives an excellent uh anti-glare properties and very very paper-like uh um experience when writing it will have a negative effect on the image quality like it does on the remarkable 2. so if you lose a little bit of sharpness you lose a little bit of contrast but overall I think it's a good balance and if this is primarily to be used as a writing notepad so as such I think that it delivers really really well but you do need to keep this in mind especially in combination with 227 PPI it's uh if you're reading a small text and due to the lack of any PDF formatting options that's an additional thing that's kind of doesn't doesn't really work so yeah you got to be careful with what types of documents you will be able to easily read on a smart paper paper and what types of documents you won't be a front light is actually really nice and this is turned off completely as you can see and then you can gradually increase it and as you do so for example this is uh this is exactly halfway it gives a very very nice kind of uh Vibe this is a little bit darker than it is in reality but um yeah it has a very nice quality to it and it goes all the way up which is actually quite bright and quite nice to look at you also have the color temperature control so the warm light or The Cold Light and either of them however you use them the uniformity is really really good of the front light on the smart paper and I really love the option of actually showing the numbers above because that's something the books Never does and they really really should because you can actually have a good idea of where you're at if you're using 20 30 half or whatever it is another thing that I really like is that the Adaptive brightness is not aggressive at all as you can see it's actually going to aim to try and see and this is really like a lot darker in this on the camera itself but in reality this gives you like a look uh how a paper would be in kind of semi-dark conditions and I think that the Adaptive brightness works really really well but for the purpose of this demo so the camera can see it I'm just going to pump up the brightness and the reason why it's so much darker is that I didn't want the image to explode when the brightness is cramped cranked up all the way to the highest setting so that you guys can actually see the uniformity on the front light uh yeah in in a good way and just for clarity's sake this is how the image looks like with with my hands and adaptive brightness when it's turned on so it's actually quite a nice kind of a nicely balanced brightness that you can see on the Lenovo smart paper and the really cool thing to see as well well again with the Adaptive brightness now that I turned the light in the light box it actually it goes all the way down to zero so you can I think it's a very safe bet to just turn the Adaptive brightness on and not worry about it because when it's bright enough the device itself is just going to turn off the front light it's going to turn it on when it deems that it's actually necessary and that's an excellent excellent thing to see now one of the obvious things that we really have to talk about when we're talking about a normal smart paper is the payment system for certain functionalities that it has so it actually has four separate things that you would need to purchase in order to unlock certain functionalities of this device so these are paid services and I'm going to be looking at the phone here so that I can actually get the correct info just so you know where I'm looking down and the first one is is actually the cloud storage so by default for free you have no Cloud synchronization functionality whatsoever included with the Lenovo smart paper now you do have the option of uh yeah hooking up with the USB and manually transferring devices the the the files but that's about it so if you want any kind of integration with the outside world that's convenient that doesn't involve a cable and you manually doing this you will need to first of all open up a Lenovo ID account then second of all you would need to subscribe yourself to cloud storage and the cloud storage is I don't have the equivalent in US dollars because I can only get Norwegian crowner values but you can do the conversions and then you can see what's it like so for me the five gigabytes of storage that's the only option that I can choose that could choose between having it for three months for 115 crowners which is around nine dollars nine something dollars or five gigabytes per year which is 365 crowners and that's around 330 something bucks per year nothing obscene but it is just five gigabytes and this is a 464 gigabyte tablet so that's something that's definitely a thing to keep in mind then the second service that is also paid is a speech transcription which means that you can actually dictate and it can voice to text basically and you can buy per uh time so you can buy for one hour is 69 nine counters for me and that's valid for one year so if you don't use that one hour in one year it expires wow then you can buy 30 minutes which is 14 crowners or you can buy 10 hours which is 749 crowners all of them valid for one year the third service that Lenovo smart paper offers is a purchase characters to use Speak function on Lenovo smart paper and that is uh per spoken character the speech function you know text to speech that it speaks back to you that it reads it to you when you're a student that it wants you don't want to listen to the book that is build per character not even per word it's per character 300 000 characters uh also valid just for one year whether or not you use it or not 209 crowners thirty thousand characters 15 counters 50 000 characters 40 crowners that just sits really wrong with me and the final uh service that they have is conversion of the recordings to text for saving and sharing and uh that's basically translation actually they're putting it really really wrong here and this is the translation service which is again per character and I don't get how does that work because you're translating a word not a character and when you translate to another you know language you're not translating letter for letter you're translating words so okay fine 50 000 characters is 14 crowners again uh limit one purchase what so we can buy that once you can't buy it okay that's weird a hundred thousand characters is 40 crowners valid for one year and a half a million characters is 185 crowners also valid for one year so those are the services that are offered as extra paid services on the Lenovo smart paper and for a device that is already costing 500 euros and is geared and aimed to plan for students I don't know I I see the logic behind it but I somehow I can't really get behind this kind of thinking at all alright so let's now dig into the device itself now that we've covered all the hardware bases let's see what the system is like so when you power up the device this is the user interface that we get my viewers will remember that back in March when I had the pre-production model there was one very glaring question that was uh kind of present that was the user interface was incredibly similar to similar to the remarkable uh platforms user interface so much so that even the icons looked identical now I don't know exactly what happened here because there was no talk but shortly after the smart paper was kind of announced it was pulled back the page the web page report which web page kind of disappeared and then it was a product delay until May then it wasn't out in May and then it went out in June and now it's out here and the user interface is completely changed coincidence or not I don't know but what I'm happy about is that the change is good so they haven't changed it in a bad way it still has that kind of Simplicity but it's different enough from remarkable so there's no more uh um kind of confusion between hey what is what is going on here this is now a different UI and that's a good thing to see whether or not that delay and the UI similarities are is that a coincidence or not I honestly don't know but that's basically just a sequence of events you make what you will out of it the bottom line is we have an excellent device here with a very nice and readable UI and I guess that's all that matters here so when we take a look at this one if you're coming from a remarkable device you will find the layout fairly familiar and easy to kind of use so we have on the left hand side we have the main icons here such as the notebooks library apps my device where you can actually have your folders this is the Google Drive that I can synchronize to your Google Drive account and we have the settings down here on the top we have my device we have synchronization to Lenovo ID which is a paid service so not free search function for searching the files and here we have the option of that will change depending on which mode you are in so if I am in my device I will have the ability to create a new folder switch between grid and list View and sort my folders in a recently updated last update or alphabetical if that switches to apps these are the apps that are pre-installed as we've talked we've got file manager email calendar clock calculator WPS office eBook reader and Firefox and a search function for that I guess to search for an app so let's say if I wanted to go Firefox so can you search fire no match is found that is not a smart search because if I type in fire I would expect you to find Firefox so not not great then we have the library down here and the library is transferring and getting files onto the smart paper is not really that intuitive and that easy sure you can do the direct USB connection here and that works you can also download from the um yeah okay let's connect you can also download from the Google Drive which is okay but again like with the remarkable at least it's not that bad everything that you download from uh here so let's say for example that I want to go and I don't know guitar tabs open source and maybe I want to download this so he's gonna please download file and open it in my device so you can't open the files directly from Google Drive you need to download and now you need to believe that it is downloading however there is no indication here whatsoever where's the downloading process there's no notification that it's downloading there's no progress notification here that is doing doing anything you can only see when it's when it's done it blinks hey I'm done and you know kind of that's it but yeah that's that's that and let's say you've downloaded it and you go to your library it's not there where is it well it's in your downloads folder so here's the one that I've downloaded so that's how that kind of thing functions it's uh it's clumsy and it's incomplete because there is absolutely no need for having that extra step that it downloads into a download why not instead have directly a question here so let's say I want to download maybe well these are wav files I'm going to download review resources there we go I want to download this and why doesn't it ask me download to download form download or download to library it would be so easy to just kind of bypass that additional step of actually you know novice users being kind of confused where is my file I just downloaded my file but it's not in my library well you have to manually put the files that you want in the library you have to manually place them there how do you do that well let's see here this is what I downloaded I can long press and select one or multiple files in this case let's select these two um and I can then say move and now it's going to ask me where and it's gonna tell you my device downloads in library so those are the current folders that I have but as if I were to make new folders then maybe they would actually become available or not but now I can choose library and then within Library you can place it into any subfolder that you want to create and that's that something that I haven't tried and I would like to try and I think it's important is can I just create not into downloads but into Library can I just create a new folder let's switch the language here and let's go test come on test there we go okay and then move it to that folder okay yeah so you can so that's a good thing that you can create um folders while you're in the move file mode so that's how you have to move these files around um there is a way when you actually kind of hook thing hook up your uh device to the computer you can navigate to different files and folder structures and I believe that if we go into the file manager here you will be able to see that file structure which is yeah this is how the file structure actually looks like and this is what you will see when you are hooking it up to the PC and the thing is that there is a way to get it directly into the library when you're transferring documents that way so you can either go into in this case this is this number and then you have my device and then you will see the library and this is where all of the things are right so if I were to transfer from my PC uh file select directly into this folder they would appear here like on a remarkable uh the swipe up brings you back home so that's kind of an easy way to go around that all right so that's like the basic operations of how do you get the files onto the the Lenovo without a Lenovo ID if you have a Lenovo ID and you have a Lenovo app then you can transfer it from the app in a much much more easier way but that is a paid service and you know I want to cover the free way of doing it yeah primarily the other stuff actually works fine but this is what you need to deal with if you don't want to pay for the Lenovo ID thing when we're dealing with the library and the documents let's continue in that light so the reader itself let's see the reader capabilities of it and let's go into test documents and let's open up first let's open up this one for example and that's my standard document that I use and this is the performance that you can actually see here so this is the normal performance it doesn't work on tabs you have to swipe to navigate left and right oh okay I went too much on the side you can tap in the middle to expose more options tap in the middle to hide it again and uh yeah auto rotation works on its own and that's pretty much that so that works but Lenovo smart paper has one more thing up its sleeve and that is actually this section here so when you swipe from the right corner down you will expose more system options such as Wi-Fi Bluetooth screen rotation a miracast because it has Miracast option which actually works and then you have screen refresh modes so you can do a full screen refresh this way right to clear out any ghosting and you can choose between three levels of speed such as clear which is the slowest and it is for books that are ebooks then you have smooth which is four books that have a lot of graphical content and then you have fast which is for browsing or yeah anything other than that so the difference is not that huge so this is the smooth this is the clear mode you can see that this resembles the Regal refresh mode where every time you refresh there's a very very minimal ghosting that's left at all and that is the whole point of course it is the slowest uh mode of refreshing when we go to smooth it is faster considerably faster yet I don't see any active degradation or any ghosting issues that I can find because you know these images like that they're just kind of they could leave a lot of potential ghosting here especially if we're going from this section A lot of text and then we go back into a image here we don't really see any of the uh ghosting issues there and if you go to fast mode then it looks like this it is maybe marginally faster and I still don't see any significant ghosting there's a bit more tiny bit of more of ghosting but really no massive degradation of quality or anything like that so yeah while you do have these modes for me I found myself that I was in a smooth mode most of the time because it gave me this kind of best kind of uh combination of the two unfortunately there's not much that we can cover as far as the functionality of the e-reader goes the first gigantic problem that the e-reader has is that it does not support hyperlinks right so if you wanted to use mdo or MMP or on a deal no smart paper at the moment you can't because it does not support hyperlinks but those organizers aside much more importantly if you're using a textbook and you want to use a table of contents and just like from the book books table of contents and just tap on a hyperlink to get to a chapter you can't you will have to rely on the book's own table of contents if it has it if it doesn't have it then then you have a problem and you have to manually navigate and try and find the page that you want which is made considerably more difficult because there's no no previewing of the page where you're at neither does it tell you where which page that you got to so you have nothing with this kind of uh yep slider for the progress slider it's functional in the form that it's it can it's a slider and when you release it it will move you to a page but as far as ux usability goes it is an absolute F because at the very minimum what it should do is it should update the current page that you are at so that you know which page you're going to and optimally it would need to show a preview of the page that you are going um yep sliding towards so do you know where you actually want to go this way nope you you just can't do that at all also I would expect that you have the go to page option as well either by double tapping here or maybe go to page here so you can simply if you know exactly the page where you want to go to you just tap and type in the number and boom you're on that page so these are the absolute bare bone basics of the functionalities that a reader should have yet we don't have that on a smart paper yet what do we have well we have let's see as far as the functionalities go so you have table of contents if the uh if the document has a type of content you are able to add bookmarks but the implementation of that is so backwards that it took me a really really considerable amount of time to actually figure it out and not think that it doesn't have it has it but look at this so first of all the thing that everybody thinks how do you bookmark while you tap on the corner well no not on Smart paper for whatever reason it needs to be more obtuse so you need to expose the menu okay so now I have bookmark icon here but if I go here I have bookmarks as well now my logic is if I go here and this shows me a table of contents then this button here next to it should show me the list of my bookmarks Instead This is the button that you use to add a bookmark but inconveniently it says add bookmarks which doesn't mean anything it should say bookmark added so at least you have the indication of when the bookmark uh when a page is bookmarked or not but I really don't understand why do we have to go here and then there and not just have an upper right corner like virtually every other device has as a functionality that's a standard so I do not understand why isn't it using it as a standard how do you actually take a look at where your bookmarks are well there's two ways you can either go into the options and go into your bookmarks and then you can see your bookmarks and manage them such as delete them or you can actually tap on the bookmark when you're on a bookmark page and it gives you you know the shortcut to the bookmarks overview page as well so that part is fine it's just that the adding of the bookmarks is quite quite confusing then you have the search functionality which searches through the text so let's say and then it's going to go search and then there we go so then we have this one and there you go but it works only on the documents that have text as text it will not work on documents that are just scanned images just so you know because that's not doesn't have OCR capabilities um then we have two things such as PDF and a study mode that icon there is study mode so PDF is like your PDF formatting and that is being unbelievably generous if we're going to talk about that because this thing is can only do one thing and it does it badly right so what do I mean well you can adjust the view of the PDF files and you're adjusted by changing the scale okay so maybe I want you know just to be able to see it like this and then flip it into my landscape mode right so I confirm it and it stretches the rendering of the PDF file this is broken this there's very very few situations when you would actually want to do this and you know my initial idea wouldn't work because it's not really zooming to fit the width it's just it's it's it's it's broken this is not done as far as functionality goes so and that's the only PDF formatting functionality that you have so the only PDF formatting functionality that you have is broken which leaves smart paper virtually with absolutely no formatting capabilities for PDFs whatsoever you can't pinch to zoom you can't adjust the zooming without stretching it and it doesn't have aspect ratio hold it's it's not something that you can use at the moment then you have the study mode which gets you into a split screen mode which is an auto translate mode so the idea here is that if you're studying and you have a textbook that you need to translate to your language which is absolutely great but then you're like smacked real hard real real hard by this thing which is you're aiming this for students and you're gonna charge them per translated word this is not even a service you buy how many words you will be able to translate and that's that so if I find like an average page very small page it's 2886 words and what I've purchased is 50 000 words so I am going to do a translate I haven't done it before because I didn't want to waste it because it's a paid service so let's see how does this work okay and let's see I've translated to [Laughter] I'm really sorry I know you guys don't understand but this translation here Chapman Chapman what the hell wait wait I I need to find where is that oh my god well actually yes the translation is someone he did the best that he could because the name is Chapman and smelly and yes mardifka is basically what you would use as a name if somebody was named smelly but you know kind of typed differently sorry this really caught me by surprise so it's working extraordinarily well it's really really good as far as the translation goes uh and it better will be good because now I have yeah 48 000 words uh uh left available plus it has a maximum word translation limit of two thousand so you can only translate two thousand words per translate kinda uh go and that's your study mode that's it you can increase and decrease the text font size here on the side so incredibly useful for studying but also really really inconvenient and really really expensive and students are not really flush with money are they yet this is kinda rough this this is really rough so it it has that feature but to charge it per word is yeah that that stings a lot alright so what are the other things that we can have well let's explore the top one you can of course make notes make notes on my document right but there's no layers you have your three brushes you don't have the full spectrum of brushes that you have in the notebook and you have your erase options here it's all selection and everything like that the highlighter works but it's not a smart highlighter yeah like you have on the remarkable so it's kind of yeah like that and you can actually switch between colors and these colors when exported they will be actually reflected in the PDF itself also they are rendered in a different way so you do have a highlighter functionality which is a good thing uh it's kind of basic but it works so that's that's nice thing to see but it would be nicer to actually have a little bit more um brush options but then again the ones that you do have fineliner and calligraphy pen why not the ink pen why the calligraphy pen like of all the things it would be nice to be able to actually choose that option and you have the undo functionality but not redo so if I undo I can't redo right if I accidentally do that again weird immersive reading I'm not gonna cover because that's basically um playing you some preset of pre-selected meditative tunes and sounds that if you have headphones you can turn it on and it's just gonna play back some music into your headphones while you're reading I think that's a nice thing to have as it doesn't have any other musical capabilities but it does have that option so that's an interesting thing to kind of see then you have your page management which is this right but it has zero functionality right so if I wanted to select the page and let's say for example export a page or a set of pages I can't do anything the only thing that you can do with your page management is to navigate right to navigate to the page that you want to plus it's fairly slow as you can see and then you can tap on the page that you want to go to and there it is um again like with the progress bar implementation this is as far as I'm concerned below minimum and this would be another f as far as functionality f for functionality um on the reader side of things because there's no management here page management should mean export page export selected Pages delete a page insert the page reorder Pages if you want things to that nature but hey hey we do have go to so you can go to page management go to page number they have the functionality so all you need to do is actually place that go to functionality where you need it which is in the progress here because we don't have anything else so that would be a nice thing to have it let's say go to page there as well bookmarks we've seen does it understand content on pages such as can I see pages that have notes on it yep you you don't have that option either and then you can share and then in the share option it's again it's implemented but it's implemented in such a strange way because you have export format currently only PDF fine you can't export these pngs okay and then page range is like this so you can use grid view as well and then you have the option of selecting these Pages well I'm sorry but if you have all of this why wasn't that part of the page management thing where you already have it so you can just long press and select the pages and then click on share isn't that like the most logical way of doing these things instead of going there share choose okay then select pages and then do an export so um yeah some some serious optimizations of the ux especially like the the interactions tabs is needed for the this one now the last thing that I want to cover is that you do have the option of underlying underlining and selecting text basically and here you have the same thing you have the translation you have the dictionary which will work for let's this the cost dictionary then you have meaning of the word cause which is great and it's free imagine that it's free service and it can speak things to you if you have Bluetooth devices uh marked so uh another thing that you can also do is you can copy it and you can also do the Wikipedia search for something like this because it will automatically open up the Firefox because it is uh it has a browser so it can actually browse so you can automatically go to the Wikipedia and see the reference for that so for example there and let's see can I do a Wiki search that's meaningful yeah and that works so this this part of quickly looking up something is really really helpful and considering the translation costs so much it's nice to see it free like yeah plus you can also select this whole thing and then you can copy the uh uh content right but what you can paste it to I don't really know because it doesn't have that much functionalities as far as you know where you would be able to paste that content but there you go so no hyperlinks very limited functionalities as far as this goes no formatting abilities whatsoever has some extra functionalities which are kind of interesting especially that translate one it works really well but it costs per word which is really really an ouchy it hurts quite a bit has an excellent Wikipedia functionality and things like that has very confusing bookmarking functionality so the way I would say it is that you can definitely see that this is the first iteration of their user interface in ux but they really really need to get somebody on board who has already experience with all the other devices so that they know what is standard and how it should be used because people who are buying this sure there will be first time e-ink users and they won't know for better but there's going to be also a bunch of people who are coming and transitioning from an existing platform and there are a set of standards that are standardized across devices and you know there's absolutely zero reason why Lenovo smart paper would be the odd one out just because you can't bookmark here you can't see the preview of the page you can't see which page you want to go to Etc and you don't have hyperlinks in PDFs etc etc so hopefully these are simply Growing Pains um but I hope that the reader side of things grows out of them quickly because this um yeah that that can turn into something quite quite unfortunate foreign test on the Lenovo smart paper because I know there's something different between this unit and this OS and the previous unit that I had it felt considerably quicker and I'm actually quite happy that I did the original that's the test on the previous unit because there is a difference and the difference is important one so the original latency on the pre-production unit when I did the desktop test was at 29.6 milliseconds of the stroke latency now on this version and remember software can actually improve this even further but even as it is now the latency rating speed on the Lenovo smart paper is up to 20.67 milliseconds which places the Lenovo smart paper right in the third place just behind the sky and the tab Ultra and actually that means that because remarkable 2 is still at 23.79 milliseconds that Lenovo smart paper is faster by almost 4 milliseconds or let's say three milliseconds then remarkable too that's quite interesting while I was writing on the no smart paper I kept actually coming back and I mentioned it several times now that the surface the writing surface the paper-like surface is really really Pleasant and really good so when I did the surface resistance test a I was actually not surprised to see that the reason why I reacted so well is that the surface resistance is around 35.23 percent of the surface resistance to the paper oh meaningless kind of comparison to the paper but it's meaningful when you compare it between the devices because that means that it feels roughly the same like Kindle scribe does and Kindle scribe feels really really good so that means that Lenovo does as well alright so we've covered the reader stuff let's check out the notebook and um yeah let's let's just open up a new notebook um okay so that's a new notebook I can rename it in the top Corner they can just say my new Note book nope there we go notebook there we go that's okay and this is the layout of the notebook you can always double tap on the screen in the middle to hide the top menu completely and this side menu is also it's possible to hide it you can alternatively tap on these icons here to expose these things so you can have a fully focused view of the notebook let's do first a template which can be added by choosing the template icon or by going to layers and then choosing the uh oh no you can't okay so it can only be added through the template function and you can choose between portrait and landscape templates and for this purpose let's use the this kind of a template aligned template here writing on the smart paper is really really Pleasant it's fast it's responsive and the way it captures your handwriting is really really good the paper surface is really nice the pen is really nice and if I had to compare it I would compare it to the remarkable 2 feel granted this nib and the pen is a little bit on a harder side but if I switch to a familiar pen like my Samsung S6 light then it's actually softer and more pleasant for me to write than a remarkable 2 when I write with the same pen on hydro 2. so for me and my own personal sensitivity sensibilities I prefer the writing feel and the writing experience on the smart paper than on the remarkable two but they are most definitely of a very very similar character so if you like how like how remarkable too right then you will most definitely like how the smart paper too feels like when writing one other thing where I think smart paper is also better than the uh than the remarkable is in the rendering itself because it doesn't have smoothing it doesn't have until I think so it's not gonna do that but it's not as jaggedy as the remarkable is and the end result is that the written content is actually quite pretty and quite a lot prettier and more legible and it looks a lot more like my own handwriting than it does on a remarkable too because remarkable 2 has some issues as far as the quality the display quality of what you actually write on it is not that good it's very jaggedy and it's not that precise and smart paper is actually quite a lot better than the remarkable two in that aspect as well navigation on the notebooks is basically you know your swipe here you swipe there it's not really a fast device so it's gonna have those loading uh bars there and more content you have you will have those slowdowns so I've experienced on larger notebooks that they kind of get slowed down and when you actually swipe there then temporary rarely content of the previous page kind of blinks and then the new one is there so again very much growing pains are present in all aspects of the smart paper notebook included unfortunately so as functionalities go well um you double tap as I said to enter the full screen mode you can tap on the icon here to expose it expand it or collapse it you swipe left and right to flip pages on the mode in the mode here you have the search option and we can search this this and then he's gonna go there two matches one match found and he founded this okay so let's try quite What's Happening Here um okay well do they have like one search I paid for uh why is search now grayed out that I can't answer you because that's kind of strange and now I can search again okay so recent searches so let's try quite okay match is found on that page I get to that page but the search is grayed out once you've used it and you go to your page or maybe if I flip a page we go back no no it's grayed out um okay so now you have like a limitation of let's see how it works in another notebook so this one was a landscape notebook when I was testing Miracast as well so let's see Miracast let's do a search on Miracast this should be landscape as well if we're in landscape mode no matches found okay so it's a bit hit and miss and again the implementation I I apologize but there's a really angry Magpie right next to me I think that he's putting his input here into the review so uh yeah the functionality is there to search for your handwriting uh notes but the functionality is a little strange so the main thing is like it's not a hundred percent that it's gonna find what you're looking for uh but the second thing is that that search functionality kind of disappears after doing it once which I really don't understand but reappears when you reopen The Notebook so I don't know what that's all about so in the options we have page management which is the page management and bizarrely here you do have the expected Behavior so the notebook page management works exactly as you would want it to and expect it to yet the PDF page management doesn't which just is really really really bizarre but it's a good thing to see that the notebooks at least have that functionality that you wanted to such as delete page copy page share and convert to text so we do have the convert to text option let's do that so let's see how does it do it that's taking quite a long time for such a small paragraph maybe he's confused by the lines but this is really taking a long time so this is how writing is on swert paper it sounds good feels very much like the rm2 and is quite fast as well like my stunning 56 liter or Samsung S6 light but I can't really fault it for that because the way I wrote it was Dreadful so that makes sense then I can actually switch to another language if I wanted to and there's a big line of languages these are the languages that you can use you can pause and find if there's a language that suits you and then you can share this and I guess it's going to generate as a text file and then you can send it to email your Google drive or WPS office if that's something that you use so the conversion to text is possible from page management so that's kind of good so yeah a bit better than on the PDF uh functionality um but we still lack basic things such as reordering Pages moving a Pages page inserting a page app so for example here insert the page before or after or move the page to somewhere else and things of that nature that's what page management management is all about for notebooks and yeah especially for notebooks so you do have the convert to text shortcut here as well I believe it's gonna do yeah just that page so you can shortly just choose to convert just that page I'm going to wait for it to do that you have the Miracast option which actually works whenever I tried it it worked with every device and it works like a standard Miracast device but the only thing is that it actually finds the the devices you want to connect to and it maintains connection very very in a very stable manner unlike books devices which don't so Lenovo smart papers Miracast actually works um then you have the share option as well which is the same kind of thing except I guess for the current page or maybe the whole notebook and you have pen type settings and this is your option to customize which of the brushes you want to see and you can reorder them and you can just kind of customize it to your liking which is a very nice thing to see as well and then you finally have notebook settings which is The Notebook cover what it's going to show last page visited or first page so those are the options that we have here then you have layers I believe that you have like the ability to add five layers traditionally that's normal let's add more this is really slow yeah so limit of five layers stacked that's the standard we'll get to the microphone unit a little bit later because that has a specific functionality which is really really cool so let's focus on the brushes and the tools first so with the brushes we got let's just go through them fairly quickly I'm gonna use the thickest one so this is the ballpoint pen nice and pressure sensitive then we have the pencil which only has the uh yet the brush option and it is tilt sensitive and it is of a very very nice quality extremely reminiscent of how the remarkable brush works pretty much identical but I think that the Kindle scribe brush pencil brush is still better than either of the two but still remarkable smart paper and Kindle scribe have the best graphite pencil brushes on the market currently so it's nice to see that and we have the mechanical pencil which is not uh uh not pressure sensitive it has this kind of paper like grainy quality that you can see here which somebody may like somebody may not like but it is it has that type of effect to it so it's a proper brush then we have the calligraphy pen which is very familiar isn't it then we have the fine liner which is again a knot pressure sensitive and I like this one a lot it's very very precise it's easy to use it's really really cool my second favorite is the pen the ink pen itself which is basically like fine liner but it has pressure sensitive and it's nice kind of sensitivity that actually works really well then we get to have a marker which is of course not pressure sensitive but to me the the the marker thing should should have a lot thicker brush settings because right now they're exactly the same thicknesses as the other pens and just just doesn't make sense then you have a paintbrush which suffers from the same thing and basically they are very similar brushes between well very similar brushes uh where are we there we go uh like the other one like the duty marker um and I think that they would need to be wider and then we have the highlighter which is the same highlighter as we've had in the um in the PDF reader so those are your options and then for the Eraser you have the stroke eraser so the regular type of eraser that you can just erase the stuff here and it works like that or we can maybe erase a little bit here you can use the erase selection which is nice and fast and the interesting thing about it is that it doesn't erase The Strokes so you can erase just a section within here and basically just removes you know just Parts over here so it doesn't ruin all of The Strokes that you've had and that kind of gives it a very nice and usable quality so that you can use it for different types of things and of course you can erase the whole page then we have the selection option so I can just select this now that's selected so I can move it around nice and fast what Canal what else can I do about with it I can mirror it horizontally I can mirror it vertically I can do a cut and I can copy so it's like I can copy the clipboard and then double tap is it like double tap to paste right so you select the uh the marker tool or the selection tool and you double tap with the pen to paste this right so that's kind of how that works fairly limiting but it works I haven't tried scaling yet though how does it scale I'm curious let me feel very curious okay so uniform scaling [Music] or moving and for rotation we have here rotation all right this is pretty cool so basic basic but works so all the stuff that you kind of would want from or basic stuff that you would want from this is there and it works fine and you can also add pages so basically you can insert a page so let's say this is blah blah blah like that and can I insert a page between them so that it's blah blah empty and then the previous one yeah so you can insert a page via the plus icon here but it would have been a nice thing to have that option in the page management as well now if we have a plus button here why is the minus button there why like because it's notebook management isn't the adding a page also notebook management so yeah some kind of inconsistencies you do have the option to delete the page but you have to go into that option you don't have it down there so those are the brush types I think that generally speaking they're really really good brushes uh the stroke width could use some uh fine tuning for different brushes to kind of find the range that's most usable for the expected use cases of these brushes but overall I think that they're on the excellent side of uh things and there's more than a few that are very very usable and in combination with that region eraser that doesn't erase strokes but it actually erases just the selection that's a very nice thing to see as well so overall a nice set of tools that you have for writing basic writing but what you have here is fairly fairly good all right and now I'm gonna switch to a brush that I'm gonna use for writing and I'm going to explore the audio capabilities here and for this let's zoom in a little bit so that you can actually see this functionality because it's really really cool so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start a recording here so now it's recording and I am going to write some content and then just scribble scribble scribble some more I'm gonna flip a page now we have blah blah so we're gonna go further and now I am going to continue writing here okay so let's say that I'm done with the recording so now you have this recording and recording icon is here so far nothing really new here right we've already seen that on books devices mate pad paper Etc well not quite because if you actually click on this there's three options here and you can enable an option called note replay and of course of course you have management of the recordings which is basic as well you can't it's the same kind of rule applies they need to polish these things up but note replay is really really interesting first of all you can adjust playback speed great note replay if you turn it on and you press play ah I need to connect my Bluetooth just a second right I hooked up my um headphones here to the smart paper so I'm gonna press play here and then I'm gonna move the headphone close to the microphone so you can hear what it's playing back and you can see what we actually see so let's start the playback now and I am going to write and then just scribble scribble scribbles more I'm gonna flip the page now it's not flipping a page automatically but if I flip to the page that I want and that's not all so let's say if I press play here and I tap on a word here it's gonna jump to where in a recording you are so if I tap on this it's going to jump back to recording the uh updating of the rendering is weird and not really there it's buggy it's it's full of bugs but the essence of the functionality is really really good and this is something that I don't think that I've seen on uh other platforms that it actually works like this especially with finding the recording point with your notes when you were writing something down and this is absolutely perfect for study because if you are in a lecture and you're recording the audio of that lecture and you are taking down notes when you're going back through those notes and we want to hear what was it that the uh lecturer was talking about at that specific point in time you tap the word it jumps to the recording and you hear it Presto that is just really really really good and I just love the way that um the idea of it now the implementation should be ironed out and you know bugs should be fixed but the essence of it is really really good so that's a very unique thing and that's a really cool selling point that the smart paper actually has especially for students as far as apps go well file manager view so it's just a normal regular file manager then you have the email functionality which I haven't tested out and I will not test out because I do not want to link my email accounts to any other devices so I'm sorry that's not something I'm going to be testing out but since this is an Android 11 I'm imagining a standard Android email application type of functionality what I don't know is does it support two Factor authentication protocols for Gmail Microsoft Etc that I really don't know so that's something we might need to take a look at but maybe address at a later Point calendar don't be fooled you're not logged in as your Google Play account so you don't have Google Calendar and this is like Beyond basic because there's no events planning possible whatsoever this is just a paper replacement of a calendar and to some extent the good thing is that you can just kind of switch between which day you want but you can't do anything you can just select a day for whatever reason then you can go back to today okay and then you have the option of having a yearly take a look at it and there's no weekly look there's no daily look there's there's nothing that's it so you got Monday Sunday start time zone and yeah show week number is the calendar option so that's it it's it's extremely basic clock again extremely basic because it doesn't have a timer now the timer would have been a great thing an alarm would have been a great thing as well any kind of things those things would have been useful especially in studying capacities research capacities and things like that like at the very least the timer would have been a very nice addition but you don't have that you get this for whatever reason then you have a calculator which is nice especially because you do have the scientific calculator and the standard calculator options which is a very good thing to see WP office has its whole thing so if if you use WP office then you know it's basically for creating PDF files and then you can use that to create PDF files and because it has Bluetooth capabilities you can hook up a Bluetooth keyboard and then type your files there that way I won't be having time to actually show that but I've tested it and it works fine it's slow but it's usable so yeah basically slow but usable eBook reader is like a specific app that's just for ebooks and I've tried to use it and it's like I really really am not a fan of something like this so not my cup of tea at all uh but I guess maybe better in the PDF reader things I don't know um and then you have the Firefox so let's see um you can just go into opening an article so this is how an article renders out and looks like okay so fairly slow let's go into a fast refresh option heavily crashed no okay so fast I don't know if I I can't really see a difference between fast and smooth honestly I can't really see that it's any faster than smooth so if I go to smooth it just it's if anything it's a little bit more responsive and smooth at least that's the impression that I get and if we go back to clear then we should have yeah then we have clear clear differences in clear mode so that's why smooth for me made most sense and yeah it kind of works as you probably would expect it to uh on a device like this so this is a dedicated Note Taker that has some reader capabilities and it's just an extra on the top that you have a Firefox there that you can actually use for some browsing but don't expect anything more than that I tried side loading apps that didn't work for me so maybe I was doing something wrong or not but there's no Google Play and I was not able to sideload any apps here so yeah that's that's the state of the apps themselves when you go into settings you have your quite a few settings here so Lenovo ID I'm not gonna tap on that because it shares all the information and I'm too lazy to actually block it out in the editing process because that's a pain but then you have wireless you have Bluetooth you have sound capabilities when you are connected to sound to adjust the the the volume then in display we have the brightness and color temperature which are both accessible from here and a clear smooth fast so all of these options you have them right here um then we have the general option and general option you have about your device you have the system updates management of your apps to kind of manage the the um the permissions force stop them you can't uninstall them because they're pre-installed they have storage information there's nothing you can do about this unless you go nope date time languages that you can use different keyboards that you can manage and factory reset then after that you have the option to set a lock screen so the wallpaper you can choose a wallpaper of any sort you can choose that it's a clock or that it is a calendar when you have the lock screen on now the security to enable a password battery stuff and there's one thing that's extremely important to actually mention here I think it should be a mandatory addition to every other device and smart paper has that and that is the battery optimization mode it's disabled by default but that's something that I use on my laptop as well and it basically protects and prolongs your battery life but how but after you turn it on it will keep your battery between 40 and 60 which is the ideal range for the batteries and also it will automatically turn itself on if you keep the device plugged in for an extended period of time and it also has the maintenance mode which when enable system would adjust battery capacity based on its condition it would extend battery life span but might influence how long battery lasts on a single charge so it's all about the longevity here and it's something that really really is a good thing to see and on top of that you have battery saver more options which are really really good that you can actually get even more out of the battery but the battery life on its own is already really good so you can extend it even further if you use some of the battery saver options and then in more you have a very important option which I for life of me I don't understand why it's not on by default and that is side buttons for the stylus so what does that mean well that means that if I choose to use my Samsung button Samsung button Samsung pen that has a button on the side and I start writing if I press the button by default it does nothing and that was my first impression was well it doesn't support side buttons well no it does but you got to go to settings more and then enable side button then you can actually choose what you want the side button to work as so it can be an eraser it can be an erase selection or you can use also uses to create a new notebook if that's something that you really want to so for me it's erase selection and now when I go into a notebook and I want to delete with the button I can now properly use it and this is the thing that this awesome pen is missing like why why couldn't it have a button or an eraser at the end then it would have been perfect but you know Samsung pen is a cheap uh relatively cheap pen and an excellent pen at that so it does give you quite a lot it's just that you know it would have been nice to have been a full package all right so it's the conclusion time for the Lenovo smart paper and as usual let's begin with the cons well the first con would have to be the cumulative state of the reader experience and functionality while it can open PDF and epub files mainly on epubs it's more or less okay but the PDFs state is below rudimentary the pen that is shipped with the device while absolutely excellent lacks an array spacer or a button even though the device actually has that functionality there are inconsistencies all over the place as far as the user interface and user experience goes page management of documents is not the same it doesn't have the same functionalities as the page management of the notebooks but generally speaking beef you know I I don't want this to turn into a huge list of cons but I need to kind of Encompass all of it is that the general state of the user interface and user experience while it is intuitive and I get completely get the minimalistic approach not talking about that I'm talking about minimum viable product and in many many aspects the software solutions that are currently in place for Lenovo smart paper they don't reach that mvp because you don't have the bare bone Basics that is something that's generally really really needs a lot work and a lot of TLC to actually get it to a point where it can be because where this can be is a really good place but it's not there yet the excellent paper-like foil that's applied on the top which is absolutely perfect for writing it has excellent reflection properties unfortunately it does have a negative effect on the image quality and Clarity so that's something that you have to kind of keep in mind especially when you consider it that it's paired with a 227 PPI display and For Me Above All Above everything else is going to be the biggest con is the business model of charging for all of the things separately in some way I get it you know the the thing the thought process is it's cheaper because not everybody's gonna need everything totally get it but I think that the pricing is too Steep and I think that that is going to be a no-go for a lot of people and for a product that is specifically tailored and aimed at students to actually pull off something like that that that's a big big ask especially with the base price being 500 euros to begin with and now on to the pros of the smart paper Lenovo smart paper build quality is absolutely fantastic and I love love love the design of this device the front light is really uniform the battery life is really good the latency the writing latency is excellent it has multiple refresh modes even though they are not really that kind of varied but it does us offer more than what Kindle scribe and remarkable to do so that or the super note as well so that's something that's definitely a thing to kind of keep in mind and for me it's a pro because you do have that even though it's a small type of flexibility the flexibility is there the included pen is of an excellent quality and even though it does lack that button and eraser which is a big big problem for me for those who don't really care about that they will be able to enjoy a really really good pen that comes as standard with a little Novo summer smart paper when we're talking about the standard well the flipbook cover that's also included with the Lenovo smart paper I think is a really really good way of doing it especially with this protective pouch that ensures that you will not lose your pen when it's in a bag when your transporting transporting it in other places etc etc I love the voice functionality that you can actually match the voice and note taking that's not something that I've seen before and I think that it's an excellent addition to the platform the thinness and lightness of the device it's really really special to actually have a front lit device with such a good high quality front light that's actually this thin so this is a really really thin device and it's a joy to use and basically it just makes me happy it's a really gorgeous looking and a good well-rounded design device Hardware wise software wise definitely has a long way to go but the potential is at least quite quite strong so the Lenovo smart paper what is the summary of this device I think that it has a lot of potential but when we're talking about the wait time and the price that's included I think that it should have had a better state of the operating system at the day of launch if you are going to delay the device anyway then you might as well delay it so that when you launch it it's complete this currently does not feel complete this feels like a early early beta that still has at least one quarter of development so like at least three more months or development time to actually gather feedback from people Implement features and and get the feature stack up to the MVP there's a huge discrepancy between note-taking and the reader and this is like a Deja Vu because when remarkable came out it also was a lot stronger in the notes taking Department by the Lenovo smart papers and a lot tremendously a lot weaker in the reader Department exactly like the Lenovo smart paper is now whether or not these things are going to change over time I don't know because I really don't have that kind of experience with Lenovo I have my experience with a standard Lenovo Android tablet and the updates there were sporadic at best so it wasn't really something that I would say that it's Stellar performing certainly not on the level of where remarkable and rata actually are as far as the frequency of the updates goes as far as the content goes that's a different thing but we will see where this is the initial state of that tablet the Lenovo tab P11 Pro was a lot better and more complete than this so I don't know if Lenovo is going to implement the same strategy and basically have few and sporadic updates for this Lenovo a huge huge company and I don't know how much priority are they going to give this one depending on how it sells and how it shows in the market I personally feel that the Hardware is really special and the device itself is extremely good and that the potential is way too high and somebody has a vision there for the Lenovo smart paper but it hasn't been realized yet and it's being hampered down by the user experience and the user interface I think that's a great shame simply because with a little bit more tender love and care Lenovo smart paper can become one of the most important devices and the biggest contenders and most important contenders for both the amazonscribe and the remarkable too because it can blow them out of water it is beautiful design excellent performance everything is there but the current state as it is now it can't it's lacking quite a lot of things I think that it's uh out of the three if we're talking about remarkable two amazonscribe and the Lenovo smart paper as your pure digital paper Replacements because I had a discussion with somebody who actually mentioned like there's a difference if I I want digital paper replacement I don't want digital notebook replacement I didn't know that was like okay if you're going to differentiate that much but still if you want purely digital paper not digital notebook because as far as digital notebooks goes nothing beats super node there's no way that you can beat the supernode but as far as digital paper goes distraction free and stuff remarkable would still be number one very close behind it is creeping up uh Amazon Kindle scribe but it's still number two and a little bit far behind it them is the Lenovo smart paper and as it is now I think the price would be adequate if again the state of the operating system was more complete and that the platform was able to offer a little bit more of a complete user experience than it is now I think that all hinges on lenovo's approach on how they will treat this device will they treat it with love attention and care that it most certainly deserves to reach its potential or will it be the cruel capitalistic world where they just kind of you know go swim but you didn't give me any floaters I can't I don't have anything to swim with and they just say like well top lock and kind of let it fall down the cracks I hope not I sincerely hope not because this is a special device and it deserves to reach its potential whether or not it gets there over time it only remains for us to wait and see I hope you liked the video if you did please like And subscribe and ding the notification Bell in the description below to get notified when new videos come out on my deep guide also please do let me down do let me down also please let me know down in the comments below what your thoughts and opinions are regarding the Lenovo smart paper does anybody out there actually have the device what do you think about it what are you what's your prolonged usage experience etc etc because I test so many devices here I can only spend a relatively limited amount of time I still do spend quite a bit of time with them but it's not the same as actually living with a device and using it over an expanded extended period of time and since this was actually on the market now for about two months I'm really curious if there's somebody out there who's using it and what your experience and opinion actually is especially if you had some other device like remarkable or Kindle scribe how do feel it compares to those two I'm also interested to hear about what your opinion is regarding the lenovo's billing strategy per specific kind of thing because it can go good it can go bad of course obviously the best would be free but it's not so when it's not free would you prefer like a bulk thing like a subscription that's all encompassing but a bit more expensive or this micro segmentation that they are doing so you can order per need when you need it and finally like what do you feel like if this is aimed towards students how do you feel the pricing of these Services actually is is it fair unfair obscene or whatever it is else that you may feel thank you so much for watching stay safe stay healthy and see you in the next video bye foreign

Channel: My Deep Guide

Views: 24,566

Keywords: my, deep, guide, tutorial, review, how to, how, to, mydeepguide

Id: 4Y23-HC7sME

Length: 106min 18sec (6378 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023