Quirklogic Papyr - evaluation - advantages and disadvantages for students and professionals
Channel: Kit Betts-Masters
Date: 2021-03-14

My Full review of the Quirklogic Papyr, all the advantages and disadvantages of this great e ink paper tablet for students and professionals.

Initial Thoughts: https://youtu.be/WLXuLnILLEY

When I needed a screen break, (because of all this remote working,) e-ink can provide that!
Easy to use device, a great replacement for notebooks.
I love the size and the weight.
Software needs to be developed, (but this is why Quirklogic are sending devices to people like me, to get honest feedback.)
Hardware is good, feels good to write on, it’s almost addictive actually.
Stylus is good, I love the three functions on the pen, I do wish it had pressure levels, but that just means I wouldn’t recommend for artist’s use.
The possibilities to come are amazing, love your point about students could have all of their text books and notes in something so light!
Looking forward to software updates.
 

 

More comprehensive thoughts 

Positives

Very light, as light as a clipboard and paper. It’s almost flexible, really is towards a paper like experience.
Nice stylus feel and paper like feeling screen.
Link with cloud and drives, (but I would love
Like the contextual menu
Very large!
Love the highlight and erase buttons. (Although the erase button sometimes skips a beat, am I doing something wrong?)
Infinite zoom
Live sharing across devices.
Beautiful high resolution screen.
Browser (although this often crashes inking and I wasn’t able to download a .pdf directly from a browser. Consider a lighter linux browser? And definitely a way to directly download .pdfs and other docs from the web.)
No notifications / distractions.
Split screen is very useful, like that you can see other pages in the same book or across workbooks. (But think should remove black battery and title etc from at least one book. I’d like to see most of the UI elements disappear when I’m just noting by the way, or at least being a lot less bold. Even page flip and page numbers, perhaps make them a mid-light grey. Or even have the option of having nothing but the three dots in normal use, and page navigator etc can return when three dots are pressed.)
Mark up student work, or annotate on documents very useful for feedback. (I’d like to see the option to email directly from the device to any email address though. I also had an issue as I sent a .pdf which was landscape in format and the converter to .qlw essentially just shrunk it, and I don’t think that there is a rotate document option.)
That there is some colour functionality is cool, I can see this as being incredibly useful for live collaboration and correction of student work. I like that you can select ink and change colour and line weight.
The wake-up is near instant, I like that it’s always pretty much showing the last page that you were on.
Inserting new page in the middle of documents is a good feature.

Negatives

The plastic has a less than premium feel. (This is more than made up by being so light weight!)
No choice of stylus.
Few pen options (line styles, I would love to see some variety in the look of the lines, tapering and textures, that sort of thing.)
The .qlw file is cool to give the infinite zoom and such, (but I’d have this as the standard new file format, or the option of converting, rather than all documents having to be converted. For example, I imported a word document the other day, and had to save it as a .pdf first, then import it into .qlw.)
No pen pressure, as mentioned above (certainly not a deal breaker for intended use.)
It seems to sometimes sign me out when network drops. I’d suggest things should be all stored locally, I’d imagine most people will have this as their own device. I can see how you could have a class set of these that students could sign into and get all their documents down from the cloud, but that could just be an option for a particular use case.
Battery-life isn’t amazing, there’s something to be said for the amazing battery life that you can get from e-readers. I’d love to only have to charge once a week for a week of all day use. However, again, this will increase the weight!
Pen latency is not bad, but I might expect more from a charged pen.
The price may make it a hard sell when compared to other devices, I do think e-ink needs to get a lot cheaper before they get mass market acceptance.
The google drive integration isn’t seamless yet. I was sort of expecting just to be able to view and even edit documents on the google drive as they are, but it seems all I can really do is to insert an image from google drive, is this right? I’d like to be able to download .pdfs and .docs from there. And to save same files directly to the drive.