I bought a Kobo Sage eReader recently

I love eink. As a technology I find it very calming; beautiful to look at. A couple of weeks ago I bought some more in the form of a Kobo Sage.

Back in 2015 or thereabouts I bought a Kindle Voyage from a bookshop in London and I always take it away with me when travelling (so not so much recently). It's a fabulous device, easy to slip into a pocket and a great reading experience. And only reading, no distractions.

Fast forward to early this year when I bought a reMarkable 2 tablet. Another brilliant piece of kit with a strong focus on one thing; taking notes. You can also read books on it and the larger screen is attractive, but it's a bit too heavy for prolonged reading and crucially, there's no back or front lighting.

So this leads me to the Sage. It sits somewhere between the two, with the Voyage and reMarkable both having positives that the Sage can't match.

How do they compare?

The Sage has a chunk of plastic to the side with page turn buttons which the Voyage doesn't have. I would guess this is to house beefier electronics and to be fair the "flagship" Kindle, the Oasis, has a similar design.

The screen is a couple of inches larger and has a (now common) "warm" lighting system, both of which contribute to a better experience than the Voyage. Page turns are much faster too and so far I've not noticed any artifacts left behind from one page to the next.

Battery life is not close to the Voyage. I'd guess it will last about a week if I'm lucky (due to the stylus?) whereas the Voyage goes on and on and on.

For writing notes though, the reMarkable is miles ahead. The feel of writing is poor, primarily because the stylus rattles when you're writing. There's also a perceptible latency between the pen moving and eink appearing on the screen.

Kobo's stylus is an optional extra, not particularly cheap and it doesn't magnetically attach or clip onto the device, making it easier to lose. reMarkable's stylus is included but a new one will set you back even more, but it attaches to the side with decent magnets.

Unexpectedly the Sage has software features for writing and drawing that the reMarkable can't touch. I really liked drawing rough shapes and with a double-tap, they are reinterpreted as squares, lines, arrows ... and it works brilliantly. As does the handwriting recognition which is at least as accurate and much faster than the reMarkable. Maybe because it doesn't have to be sent to a cloud service?

I'll sum up by saying that it's a great device for reading (and it's waterproof too, so I can read in the bath!) but only so-so for writing on.

And given that it runs Linux maybe I should try writing a gemini client for it? That would be seriously cool...