I’ve said it before, both in these reviews and elsewhere; my life is pretty messy.
Easily 75% of the walls in my home are lined with books. There are many, many more books in stacks, in cupboards, in boxes. Then there are the print-outs; the pitches and synopses, the page by page breakdowns, the articles for reference. Things I don’t want to read on a bright computer screen, or to have open constantly, but which I need to have easy access to. Then there are the notebooks; lots and lots of notebooks filled with notes and roughed out pages and scribbled ideas. An awful lot of paper, basically, and often not easily sorted through to get to what I need. Consequentially, the idea of an e-ink e-reader / notebook has been something that’s interested me for a good while, and the very generous people at MobiScribe were kind enough to send me one.
The MobiScribe Origin, launched earlier this year, is an e-reader and electronic notebook with a 6.8-inch, Black and White E-ink touchscreen display.
I’ve never owned a dedicated e-reader before – no Kindle, Nook, or Kobo for me, although I was always intrigued by the idea – and the app versions of those e-readers on phone and tablet never really worked very well for me. Even though (maybe because) I spend so much of my time writing and working on-screen, I really don’t like reading long-form things on a screen (hence all the print-outs mentioned above). My only real experience of E-ink prior to this was the rather small display on the Freewrite, but that was definitely one of the things I really liked about it the device. Much more ink and paper-like, rather than blazing, circadian rhythm disrupting, headache inducing blue light of a glaring screen.
So, can an E-ink e-reader and notebook help me reduce the number of print-outs, notebooks, and reference books piled up on and around my desk? Well, maybe.
I don’t think I’ve spent enough time with the MobiScribe Origin yet to know how exactly how my long-term use of it is going to pan out (three kids currently at home for the school Summer Holidays, and nine days or so away from home / the office last week), but I can tell you what I’ve discovered that I like about it so far.
Reading
The Mobistore is MobiScribe‘s own dedicated app store, accessed under Tools on the homescreen. These apps are divided into three categories: Reading (Kobo, Libby, OverDrive, Tolino, and Kindle), Tools (Calendar, BlueMail, Calculator, ib Eink Browser, Chess Play and Learn, and Dropbox), and Templates. So that’s a total of 11 apps, and a huge range of templates (for note taking, lists, to-dos, etc), available in the Mobistore.
Leah already uses the Kindle app on her phone, so it made sense to hook her account up to the MobiScribe Origin, since she has a bit of a library built up on there. Now this is obviously very old news to anyone who has owned or used an E-ink e-reader in the last 15 years but, it turns out, they’re actually really nice to read on. I know you already know that, but there you go. I also don’t need to explain that e-ink means you can read the screen in full, direct sunlight without getting screen glare, or that adjustable brightness and backlight mean that you can read in very low light with the same level of comfort. But you can, and it does.
Having also installed Dropbox (which, luckily enough, is the cloud backup service we already use for all our work stuff – if you weren’t already using Dropbox however, I can see that potentially being a bit of a problem), I can read .odt .doc and .docx files I have saved there within the app easily. I can tick “make available offline”, meaning that I’ll still be able to read that file, or that whole folder in the Dropbox app even without wi-fi. If I download a .doc file to the MobiScribe Origin there is no app on the device itself which can open it, but .txt files can be opened, edited and saved easily.
Files like .pdf .mobi and .epub can be downloaded from Dropbbox or copied over to your MobiScribe Origin from your computer via USB. Once they’ve been placed in the Books folder these files all open seamlessly in the Books app and you can read them just as easily as if you were using the Kindle or any other e-reader app.
In a nutshell: the MobiScribe Origin is great for viewing and reading text that I would normally either print out unnecessarily or else struggle through reading on a screen that was either too big or too small. Sometimes people send me digital copies of their books to read and I end up squinting my way through it on my phone, or sitting unhappily reading it at my desk, getting distracted, and feeling like I wasn’t really getting the optimum reading experience. These are the instances in which I will definitely be using an e-reader in the future.
Writing
The MobiScribe Origin does not have Bluetooth capabilities, and you cannot connect a keyboard to it via USB either. No keyboard. No typing. This is an E-ink notebook. Of course, there is an on-screen keyboard for typing, which you can do with your fingertip, but which works much better with the device’s stylus (as you’d expect). So, if you’re writing, then you’re hand writing. Note taking. It’s a notebook, after all.
So first of all, I’m going to admit that, so far, I haven’t done very much writing or note taking on the MobiScribe Origin. What I have used it for is to-do lists and task lists – the kind of thing I’d usually write in my workbook for that day, and then find again in a few months, having completely forgotten where I wrote it. And it works great for that. No complaints at all. The stylus on the screen has a pleasant pencil-on-paper feel, and the whole process feels very natural.
Right now, I don’t know if I’d use it for actually writing out longhand ideas the same way I do pen and paper, however. A big factor is the size of the screen/writing area. I’m used to scrawling in biro across A4 pages when I’m trying to get something down quickly, and a screen that’s almost a third of that isn’t going to fit much of my writing on… but maybe I’ll get used to it. The obvious advantage being that I could carry this one, small A5 sized device around, and have literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes stashed away in it.
You can save your handwritten files as images and export those to Dropbox, or to your computer via USB, but you can also automatically convert your handwriting to text. I have terrible handwriting but, as you can see from the images the software recognises about 95% of what I write, no problem (it does much better set on US English than UK English, which I assume is some kind of usage/ learning gap between the two language packs). Once converted, the files can be altered using touchscreen and the on-screen keyboard and can be saved / exported as .txt files. So, handwritten notes turned into standard files that you can open and work on on your computer. Again, it sounds very useful, and I’m excited to see what I can do with it in the future.
Sketching
Roughing out comics pages on the MobiScribe Origin is something that I’ve found works surprisingly well.
Although I’m used to working in an A4 sketchbook when I’m planning out pages – typically drawing out four very rough pages of comic per A4 page – the fact that the Mobiscribe is so much smaller isn’t so much of a problem in this instance. After all, it’s not like I’m going to run out of pages.
My roughs / thumbnails are not something I usually share. They’re just guides for me when I’m scripting and a way of me keeping track of what the pages I’ve written roughly look like. It’s easy to flick back and forth through the pages, make notes, and alterations as an when. You can save / export any sketches as .pdf or .png files.
As I said at the outset, I don’t feel like I’ve yet spent enough time with the MobiScribe Origin to fully explore and get used to all the things it can do and all the ways it could be useful to me in the way I work and the type of writing I do. I am, however, impressed by what I’ve seen and tried so far, and I’m definitely excited to do more.
The MobiScribe Origin is available now direct from MobiScribe for $199 USD + shipping
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