Loads of Engadget readers – and to be trustworthy, Engadget editors – are obsessive about e-ink units. Whether they’re productiveness workhorses or digital canvases, the tech has slowly continued to inch past the one-handed e-readers of the final decade.

The newest addition is a substantially-sized e-ink pill from Huawei. The MatePad Paper has a ten.3-inch grayscale display with an anti-glare, reflective show to assist low-light use. The Paper can reproduce 256 shades of greyscale to show textual content and pictures – and even video — though I’m unsure why you’d need B&W video.

You most likely already observed it’s acquired surprisingly small bezels for an e-ink system. Huawei says it’s honed the pill all the way down to an 86.3 p.c screen-to-body ratio, with a ebook spine-inspired design guaranteeing there’s one thing so that you can maintain. All that e-paper, coupled with the scale of the factor, units it aside from just about each different e-ink system we’ve seen thus far. (The Kindle DX was a very long time in the past.)

Alongside 32 ranges of backlighting, the system can also be appropriate with Huawei’s M Pencil, which normally launches alongside its extra typical tablets. This means you possibly can scribble, annotate and edit your paperwork and books, which is a really great tool with regards to e-ink units. Notably, Huawei has been capable of refine the sensitivity of the textured display to 26ms. It won’t be fairly as tremendous clean as an S22 Ultra – and even Huawei’s different tablets, but it surely’s notable on a matte e-ink floor. Is this the right digital note-taking system?

Continuing Huawei’s push to attach all of its units as seamlessly as doable, you possibly can join the MatePad Paper to the corporate’s laptops, PCs, tablets and telephones. Huawei says the pill will appear as if a USB drive, and you’ll drag and drop your notes and annotated PDFs throughout to your laptop computer. This is feasible because of the corporate’s propriety working system, HarmonyOS.

Huawei product bulletins include the same old proviso, nevertheless. The {hardware} is thrilling – and tempting for anybody who works with a number of books, paperwork and digital paperwork — however you’ll be constrained by HarmonyOS. 

The firm says it is nonetheless rising out the ecosystem, however the onus stays on app creators and firms as to whether or not they’ll provide help. For instance, There are a couple of methods I may take a look at my Kindle books on the MatePad Paper – possibly I may use the web-based reader? – but it surely received’t be as seamless as Amazon {hardware}. Then once more, the MatePad Paper can also be able to greater than a easy Kindle.

Huawei didn’t announce the provision and pricing of the MatePad Paper forward of its MWC presentation. We’ll replace this report after we hear extra.

Catch up on all the information from MWC 2022 proper right here!