Onyx Boox M92 sample has arrived. First imression - I love it!

[peterx]

Originally Posted by kodomo

Hi PeterX!
Did you put your findings into the Wiki in the end? If so - how about linking them to the M92 article?
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Boox_M92

I've started collecting tidbits of information and creating some documentation under the 'Related Wiki Links' section. It would be cool to bring a bit of organization to this mess ( ) of information hidden in a number of threads a new M92 owner like me needs to read.

Cheers!

No, I have not written down anything, but I think that in the end there was not much to write about. I'll see if I can add anything to that page. (the ssh server for example)

[janek]

Hello forum!
This is my first post here, but I've been lurking for quite a while - you helped me a lot when I was making a decision to buy a reader. So to return the favour I'd like to share my m92 experience with you. I just received my Boox from ereader-store (which is recommendable - it took them 4 days to deliver the device from Germany to Poland).

There's also Polish distributor of Onyx out there - Artatech, but they don't have M92 yet and keep on moaning about "Chinese holidays" when asked about plans to introduce it - and I wanted the thing asap. I'm mentioning this because there's one thing about Polish distribution that might be interesting for general Onyx audience, which is that they include Ivona tts application, which is *truly outstanding* in terms of speech quality. Sadly for license reasons it is not available from Artatech for devices not purchased in Polish distribution, and may or may not be installed as an add-on by the users themselves (it looks very fiddly), but perhaps the cooperation with the guys from Artatech or Ivona Software would be helpful for other distributors (I've seen people asking here about tts in German - and Ivona speaks many strange voices, including Welsh, Romanian or Polish).

Anyway, I bought the Boox because I wanted to get my pdfs out of netbook jail. I have tons of scholarly papers and books in all possible pdf flavours and Boox seemed the only reasonable option to read them on eInk, beside PocketBook 9XX (Kindle DX is way too proprietary/closed source/we-spy-you-and-drm-your-life for my liking). And, I must stay, it does this basic job very well. Text quality is very good, the device is very responsive when reading pdfs and not sluggish at all. Page enlargement works very well, even on scanned pdf. Also two-page crude A4 scans work well - they must be enlarged by some 150% but then joystick is helpful for panning around the page. I was also surprised by how good scribbling option works. I was able to write in very small script very quickly, and the Boox did catch up, so it is almost fit for doing lecture/conference/seminar notes (see below why "almost"). Annotations work as promised, so does scribbling and merging them with files (both regular and scanned pdfs).

Build quality is good, the device feels solid, the enclosing is ok. Stylus is perhaps a little bit too tiny. After two days of playing with the Boox the battery remains at 60%.

Now to the usability in academic work, which apparently is relevant for many of us here. Both annotations and scribbling are the key features, and it seems that in the current state of development they will allow me to keep/improve my workflow (I use a local installation of Wikindx for storing references, notes and for indexing pdfs, so I can use a bash scripts to sync my books on PC and Boox and to update Wikindx entries automagically with new annotations/scribbles whenever I export them. A ssh server on Boox would be better for that, though, rather than usb cable - any progress on that?). On the other hand, downloading papers straight off Wikindx installed on a networked PC doesn't seem to work, nor from commercial databases like jstor.

Now for the downsides/glitches I noticed over two days of playing with my m92 (firmware 20120221):
- [Hardware design] I find it strange that the headphone socket is located at the bottom edge of the device. If I try to read a book while listening to music AND lying on my sofa (lazy researcher I am ), the headphone jack sticking out of Boox will force me to hold the device up in the air, or it'll bruise my stomach. Of course I can rotate the device upside down but then I have to operate the stylus/joystick with my left hand and buttons with right hand - uncomfortable.
- [Web slow] Web browsing generally works and even complex pages are rendered properly. Still, the browser is very basic. It is slow, at times the device becomes unresponsive. This of course may be due to hardware limitations.
- [Web - no new window handling] Also, it is impossible to work with websites that require opening new windows, even if there are no other technical reasons why they shouldn't work (try playing a game at www.kurnik.pl). This is perhaps due to the lack of multitasking, but it could be overcome somehow.
- [Web forms] Entering data to forms on websites is painstakingly slow. This is definitely a software problem that should be fixed - virtual keyboard is responsive enough in annotations. Also clicking on a form does not start the keyboard, one has to do that manually.
- [Web] I was unable to download files from websites. This is an important drawback because it makes it impossible to download your books/articles straight from www.
- [Web/virtual keyboard layout] Virtual keyboard should feature the dot sign on the first "page" so that it is not necessary to click Symbol button twice just to type a dot. Try typing in a web address like www.something.important.com - current layout buys you six unnecessary strokes of the stylus... Or is this so only with Polish keyboard?
- [Translation/Virtual keyboard] Polish virtual keyboard lacks some important characters, like slash, backslash and quotation mark. This is probably because we have so many special characters in Polish (zażółć gęślą jaźń), but still the keyboard has two types of dash, out of which only one appears to work :nuts:. This should be fixed ASAP, it is very annoyoing to switch to other languages just to ask questions (or type a full web addresses).
- [Scribbling bug] Scribbling on a blank page (when you enter the scribble app from main menu) and exporting the scribble produces a blank png file with no scribbles at all, but that only when the scribble has more than one page. This is a really nasty bug - the device should produce a number of pngs instead of one.
- [Power management bug] Auto-shutdown doesn't seem to work if you leave the device in the web browsing mode.
- [Apps] Calendar applet is very basic, to say the least. Some basic time planning features are needed, not to mention syncing with other calendars.
- [Browsing filesystem] If you browse the filesystem (SD card or internal storage) with joystick and there are too many files to be displayed on one page, the expected behaviour would be that the page flips automatically whenever you reach the last file on the current page. Instead the highlighting moves to the first file on current page.

All in all, I'm a happy camper. This device is generally fit for serious work, UNLESS (like some people here) you expect an eInk tablet, which Boox clearly is not. Book reading and annotating work mostly as they should. Usability must be improved though, with limited web browsing being the most acute problem for me.


Correction: downloading files actually works. It is just infuriatingly slow and the browser does not recognize "file://" type of link. A 3.5 mb journal paper took about 5 mins to load on my local network! Also, the browser asks if I want to open the file and then does nothing - the file has to be accessed manually from "downloads" directory... I also played some more with "blank slate" scribbles to discover that exporting them sometimes works, but only for odd pages. Odd.

[kodomo]

Originally Posted by PF4Mobile

Great ...I see that they have the sources here...
The PDF reader is based on http://podofo.sourceforge.net/
Probably a closer look at these libraries and at Onyx's sources will tell us what sort of format they use for the highlighting so we can export that decently. I believe that that is the only thing missing right now.

Are you sure that the M92 reader is based on Podofo? Settings->About mentiones something about 'Adobe Reader Mobile'

Or were you talking about a different device?

[PF4Mobile]

Originally Posted by kodomo

Are you sure that the M92 reader is based on Podofo? Settings->About mentiones something about 'Adobe Reader Mobile'

Or were you talking about a different device?

https://github.com/onyx-intl/boox-op...aster/code/src

See the line:

pdf_tools 2 months ago fix problem of pdf_doc->getInfo()->GetTitle() in PoDoFoAnnotationWriter [joycode]

[kodomo]

indeed - or https://github.com/onyx-intl/boox-op...f_tools/podofo for that matter

[Booxtor]

Originally Posted by janek

Hello forum!
.....There's also Polish distributor of Onyx out there - Artatech, but they don't have M92 yet and keep on moaning about "Chinese holidays" when asked about plans to introduce it - and I wanted the thing asap. I'm mentioning this because there's one thing about Polish distribution that might be interesting for general Onyx audience, which is that they include Ivona tts application, which is *truly outstanding* in terms of speech quality. Sadly for license reasons it is not available from Artatech for devices not purchased in Polish distribution, and may or may not be installed as an add-on by the users themselves (it looks very fiddly), but perhaps the cooperation with the guys from Artatech or Ivona Software would be helpful for other distributors (I've seen people asking here about tts in German - and Ivona speaks many strange voices, including Welsh, Romanian or Polish).
....

Hi, janek!

Welcome aboard.
Concerning Ivona tts it must be telepathy Three days ago I discovered, that in Poland they are using IVONA in M92 and have visited their website. I was really surprized about quality of this speech engine and wrote a mail to the Onyx ingenieurs about possibility to install that engine to M92 and make the users able to download/buy language packages from Ivona. They are testing now how to realize that technically. I hope that very soon we can enjoy the very best TTS synthesys in our beloved ereader.

[Klastes]

Hi.
Does the Polish Ivona work in your m92? I am from PL and I also consider to buy german distribution of m92.

[janek]

Originally Posted by Klastes

Hi.
Does the Polish Ivona work in your m92? I am from PL and I also consider to buy german distribution of m92.

No, it does not. It has tts but only the original English/Chinese, not Ivona (which currently only features Polish voice - it cannot read in English). Robert from Artatech explained the situation here - to run Ivona on Boox one must have special software which Artatech developed for Polish customers, as well as voice files and Ivona engine as such.

So it appears that there are three possibilities:
1. People who purchased "non-Polish" m92s will not have the opportunity to use Ivona at all
2. Once Artatech starts selling m92s in Poland, they will also make available new firmware for Polish versions, necessarily including the bits required to run Ivona. In such case one could download firmware from them and buy the rest of the software from Ivona - and voila.
3. Someone else develops the software and makes it generally available.

Originally Posted by Booxtor

Hi, janek!
I hope that very soon we can enjoy the very best TTS synthesys in our beloved ereader.

[lorenzoens]

Originally Posted by adrhc

Man, great news. Take a look at this PDF:
http://static.springsource.org/sprin...-reference.pdf (I attached it anyway).

The new Kindle DX (that one with joystick) manage to browse this huge programming technical PDF document with 1 page in less than one second (really impressive ); the new Sony 6" (with reflow on) takes about 20s to load a page . Try to browse the PDF from page 70-72 (page 70 starts with "arguments, each representing a dependency. Calling a static") and please tell me how it behaves with reflow off then on .

Kindle DXG is one of the slowest 9,7" on pdf. The file you linked is easy as pie on readers. I think you should try with a 300 pages pdf made with static image scans, not the easy textual ones. 60-70 MB. The DXG will take up to 5-6 seconds to turn a page.
This is the territory wher you should propose a competition, but I warn you that DXG's firmware (and hardware) is completely outdated with pdf.

And the only text where it can turn pages in less than 1 sec is *mobi.

And what about reflow? Did you notice DXG has no reflow, which even Kindle 3 has? this means no zooming on texual pdf.

[janek]

Hmm, It looks like I'm about to monopolize this thread, but since there's no separate thread for bugs, I'll stick to this one.

Two more quirks I've discovered (fw 20120221):

1. Open a pdf in vertical mode. Rotate the screen to landscape mode. Now rotate back to vertical mode. Select annotations, add annotation... Annotation dialog appears but it is bigger than screen width... It cannot be closed - some buttons are not visible. Ok, rotate the screen back to landscape mode and close the dialog. Now rotate back to vertical. Try again - add annotation... The problem persists, the dialog again is bigger than screen width. And so on. The only way to get rid of this is to close the file and start again.
2. While in web try downloading a file with multiple extensions (ie. something.something.pdf.pdf). Browser crashes, file is not saved.
3. Edit: Now, another one. It is impossible to effectively create a bookmark to a web folder (just a folder with files accessible on web) - it is invisible in browser's menu, even if the bookmark symbol on top bar is highlighted whenever the page/folder is opened.

Can anyone confirm this on newer firmware?

[pkbo]

Originally Posted by kodomo

Are you sure that the M92 reader is based on Podofo? Settings->About mentiones something about 'Adobe Reader Mobile'

The PDF reader is based on Adobe Mobile SDK, they use PoDoFo to create PDFs combined with scribbles.

[kodomo]

Originally Posted by pkbo

The PDF reader is based on Adobe Mobile SDK, they use PoDoFo to create PDFs combined with scribbles.

Interesting... Do I get this correctly then, that scribbling is not really part of the reader's functionality, but an external addon? (perhaps even _the_ scribble application?)

[Mono]

I think, it is external addon by Onyx.

[pkbo]

The PDF reader itself has obviously no sources open. So we can only guess how scribbling is integrated with Adobe part. Scribbling is definitely implemented by onyx. You can check implementation in the SDK. It is in data directory, see files starting with 'sketch_'

[peterx]

Originally Posted by kodomo

Interesting... Do I get this correctly then, that scribbling is not really part of the reader's functionality, but an external addon? (perhaps even _the_ scribble application?)

As pkbo writes, any viewer can be extended by a scribbling widget (from onyx, see the sdk sources) that just draws on top. _the_ scribbling application seems to just show a white screen and then adds the scribbling widget. For _the_ scribbling application there is also another difference: The data is stored in a sqlite database in /root while for pdf scribbles, it is stored in an sqlite database in the respective .onyx-directory.

By the way, you can convert these sqlite databases to svg files using https://github.com/peter-x/boox-annotation-export