Thats essentially the problem in a nutshell. You have five people struck by confirmation bias, 20 people that always phrase their inputs with "I'm very happy with what I bought" regardless of what they bought. An entire 16 page thread that cant point out the shortcomings of a device - and in the end every voice that does, gets counter balanced with another one of those 20 stating "I'm very happy with what I bought".
Thats the internet in 2018 for you. Everyone very eager to participate, while have nothing of substance to say.
One more shortcoming - if you have any app installed that uses an Android notification to stay active, the dropdown menu will now default to the notification view. So added to the very fidly "get the dropdownmenu to appear" gesture (which is an edge gesture (the designer should be fired..
)), you'll now have to swap the dropdown layout each time you want to get to the brightness slider. Which then isnt very responsive either.
That means, that you are fidling around more than 1 minute each time, you want to change the brightness alone.
In the reading app they noticed, that that is an issue, and wrote in another brightness slider - but this one has no "numbers" for you to gage what setting you actually are on.
Every usability designer, looking at this thing will get a laughing fit.
And again, its only three, four "small" things, but each of them is "ruining" the device for anyone who is clued into how better eReaders are designed.
Take your software team, go over the four most important points (make soft hyphens work, dont overrule epub layout settings (at least not by default), make the "move in" action for the top bar more usable (create a touch target, Idk), let the device perform a "new books?" check everytime you leave an app (or a certain app - if you want to save battery and let the user make the choice) -- maybe even: make the contrast enhancement options more usable with most apps (most simply "forget" them past the first screen) - or have someone explain to your customers why you cant (thats fair as well)) with them, and you have a very good eReader.
Maybe Librera can be a decent replacement for the reading part, but then we are back to contrast and kerning options. If the app has them (which it probably does), they are likely bothersome to interact with... So most people wont.
Their general idea is correct. Take the Android platform - create a customized launcher, create a good reading app, you are done. And they are half way there - they havent made any unforgiveable design mistakes either - its just, that they went to market before finishing their work. And then had a bunch of cheerleaders tell everyone on youtube, what a great device this is.
By leaving all the stuff mentioned here - out.
And please - dont get me started with other eReader manufacturers with bigger brand names, that cant get it together either. This is not a rant against one participant, this essentially is the market - sans Amazon..