[plusz]

My thoughts after a few days.

TCL NXTPAPER 11


It's an excellent tablet for indoor use. I really like the matt screen. I wish this device catch attention on the market, and we will see the return of quality matt displays for laptops, monitors, etc.

For outdoor use, well it can be used but rather only in light (black text, white background) mode, and when you're covered in a shade. Direct sunlight, of a sunny day with clear sky, it's too much for it.

The tech spec of the tablet is really good for an "e-reader". I'm just reading books and web articles. For that task, the tablet has enough processing power. I have no idea if it's good for games, etc.

The cons:

I don't like the aspect ratio. The NXTPAPER 12" has much better geometry, but seems just too big/heavy, besides I can't find it anywhere to buy. However, the screen aspect ratio really matters for viewing PDFs which are in ~1.4 vs the screen ~1.6, so you've got ~20% of screen space wasted when viewing full page.

The automatic brightness is bad. It's a problem of any tablet/phone, as they measure the amount of light behind you, the sensor is next to the front facing camera, instead of measuring the amount of light around and behind the device to match the screen brightness to the surroundings. Perhaps because the matt surface, the screen is only really pleasant to read when the brightens is at the right level to the surroundings. I wish there was a side button (I'm thinking of hacking the volume up/down for that purpose) to adjust the brightness manually. The standard Swipe down, find the knob, adjust... routine is a bit awkward.

The PC mode, looks very interesting. I love it, it feels like Windows tablet. Unfortunately, it's unusable because in this mode the screen rotation doesn't work, it's stack in portrait mode, there's no access to the control panel (the swipe down gesture) so I can't adjust the brightness. In fact, I don't like the swipe gestures. It would be best if they could add all the system settings to the task bar, much like in Windows 10 when you click on the bottom right.
EDIT: actually, it works exactly this way. I was fouled by the ask for android permission, which looked like it's some kind of location tracking app launch. Once I gave it all the permissions, the lower right corner button shows notification, all the tablet control settings with brightness slider conveniently exposed. It's really nice to use. Now the only issue is that screen rotation doesn't work.

TCL NXTPAPER vs Hisense Q5 RLCD

To be honest I much more like the RLCD screen, but it only works great outdoors. It can be used indoors, but I don't like that using it forces you to find an exact spot/position, otherwise either the screen is too dark or you see annoying reflections. It's not that bad or difficult. Obviously, the room has to be well lit, a desk lamp in a dark room is rather bad idea. However, adjusting your position to use the tablet is a friction. If I have to change position then I may as well go sit at my desk with computer, which I do most of the time. With NXTPAPER I mostly adjust the screen light to the position. Well, you can still find yourself in a really bad spot, for example when the light is shining at you and you're wearing white t-shirt the screen will just wash out. Nonetheless, battery lasts sooo long in Q5 as it's not "wasted" on screen light.

TCL NXTPAPER vs Onyx Max

I bought Max for reading PDFs. These days I hardly read any, so it's laying on the shelf collecting dust. However, I keep it as I might have again some PDFs to read in the future... I was hoping that this tablet will finally replace it, but it can't due to the size. I've tried reading PDFs and it was just too tiring to constantly do zooming and panning around.

Summary

I've bought the NXTPAPER in hope to replace both Onyx Max and Hisense Q5, but I just ended with a 3rd device ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, I'll see. Since I don't read much PDFs these days, and I don't read much outdoors, perhaps these two would be collecting dust.