[brehon]

Greetings,

I am looking for a cheap portable device for reading pdf's, both indoors and outdoors(albeit indoors more often). Obviously for quality I should go for large e-ink tablets but those do cost alot, hence I am considering alternatives.

Lets start with the fact that I don't know the size needed. Either wide tablet for landscape view or really wide phone. For the reference, currently I am using LG G6 phone(permanently in comfort view) in landscape mode with Moon+ Reader(also got Librera and ReadEra). Screen might seem quite small and indeed it's not easy but I do have some success. Perhaps it's because G6 has rather good 18:9 IPS screen, with HDR10, 1440 x 2880 resoution, 564ppi and 2410Hz PWM which doesn't kick in when brightness is set to be bit over 35%. Outdoor reading is hard, especially in bright sun but I rarely use it this way and phone offers rather high brightness levels to compensate. So the biggest drawback is screen size, it's 5.1 inch wide and I would need it to be wider so I was wondering just on bigger phone with some nice screen.

I've noticed that TCL NxtPaper 40 phones are quite popular lately albeit I don't know if they are worth all the fuss, as it seems they are just using modified matte LCD screens. Some reviews note that they also have low resolution, low ppi, only 150nits and PWM. The special view modes seem to be just marketing hype as any phone can enable most of this stuff in developer options or with custom apps. Apparently it's also using shared memory instead of own RAM. Moreover software seems to be scarry, some proprietary boot-locked Android with unknown amounts of possible unremovable bloatware(sadly LG G6 has similar problem, not only LG software draws lot of power even when idle but also 4G only works with LG OS).

But I must admit, technically I have no idea what to look at when checking for LCD screen for reading, I know reflections and glare are most horrible and TCL seems to be good at mitigating those, but should I care much about screen parameters like brightness levels, ppi, resolution, PWM?

I've also read that there are many new attempts, like RLCD and similar screens but I have no idea how such compare to normal LCD or NxtPaper ones. And what's with availability and prices?

Also, speaking of size and functionality, it could a be full device like android phone/tablet, with apps, calls and web but it could also be specialized device with just basic reading functions and no outside connections(except for a way to copy pdf's). And as I said, it could be tablet size, albeit I would probably prefer something that is wide for landscape(hence I also mention those 21:9 phones).

Even in case of full device, I completely don't care about stuff like cameras, CPU/GPU speeds, stylus or any extra functions beyond pdf reading functionality because the only stuff that I would do beside pdf's would be probably basic phone functions and some minor web browsing.

And when it comes to money, I prefer to spend as little as possible which includes buying outdated/used stuff that works just fine.


On sidenote, I'm also wondering if there's any free android app for reading pdf's that would let me to manually select pdf colors(mainly text and background). There's plenty of such apps for Windows and Linux but I haven't found anything for android yet.