MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Android Apps that work well on eInk devices

maximus83 · 03-23-2019, 05:15 PM

Had a chance to play with a current version Likebook Mars for about 3 hours (not mine) and was able to install apps and try stuff with reckless abandon.

Some regular Android apps I tried:

* Pocket. Worked without issue.
* Feedly. Worked great, couldn't tell much difference from my phone except slower content page rendering.
* Solid File Explorer. File manager that can work unroooted or with root access, worked without issue.
* Microsoft Onenote. This one was a surprise, fully expected it NOT to work as I'd seen negative feedback on it elsewhere. But it works fine, with a caveat: it is not going to be able to handle the fancy features like drawing and native handwriting recognition that are built into Onenote. But....if you are content to just "share" text or images to it from other apps like your reader and your web browser, it works great for that. And you can still input text just fine, using the Likebook's screen keyboard. So I was pleasantly surprised at seeing OneNote work. That will be a win for some users.
* Firefox android. Worked without issue, including running the Ublock Origin ad-blocking add-on. Firefox did not perform noticeably worse than Boyue's native browser.
* Google Play Music. Worked ok, not perfectly, with 2 or 3 crashes. It hogs a fair amount of resources, searches and song loading were slower than expected, but it worked.
* Microsoft Swiftkey. Background: it enables 'swipe' style rapid data input. Expected it wouldn't work at all. Surprise, it actually does, although performance is laggy to the point of being unusable. Anyone who's used Gboard or Swiftkey for swipe-style typing knows how these apps leave these little 'trails' on your screen in the UI, to give you feedback on your swipe movements. The trails on the Likebook were incredibly slow to render and would linger too long, as the screen had trouble repainting fast enough to keep up. It did make for a few laughs, it looked downright bizarre as it got so far behind. In short, install Swiftkey only for entertainment but not to actually use. :-)

03-23-2019, 05:15 PM	#67
maximus83 Nameless Being	Had a chance to play with a current version Likebook Mars for about 3 hours (not mine) and was able to install apps and try stuff with reckless abandon. Some regular Android apps I tried: * Pocket. Worked without issue. * Feedly. Worked great, couldn't tell much difference from my phone except slower content page rendering. * Solid File Explorer. File manager that can work unroooted or with root access, worked without issue. * Microsoft Onenote. This one was a surprise, fully expected it NOT to work as I'd seen negative feedback on it elsewhere. But it works fine, with a caveat: it is not going to be able to handle the fancy features like drawing and native handwriting recognition that are built into Onenote. But....if you are content to just "share" text or images to it from other apps like your reader and your web browser, it works great for that. And you can still input text just fine, using the Likebook's screen keyboard. So I was pleasantly surprised at seeing OneNote work. That will be a win for some users. * Firefox android. Worked without issue, including running the Ublock Origin ad-blocking add-on. Firefox did not perform noticeably worse than Boyue's native browser. * Google Play Music. Worked ok, not perfectly, with 2 or 3 crashes. It hogs a fair amount of resources, searches and song loading were slower than expected, but it worked. * Microsoft Swiftkey. Background: it enables 'swipe' style rapid data input. Expected it wouldn't work at all. Surprise, it actually does, although performance is laggy to the point of being unusable. Anyone who's used Gboard or Swiftkey for swipe-style typing knows how these apps leave these little 'trails' on your screen in the UI, to give you feedback on your swipe movements. The trails on the Likebook were incredibly slow to render and would linger too long, as the screen had trouble repainting fast enough to keep up. It did make for a few laughs, it looked downright bizarre as it got so far behind. In short, install Swiftkey only for entertainment but not to actually use. :-) Last edited by maximus83; 03-23-2019 at 05:18 PM.