With their paper-like displays and ability to hold stacks of digital books, e-readers have become a popular alternative to bulky paperbacks. But what about e-notepads? Is the technology there to replace your drawers of bulky legal pads with a single sleek plastic slate?
The first mainstream e-notepad to hit Australia was 2021’s Kobo Elipsa from Rakuten, which was joined last year by Amazon’s Kindle Scribe. Most recently Rakuten put e-notepad tech into a small form with the Kobo Sage, and this month it’s releasing the most advanced (and expensive) e-notepad yet with the Elipsa 2E.
The Kobo Elipsa E2 can replace piles of paper notepads, as well as textbooks and novels.
So, what can you do with this $630 slab? You can read ebooks on it, and write all over them if you like with the included stylus, which attaches via magnets to the tablet and has a rechargeable battery. But you can also start fresh with a clean page and fill it with your notes, sketches and doodles, which are all saved and synced for you to return to later.
When you make a new notebook, you can choose between basic or advanced. In the former, you just write as normal and the ink shows up instantly as you go. The textured screen makes writing feel and sound great (though I assume it wears out the stylus tips eventually, since there are spares included in the box), and my writing is way more legible here than on a slippery tablet screen. You can choose between more than a dozen paper types, depending on whether you want lines or a grid or dots, etc.
As with a paper pad, you can switch to a highlighter or a different shape of pen, all on the same page. But unlike real paper, you can also delete anything, by touching the page with the back end of the stylus, or move text and elements around by using a free-form lasso tool. The device also does a decent job of recognising handwriting, so you can search through your notebooks with a word or phrase.
The advanced notebook is handy if you’re going to want to move your work to a computer afterwards. You can write as normal, but you can also double-tap paragraphs to convert them to regular text. You can also insert sections for drawings or diagrams, and the layout is kept fairly neat.
If you want to get your notes off the reader, you can export them to a PC (via USB cable) or to your Dropbox account. You can also download from Dropbox. Similar functionality with Google Drive is coming soon.
The Kindle Scribe is an e-reader and e-notepad from Amazon.
But the Elipsa isn’t only a notepad, it’s an e-reader as well, and works just like any other Kobo e-reader, apart from the fact it’s bigger. That means you can import books to read in most formats – EPUB, PDF, FlePub, CBZ, etc. – or buy them directly from the Kobo store. If your local library (or any library you can get a membership to) uses Overdrive to manage its ebooks, you can also borrow and read books right on the device.