Review cover Viwoods AiPaper GBAtemp review
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An e-ink tablet with AI as its unique selling point, does the aptly named AiPaper do enough to set it apart from the rest?

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I probably open every e-ink related review in the same way, but by now my general enthusiasm about the technology probably isn’t a secret. I love e-ink tech and more specifically I really do enjoy e-ink notebooks. I’m not going to pretend that they’re the economic decision for your average person when weighed against the cost of a normal notebook, or even when compared to the cost of 100. I like them because they’re convenient, feel great to write on, are easy to organise, and can even offer greater flexibility than traditional means of writing. With Supernote I really came to appreciate the headers and in-document linking, with the reMarkable its seamless transitioning between hand-writing and typing. One feature I’ve never really been crying for however is AI in these tablets, but before getting to that, let’s look more generally at what the AiPaper offers.

Out of the Box

To get stuck in with what the AiPaper has to offer, we’re looking at a strikingly thin 4.5mm slate that weighs around 520g when sat in its case. Along the bottom of the tablet you get three capacitive buttons, representing Back, Home, and “AI” going left to right. Outside of those there’s a power button along the top of the device on the right, and a USB C port for charging on the bottom of the device on the left, and that’s really the bulk of it.

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The larger design is clean, simple, and feels great to both use and hold. I’m a little more mixed on the case though; I’ll say it does the job, and the fact it even comes with a case as standard is honestly a plus. The material used is a thin faux leather with a hoop for the pen, which I will add is also included in the base price, and a plastic spine inside to guide where the tablet should be placed and secured with magnets. Compared to the reMarkable 2 and Paper Pro the magnets are definitely weaker, but still do a good enough job in keeping things where they should be. It hasn’t fallen out since I originally put it in, so it’s certainly good enough for me. Though the plastic spine does manage to help secure the tablet in place, I will also note that it doesn’t quite meet perfectly with the left side of the device, overshooting slightly on both the top and bottom. There certainly is an argument to be made that it’s a design choice, but it’s not one I’m fond of. The choice of material and general makeup of the case comes across as a little cheap, with the pen loop in particular feeling a little exposed due to the use of a softer faux leather. I can at least say it's survived a few months of use in and out of a bag though, so despite my reservations it has held up well enough.

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Following on from my thoughts on the case, the pen similarly feels a little lacking. And that isn't really for a lack of features either. We have a fairly standard design with replaceable nibs, a button where you grip it, and an eraser on top. It goes beyond what you see from reMarkable's marker, and yet it has a hollowness to it that, paired with its relatively light weight, just makes it come across as feeling a little flimsy. It's a bit like a cheaper feeling plastic Surface Pen if you've used one of those before. All together you get a really rather odd out of the box experience where on paper you have everything you'd want to get going, but it all just feels slightly off. This idea carries through to the software as you start to use it too.

A Well Rounded Software Experience

The software experience on the AiPaper actually surprised me for how much I came to enjoy it. Compared to something like the reMarkable or Supernote, the larger UI feels like a more guided experience towards certain areas of productivity. If these are things you’d use the device for, it’s a really big plus. If not though, you might find yourself frustratingly staring at things you aren’t interested in whenever you turn the tablet on. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Starting at the main menu you get a good idea of the general design philosophy on show. You have a heading bar on the top that tells you where you are in the UI, as well as offering a search function. To the left you have a toolbar with nine non-customisable shortcuts, and front and centre we see six panels, these mirroring a number of the icons on the toolbar along with various panels to preview content. From top to bottom we have Paper, Daily, Meeting, Learning, Picking, and Apps. Paper is your core e-ink notebook experience, and if you’re coming here from another device, a lot of this will look familiar.

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You can create notebooks, here called “Papers”, and scribble away to your heart’s content. Pressing on the new notebook icon on your screen will throw you straight into a blank sheet of paper with no fuss, updating the toolbar to include pen options, an eraser, text, AI shortcuts, and a selection tool. At the bottom of the toolbar, we also see tags, an option to view all pages, layers, templates, the option to add a passcode to the notebook you’re currently in, and a few other miscellaneous settings. The reMarkable resemblance is really uncanny in places. I do understand that there’s only so many ways to present something like this, but the larger implementation really just feels like the core reMarkable experience with features thrown on top, all without really questioning why it was that way in the first place. There is, for example, a button on the toolbar to change your page’s template. This is in addition to the button that does the exact thing within the layers menu, one entry above the template button on the toolbar. It’s a small thing I’ll admit, but it makes the system feel unnecessarily cluttered and all together less polished than I would have otherwise liked. There is also a semblance of this when creating a notebook. Though you can press on the new notebook icon to jump straight in, there also happens to be a second new notebook icon tucked away on the top menu bar, this opening a more thorough page that closely mirrors how you'd create a notebook on the reMarkable. I don't think it's awful to have more choice in setting things up, but I do feel this would have done better as a setting than cluttering the UI the way this has.

Much in line with the name of the device, the AI options available in notebooks are perhaps some of the more interesting features on show. Once you’ve registered an account with Viwoods you gain access to a number of ChatGPT-powered tools. I’ll get this out of the way, I think the dedicated AI button at the bottom of the device is a complete waste. This button will simply pop up a new ChatGPT window and allow you to type in a prompt using a software keyboard; dedicating a button on an e-ink notebook to an AI chat window that doesn’t interact with your notes at all is in my mind ludicrous. Realistically this should’ve been a remappable function button that had these AI tools as an option, if only for the fact there are some actually useful tools on the device that do interact with your notes.

Pressing the toolbar-based AI button brings up a menu with four set options: analyse content, generate article, AI text conversion, and AI assistant. Analyse content seems to take a screen grab of the page and send it upstream with a basic prompt to explain what’s shown. A simple hand-written bullet point list gave me an explanation telling me that they’re hand-written notes in English, and also provided an overview of what the notes were about. It’s simple, but it does the job well enough. Generate article will take whatever text you have and blow it up into an article, as the title suggests. I tested this by writing a short synopsis, and it read it correctly and wrote it out as expected. AI text conversion will be a raw conversion of your hand-written notes as text, which is again fairly simple, and the AI assistant button will just take a screenshot of your current page and open a fresh chat window for you to type in your own prompt.

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Where I think there is actually a useful feature here is in the option to add your own custom items to the AI menu after those four, and this is the kind of integration I was hoping to see when pushing so heavily on AI as a selling point. You’re given a box to name your command, and then a free text box to write out your own prompt to be called with a screenshot of your current page. I really do think this one has some potential. As a quick idea, I wrote out a prompt along the lines of “for each bullet point, write out a prototype, explaining how it works and any notable intricacies to the design”. Testing this with a list of “C++ MQTT client, C# gRPC client, and Python gRPC server” it did exactly what I asked.  To come up with a bit more of a unique prompt to the notebook format, I tried going for something that would look at the UI sketch I drew on a page, and attempt to recreate it in C++ using the fairly common ImGui library. Again it gives it a fair stab, but it’s in these more complex actions you can find yourself hitting a wall. And it’s not so much the fault of the AiPaper, but the technology it’s trying to incorporate.

Two responses from the same prompt and image.

Under the hood we’re basically seeing the device take a screenshot and send it to ChatGPT with your prompt, and with that you naturally get all the quirks of ChatGPT. Some requests just time out, others give responses varying from wrong to somewhat off, and sometimes you just get gibberish back. Of course sometimes you do get a useful response, but as a whole it does demand a certain patience to really get the most out of. Having an AI assistant in this kind of setting where you can easily draw as well as type is a novel idea, but I am left questioning whether the AI behind the scenes is at a point where you’d want something like this.

Going beyond the Papers menu, Meetings are largely more of the same. You get the same menu to create a new note, this time with a focus on, as you might have guessed, meetings. These notes are stored entirely separately to your regular notebooks, also giving you a small assortment of different templates and a slightly different page layout with your toolbar now along the top of the screen. Beyond that you can mark certain meetings as favourites, tag them, and add a password to them just like you can normal notebooks.

Though it does feel a little arbitrary to separate meetings out the way they have here, it is something I appreciate as somebody who actively does use a digital notebook for work. The meeting templates are well designed, and with how lightweight the tablet is, I had no issues carrying it to wherever the meetings were. One small point I do just want to appreciate somewhere is the fact you don’t actually need to name your meetings, nor notebooks either. With each of these having a title space, the AiPaper will take any text from there and use that as the title. Despite my complaints about the OS feeling a little rough around the edges, this is the kind of small touch I do appreciate.

The Daily menu on the home page gives you an overview of your day, pulled straight from the built-in calendar. When the calendar is opened fully, you’re given a monthly, weekly, and daily view, each with space for free writing. The Daily preview space on the home page will show you anything written or drawn in the Tasks portion of your notes, which gives you a good idea of where you stand as you open it up for the first time in a day. Also being able to check any other day of your current week, it’s a really effective use of the home screen. You are also able to link the calendar here to your existing one on Outlook, which is always a good thing.

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Both the Learning and Picking menus are similarly simple with fairly arbitrary names, with Learning being the place to find the PDF and EPUB files on the device, and Picking being the place to find any quick notes or screenshots you’ve taken. To give the Picking menu a bit of credit, there is a good bit going on here. From anywhere on the AiPaper you’re able to swipe from the top-right corner using the pen. This brings up a small menu to crop an area of the screen, annotate on top of a full screen grab, or to just record a quick note. Each of these get put into your Picking menu, where you can then go onto insert them into your more standard notebooks later or just keep them handy. Much like your notebooks these notes and screenshots are automatically named based on the screen you were on when you took them, something that helps a bit in keeping things organised.

Our final menu item is a big one, and that’s because at its core, the AiPaper is an Android tablet with an e-ink screen and a pretty extensive launcher thrown on top of it. As its name might suggest, the Apps screen lists all the apps you have installed. Out of the box you have a few standard ones like file transferring and a browser, but you are completely free to download more. When I first got the device you were limited to grabbing apps from Viwoods’ own App Store app or sideloading APK files, but there has since been an update to enable the Google Play Store. It works just as you’d expect it to. After I followed a short set of instructions I was able to log into the Play Store and download whatever I wanted to, though obviously you need to keep your expectations in check as to what something like this is capable of. For a laugh I tried installing Pokemon TCG Pocket since I’d been playing it a lot lately, but the app just crashes shortly after booting. Something like an e-reading app, or an alternate browser like Brave will have no issues though.

Not Quite Paper… But I Like It

When it comes to the writing experience of the AiPaper, I don’t quite know what to think. This feels entirely unlike the reMarkable 2’s soft pencil feel, the Paper Pro’s pen on card feel, or the Supernote Nomad’s pen on a textured stack of paper feel. Having had a brief hands on with Amazon’s Kindle Scribe I would say that’s the closest fit, and the Scribe is itself entirely unlike paper. The best comparison that jumps to mind is how I remember interactive white boards feeling in school, though with how many years ago that was the comparison should be taken with a pinch of salt. Coming back to the AiPaper, you get a really smooth pen stroke. There’s certainly more resistance there than an Apple Pencil on an iPad, but definitely less than on any of the devices I’ve reviewed previously. It’s different, but like the devices I’ve tried before it, I do like it a lot. The writing itself has some really nice smoothing applied to it, making the experience both look and feel really quite good.

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So with everything said, is Viwoods’ first e-ink outing one worth checking out? I’m honestly a little split. What they’ve managed to come up with is a brilliantly thin and lightweight tablet that covers all the essential bases you’d want out of an e-ink notebook. The UI can feel a little rough around the edges in places, and some of the menus are oddly named, but it’s easy enough to navigate and use. The writing experience, while not quite like paper, is again enjoyable and smooth. I just don’t know how I feel about the AI, and that’s supposed to be the big selling point here. I don’t necessarily think it’s the fault of Viwoods, but I’m just not sure it’s at the point yet where it should be the central feature of a device like this. In terms of cost I will say it’s not terribly unreasonable for its current £455 price point considering you get both a pen and case with the tablet, coming in at a very similar price to a reMarkable 2. As it stands it’s a good e-ink notebook, and in time it could be a really great e-ink notebook with all the bells and whistles. I’m excited to see how Viwoods continues to update the device, and for what they have in store going forwards.

Verdict

What We Liked ...
  • Incredibly thin and light tablet
  • Pen and case included as standard
  • Really useful main menu layout if you're using everything the tablet has to offer
  • Great number of templates available
  • Meeting-specific templates are incredibly handy for those using the device for work
  • Custom AI prompts interacting with your notes is a really interesting concept that can work well
  • Built-in calendar is flexible and easy to use
  • Supports Android apps via Play Store and APK installation
  • Enjoyable and smooth writing experience
What We Didn't Like ...
  • Pen and case feel slightly cheap
  • UI can at times feel cluttered and a little confused
  • Dedicated AI button isn't mappable and doesn't interact with your notes at all
  • Main menu shortcuts and panels aren't changeable if you aren't interested in certain parts
  • AI interactions, while novel, do feel limited by the current scope of the technology
  • The specs of the device limits what you're able to install in terms of Android apps
7.8
out of 10

Overall

The AiPaper is an e-ink device I find myself liking in spite of the AI features more than because of them. Viwoods have here a brilliantly thin and light e-ink notebook that clearly has had, and continues to have, a lot of effort put into it. Though novel, the titular selling point just doesn't feel like it's far enough along to be the star of the show. All the same this is a genuinely good tablet, and could yet be a great tablet should it continue to be updated.
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I love tablets and I would really love one of these paper like ones, albeit I'm still reluctant since most either don't have colours, don't support android or are just very limited specs wise.
 
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I love tablets and I would really love one of these paper like ones, albeit I'm still reluctant since most either don't have colours, don't support android or are just very limited specs wise.
Yeah they’re all reasonable requirements to have. Things are moving along in all of those departments. There’s solid colour tablets, and there’s Android tablets with decent specs too. I’d keep an eye on what Boox have on their higher end. They’ll probably be the ones that suit what you’ve described.

I personally have a reMarkable, Supernote, and this Viwoods, and I don’t think any would be a perfect fit for you.
 
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Yeah they’re all reasonable requirements to have. Things are moving along in all of those departments. There’s solid colour tablets, and there’s Android tablets with decent specs too. I’d keep an eye on what Boox have on their higher end. They’ll probably be the ones that suit what you’ve described.

I personally have a reMarkable, Supernote, and this Viwoods, and I don’t think any would be a perfect fit for you.
Yeah, lately I've just been using normal tablets, currently still using a Samsung I bought a couple years ago but I'll probably replace it soon. Usually upgrade them every couple years or so when they start lagging with certain stuff.
 
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    kijetesantakalu042 @ kijetesantakalu042: Ehh. I'll try it tomorrow