ReMarkable has enjoyed a small corner of the e-paper writing scene for a while, but the competition is growing fast, with the likes of the Kindle Scribe and more recently, the Lenovo Smart Paper wanting to make its mark.
We caught up with the Lenovo Smart Paper at CES 2023 to see if it was noteworthy.
Lenovo Smart Paper
First impressions
The Lenovo Smart Paper is a nicely-built writing device offering a range of convenient connectivity functions. First impressions are good, with a quality slim design and good pen feel.
- Great design
- Good pen action
- Plenty of connected functions
- Loads of templates
Design and build
- 195 x 226 x 5.5mm, 408g
- Cover with pen holder
There’s more than a passing resemblance between the Lenovo Smart Paper and the Kindle Scribe, both opting for a slim and neutral design, thin through the body with a cover that accommodates the pen. The Lenovo Smart Paper is finished in grey, with a metal body, leaving the front panel free from distractions. There’s a wider section to the left for grip, although you can of course rotate it and use it the other way up.
The cover magnetically attaches to the rear of the device and there’s a groove down the left edge, with a matching cut-out in the case so you can accommodate the pen. This is a slightly more elegant solution than the Kindle Scribe’s cover, with the pen in a loop – it feels better contained here.
Although slim, there’s still a weight of just over 400g, although this is lighter than the Kindle Scribe too (you can see how the two compare here). There’s not much else to say on the design from our first experience with it: most of these devices are similar and Lenovo doesn’t really change direction with the Smart Paper.
The tech specs
- 10.3in E Ink, 1872 x 1404 pixels, 227ppi
- Rockchip RK3566, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage
- 3550mAh
There’s a 10.3-inch E Ink display on the Lenovo Smart Paper, which is a good size for this type of device giving you plenty of space to scribble down your thoughts or to annotate content you have on the device. The E Ink display means it’s greyscale, but it’s illuminated with a front light, which has 24 brightness levels and offers 24 temperature adjustments to cut out that blue light if you’re using it in the dark. It offers automatic adjustment.
The core hardware perhaps doesn’t matter, because you can’t really compare this to other devices seeing as it’s designed to run at a more sedate pace. We found it opened files, refreshed, and responded fast enough during our first encounter, but we really didn’t have the chance to do anything too demanding.
There’s 64GB of storage, with about 50GB available for user storage, which is loads of pages, which can be managed into folders to keep things organised. There’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.
The battery is rated at 3550mAh, which is said to be good for 8500 pages of reading – obviously, there’s a lot more going on here, and writing, syncing documents, and so on, will change the demands on the battery over a simple reader, so it’s difficult to gauge exactly what you might get in terms of battery life.
Software and features
Notetaking is the primary function of the Lenovo Smart Paper and there are some 74 templates you can use to create your work. This will range from standard lined paper through to music manuscript and a whole lot more.
There’s support for e-book formats, with ebook.com accessible, but this arrangement is slightly different to the Kindle Scribe which essentially offers the same reading experience as other Kindles. That’s less of a focus here – although annotation features are still supported. The Lenovo Paper will also support Microsoft Office documents, which has instant appeal.
You get OCR, so you can write and have that recognised as text so you don’t have to live with your scrawl, while you can also sign in to various services, like Google Drive, to facilitate the sharing of documents. This will make your Smart Paper notes easy to use off the device, as well as make it easy to get other documents onto the device.
There’s also support for dictation, as well as email and calculator apps so it will do a little more, while there’s an app for your PC or phone to assist in syncing too, although there might be a subscription cost for this.
The pen is a passive stylus with changeable tips, with 4096 levels of pressure supported through the display, and a range of different pen types accessible. There’s no need to pair or charge the pen and we found it had a nice paper-like feel when writing.
First impressions
The Lenovo Smart Paper looks like a compelling option if you’re after a notetaking device with plenty of flexibility. It might sit closer to the ReMarkable 2 in terms of functionality than it does to the Kindle Scribe, but from our brief time with the device we haven’t had the chance to fully explore all it has to offer.
What we can confirm is that it feels and looks great, is nice to write on and seems to have sufficient quality to warrant a second look.
