It’s interesting to see the generational shift from every device being an ARM SoC running Linux with BusyBox and a bunch of daemons (i.e., the Kindle, Kobo and ReMarkable) to every device being an ESP32 microcontroller running a (more or less) monolithic application firmware.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Sorry, what does that mean in layman's terms? It sounds like a step backwards?
I see it as more of a simplification of things. An e-reader was just supposed to be a digital book reader with an e-ink screen, good battery life and possibly a backlight. Current e-readers OTOH function more like a phone with a screen that wasn't meant to support such an experience. I'm not interested in browsing the web, playing games, and listening to music on something like this when there's already a perfectly functional phone in my pocket.
Using an ESP32 just shows that we can strip away all the bells and whistles to keep the core experience of reading a book with an energy efficient architecture.
Thanks for the enlightenment. I hope things like TTS are treated as first party citizens though rather than an afterthought as that's primarily how I consume novels.
It is really all you need for a basic e-reader. However, I am not convinced that it will survive feature creep.
Esp32 runs out of headroom extremely quickly once audio processing (TTS) and screen annotation/highlighting are involved. Especially if they are implementing high quality partial refreshing.
I hope they can stick to the basics and make it a great, polished software experience because that is probably be the difference between failure and success of it, not featute-packing.
Maybe I'm the weird one, but I've never used any of those features (TTS, highlight, etc) on my Kindle.
No I think that is normal, but trying to cover all edge cases and accessibility are quite common reasons for feature creep.
I can see that being a concern for Amazon where they need to convince people to buy a new Kindle every year or two. Hopefully it's less of an issue here.
Good. Anything that says, "fuck you", to Amazon. Kobo is okay though.
I love my pocketbook, their ecosystem is far from perfect but open enough for me
This looks great but I don’t want to solder anything, when can I buy an assembled and ready to go unit?
Spyfree hardware and software together is compelling.