The Supernote A5 X2 is one piece of E Ink hardware that the company has been keeping prospective buyers on the tenterhooks for long. First teased about a year ago now, there has been very little about the e-note device that has made it to the public domain. Fortunately, there is something about the device that has leaked online.
Amazingly, the news has emerged directly from Supernote itself, which makes it all the more authentic and ready for consumption right away. It has its origins in a page on the company website that has since been taken down, but not before the eagle-eyed sleuths from Reddit have had a good look at it.
There is not a lot of information that has been revealed though we now know the upcoming Supernote A5 X2 device is going to be named Manta. The page also revealed it is going to cost $459 once it is launched. That might not make the Manta the cheapest e-note device on the block, more so given that it lacks a feature as crucial as a front light. It still makes sense considering that the Manta has been designed from the ground-up to be a purely writing device.
Then again, there is no dearth of e-note devices in the market. There are the likes of the Kindle Scribe or the Kobo Elipsa 2E though the problem with these, if it can be so said, is that they are tied to their respective content ecosystem. There is also the Onyx Boox Go 10.3 that offers an excellent writing experience though it is basically a dual-purpose device, designed as it is to serve both as an e-reader as well as a tablet.
The only other option you have that offers the best and most paper-like writing feel are the ones produced by reMarkable. The new reMarkable Paper Pro is truly a remarkable piece of hardware, one that offers a feel that is closest to writing on real paper. However, at $580, it isn’t exactly cheap.
Does the lack of a front light matter much? It depends on how important the feature is for you. Adding a front light means there is an extra layer added on top of the E Ink screen for the light to uniformly illuminate the e-paper panel. This translates to a greater distance, howsoever miniscule that might be, between the pen and the output. This is a less-than-ideal scenario for those who’d prefer to have a more paper-like writing feel where the pen is in actual contact with the writing surface.
The obvious disadvantage to such a setup is that you are dependent entirely on the ambient light for your writing and reading activity. But then, that is what real papers are like. Reading something on plain paper or writing on it needs to be done in a place where you have ample light for the same. Naturally, this should also apply to anything that wants to mimic the real paper, which is where the Manta or the remarkable Paper Pro comes into the picture.
As for its release date, well, that is anybody’s guess at the moment. The company is yet to come clean on the device, which means it isn’t likely to be available in time for Christmas this year. Maybe the most that the company might go for right now is launch the device while shipping starts sometime in early January 2025. Or maybe the company is eyeing a grand launch during the Consumer Electronics Show in January next year. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I’ll likely make a film sometime in the future.
