The Meebook M8 is a brand-new e-book reader and is the spiritual successor of the Meebook P78 Pro. This device is primarily marketed as a manga reader and does some light note-taking. The major selling point is the fast processor, 64GB memory, plus external. There are gesture controls to change the brightness of the light, and it has full access to the Google Play Store and all Google Play Services. It also has Google Android 14, making it one of the most current e-readers to have it.
Hardware
The Meebook M8 features a 7.8-inch E INK Carta HD e-paper display with a resolution of 1404×1872 with 300 PPI and 256 levels of grayscale. The device’s body is white on the front, back, and along the sides, making it stand out in a crowd. It has a front-light system with 24 levels of white and amber LED lights to read in the dark. It also has a digitizer layer, but it is not WACOM; this is used to take notes, edit PDF files, highlight text, and freehand draw, but Meebook is not hyping up these features. It ships with a simple capacitive pen with no eraser and needs to be charged via USB-C.
Underneath the hood is a Octa core 2.2GHZ processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64 GB of internal storage. If this storage is unsuitable for your apps, books, manga, and other digital content, an SD card can have an additional 1TB. There are two microphones for voice communication apps, Teams and Zoom. Two speakers are available to listen to audiobooks, music, or podcasts, but it also has Bluetooth 5.2 for wireless headphones and earbuds. A USB-C port is used for charging or transferring data and is powered by a 3200 mAh battery. WIFI 6 is available to access the internet. The dimensions are 193x140x7.0mm and weighs 265g.
Software
The Meebook M8 runs Google Android 14 as its primary operating system, and few other e-readers are on the market with this latest OS. The M8 is considered an international release, so it supports dozens of languages and has full access to the Google Play Store. Meanwhile, the M8 Color is only available in Asia and won’t be widely available.
A few software features and enhancements make the M8 stand out. Variomodes make key tasks fast and robust. Regal Refresh is ideal for reading text or web pages. Default Refresh is the standard, which is better for images. Fast Refresh is good for overall performance. High-Speed Refresh is suitable for browsing Google Play app listings and actually using the apps. Extremely Fast Refresh is geared towards streaming music or watching videos.
This device also has less ghosting due to its self-cleaning technology. You should never see text superimposed when you turn the pages of an e-book or take notes. There shouldn’t be any residual text and no anti-aliasing issues.
The home screen is similar to prior Meebook models. The UI is on the left side and comprises Home, E-book Library, Bookstore, Notes, files, settings, and apps. Nothing stands out about how they implement the library, files, or settings. The library comprises only books you have sideloaded on the stock reading app. However, anything you download, such as Kindle, Libby, or Kobo, will appear in the app category.
The home screen also has some widgets. There is a calendar and quotes widget by default, but they can be removed. A section prominently displays your recently read books and their cover art. There are shortcuts to the dictionary, Google Play, and Cloud Storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.).
Reading
The Meebook M8 is seriously geared for reading. This model has a stock reading app called Z-Reader. This app supports many eBook formats, including TXT, CHM, FB2, MOBI, HTML, RTF, HTXT, EPUB, PDB, DOC, PRC, PDF, DJVU, ASW, and PRC. If you are a big comic fan, there is now support for CBR and CBZ, two of the best and most well-known formats. This app is primarily designed for reading sideloaded content, such as connecting to your PC or MAC and dragging and dropping files. If your collection resides on a cloud storage provider like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive, you can easily install and download those apps to your device.
Meebook is marketing this device in Southeast Asia, pushing hard for the M8’s digital manga aspect. I suppose that is why they embraced CBR and CBZ, for those who pirate stuff online and want to sideload everything. However, for most people, Google Play houses the vast majority of popular apps for legitimately reading this sort of stuff.
There is plenty of storage for your digital collection. It has 64GB of storage and supports up to 1TB of extra space via the SD card. This will ensure that your entire collection of PDF files, books, manga, and audiobooks is available when needed. The file system automatically organizes everything into lovely little folders, so management is a breeze.
Audiobooks and podcasts make this a perfect choice. You can listen through the two speakers, which have a middling quality. They certainly aren’t up to the level of the iPad or other flagship smartphones, but they are suitable for E INK screens. The Meebook supports MP3, OGG, and WMA using the default music player. This app relies on you having to sideload audio content. Of course, with Google Play, the world is your oyster. I recommend Audible for audiobooks or Overdrive Libby for audiobooks from your local library. Spotify is solid for music and podcasts, although you need a subscription for the most value.
The stock e-reading app is pretty standard fare. You can adjust line spaces, margins, font size, font type, and several other things. You can choose what dictionary you want or download additional ones. Page turns are lightning-quick via taps or gestures. You will likely only want to use this app if you already have an extensive DRM-Free ebook library or have pirated it online. For everyone else, you will likely want to download apps to access the content you have paid for, such as the Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Scribd app, or your favorite library app to download ebooks or audiobooks from your local branch.
PDF files are handled very well. Page turn speed is lightning quick. There are many options to optimize a PDF, such as contrast options. You can make it lighter or darker, with many other options between these two settings. If you have a PDF with light text and the images don’t look that great, you can make everything a bit darker until you find the sweet spot. Many different type settings allow you to crop the image, make it full screen, reflow, and full page scrolling. I like the page scrolling feature; instead of turning pages with swipes and gestures, you can swipe up and down. You can use the pen to draw on PDF files, such as underlining specific bodies of text or just making notes in the margins.
Drawing
The Meebook M8 has an introductory note-taking experience, which is not as advanced as the Onyx Boox, Supernote, Fujitsu Quaderno, Sony DPT, or Remarkable. This model does have the advantage of pressure sensitivity with the stylus, so the harder you press, the thicker the lines become. There are four types of tools to make drawing fun: pen, pencil, ball-point pen, and paintbrush. Each has line thickness settings as a slider bar and can be displayed in four colors: black, red, blue, green, and white. You can’t view the colors without Kaleido color e-paper technology. You will only see the colors if you export the notes in PNG or PDF and view them on a computer or mobile device. Drawing feels a bit like sandpaper. It has a glass-based screen with a matte screen protector preinstalled at the factory level. It is not smooth, so you typically have to press harder. The stylus is also top-heavy because of the metal clip and battery canister.
There are many preinstalled templates, such as blank, college rules, meeting notes, schedules, and many others, but they are just PDF files so you can sideload them in your templates. You can easily insert new pages and create four shapes (lines connectors, square, rectangle, and triangle). You can insert text, and it pulls up the Android keyboard. Want to insert images and work with that? You can sideload in pictures and have advantageous tools to control them, such as resizing and cropping.
Wrap Up
The color variant of the Meebook M8 was a jumbled mess. Awful note-taking experience, lack of features, and touch errors galore. However, the black and white version of the M8 is, in fact, actually better.
The touch recognition is on point, fast responsive, and cheaper due to the lack of Wacom licensing, as it uses an active capacitive pen. The active capacitive pen in question is pretty bad. It looks good, and it feels good in your hand, but it’s slow, laggy, and needs to be charged with a USBC
Other than that, the UI and the operating system have just been copied from Bigme and Onyx and brought over onto this unit, with no real care or consideration to make it their own.
When Boyue fizzled out and Haoqing (Meebook) back in 2020, their devices had a lot of character. They were simplistic and to the point; you could tell you were using a Meebook. Now it feels like they’ve gone just a generic, cookie-cutter route with race-to-the-bottom prices.
They’re advertising, as well, is heavily focused on manga reading solutions, which I must say is quite accurate as it does complete that task with competency.
Meebook M8
359.99
Pros
- Android 14 and Google Play
- Lots of Storage
- SD Cart
- Suitable Hardware
- Affordable
Cons
- Pen is Terrible
- Drawing Experience is Abysmal
- Front-Light is Not Bright
- Uses Active Digitizer Instead of WACOM
- Reliant on Apps
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
