Wave - Black & White | 7.8" 64GB Waterproof E-Book Reader for Reading, Writing & Sketching | Glare-Free Paper-Like Display | Bluetooth Enabled | Includes Stylus only | No Cover

I've now been using this for a few weeks, and am ready to share my thoughts. The short take: The Mobiscribe Wave (B&W) is a flawed, but still excellent ereader & note pad.I will note that I got mine on sell for about $170, so didn't pay the full list price. This does have some impact on my evaluation of it.The device does not feel as premium as my Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Scribe. It has a plastic front frame that's an off white, which matches nicely to the gray of the display. I don't like the white Mobiscribe logo on the front. The back is blue, which I like, and has a soft touch coating. It feels pretty good on the back, but the front bezel feels cheap. The internal edges are rough and uncomfortable (it'd be nicer if they had rounded them slightly), and the fit into the back leaves a tiny bit of gap, which sometimes catches surrounding light, making it more noticeable than I prefer. The screen is recessed slightly behind the bezel. This is fine, and I have no real issue with this choice other than the relative sharpness of the bezel. At the top is a power button and a front light button. I wish more devices had this; it's really handy to be able to toggle the light as it starts to get dark. It charges with a USB C port on the bottom. This is slightly off center.Battery life is mediocre. When using the backlight in the evenings, doing a mix of reading and writing in my note books, I get 2-3 days of use. For this I also leave off wifi and bluetooth. If I turn the backlight up, or leave the wifi and/or bluetooth on, it drops to 1-2 days. It also runs down much more quickly when using most Android apps, but I expect that as few are optimized for use on eink displays.The basic reading application is limited, but works. I use it with mobi format books as it seems to work better with those than with epub. (Part of this is due to font/layout choices; with epub it prefers to use the publisher css rather than my settings, which I find annoying). It doesn't have a lot of features, but it's ok for just reading. When more is needed, I can use sideloaded apps.For PDFs, a separate reading program is used. This gets installed when you first open a PDF. I've not done much with PDFs on this, but they seem to work fine, and writing on them is quick and easy.Note taking is great. I have around a dozen notebooks, with custom covers and various templates. The functionality is much greater than on my Kindle Scribe, with more brush options, sizes, good pressure sensitivity, and various functions for drawing simple shapes & lines. It also has a nice offline text recognition system which handles my rather bad handwriting with few issues. I really enjoy writing on it. You can import PNG images as templates. I've added a variety of templates designed for the Supernote Nomad A6X2 to mine without any issues.The stylus included is basic, but works well. It doesn't clip to the body with a magnet, but I can live with that. It has a hexagonal body, which I find comfortable to hold, and an eraser button/nub on the rear. It's a basic Wacom EMR pen, so the various other digital pens I have for my Kindle Scribe & Samsung devices all work fine.There is a built in calendar program. It's basic, but lets me create visible notes by handwriting on the days, or I can create actual events. I've only used this a little, but find it pretty nice for a basic overview. For more detailed scheduling, I'll probably continue to use organizer PDFs.There's also a tools tab. This has a few basic programs (files, mobistore, imagces) by default, but you can side load Android APKs and the apps show up here. I have FBReader & Kindle for more book formats, Termux, a Bible app, a PDF reader, and F-Droid. A tip: when done with an app, tap the task switching button in the top bar and close it to save battery life. You can enable Google Play, but I chose not to do this.On the software, it's a lightly skinned Android. The UI is basic, but works well. There's tabs at the top of the home screen for notes, books, calendar, and tools. Above this is a title bar with back, home, recent apps, screen refresh, a clock, quick settings, full settings, and the battery indicator. Tapping the quick settings gives options to toggle wifi, bluetooth, adjust sound settings, toggle the front light, and tweak the contrast & brightness of the display. The quick setting icon changes slightly when the front light is on, so it's easy to see if it was left on and not needed.A particularly nice thing for me is that it's ready to go as soon as you turn it on. No logins or registration needed, and nothing that pushes a book store on you. Compared to the Kindle, this is a huge quality of life improvement.The front light works well. It's even, gets painfully bright, and the color temperature can be adjusted. I have no issues with it, and normally don't need to bump it higher than about 5-10%. When reading a book, a vertical swipe on the left side can be used to tweak the brightness.Bugs do exist. On a few occasions with longer books the screen failed to update and I've had to hit the refresh button to redraw it. When running Android apps, there are sometimes odd display quirks and a lot of ghosting. (Long pressing on an app gives options to tweak the display settings for the app, so this might be something I can work around with a bit of trial and error.). When copying over my library of books, I had to break the copy into two sets of files. Attempting to copy the 1800 books in one pass resulted in around 200 not appearing, but this was resolved by splitting the copy operation.Performance is more than adequate for reading & note taking, but it's noticeably sluggish for heavier Android apps. I find it's ok for some light web browsing with EInkBro, and using FBReader or Kindle, but it's slow with Termux. I've not tried running any games on it, but don't think it'd be well suited to that. For productivity tasks it works fine.Overall I really like this. Despite some software bugs and a few questionable bits in physical construction, it's worked well, and I find myself reaching it over my other eink devices when I want to read or take notes. If you can get it for a decent price, it's a very nice overall unit and I recommend it.

I've had this e-reader for 5 months now. It's pretty much the ONLY android e-reader with the Google Play store that's also waterproof. These were the two primary selling points for me, as I've lost expensive e-readers to high humidity and moisture; and all of my e-books are in my Google Books library, whether i purchased them from Google books or not. That's just where i keep them as they update concurrently on all devices.For this, the Mobiscribe Wave is pretty good. Everything in that capacity works well, no issues. My only complaint is that you have to access all of the Google Play apps through a separate menu button on the main screen, and you can't change any of the buttons on the main screen.My biggest complaint, though, is that this e-reader has the worst battery life of any e-reader I've ever owned. That includes all of the super cheap B&N nook e-readers that I've had back in the day. Even sitting on standby when not in use it has to be plugged in to recharge once a week. If I'm actively reading a book i have to charge it every several days. With my cheap Nooks 1 charge would last a month or more on standby, and 3 weeks when actively reading. This meant that while traveling for 2 months recently this thing was connected to the charger practically all the time. And I'm reading it usually on the lowest light settings. Doesn't even seem to matter if WiFi is on or off.Edit 3/21/2024 - I'm docking another star. After the latest update the e-reader now routinely freezes to the point that i have to hard reboot it frequently when i wake it from sleep. ON TOP OF THAT, the device is now CHUGGING through its battery life at an ludicrous speed. I'm now getting to the point where i regret buying this thing, and that sucks.

Primary use case is hand written notes, reading and some light office calendar work. I have terrible hand writing and the ocr rarely fails to convert it correctly. Google play is awesome you can download whatever you want like kindle app chrome, Google calendar, office apps einkbro. Without Google play you can still use the mobistore to install a few other popular e readers and Adobe PDF reader. Coming from an Amazon Paperwhite this thing performs well is fast and does exactly what it says it does. Build quality is great and the pen with no battery needed is perfect to write and erase.There is a mobile app so let's say you write a bunch of notes and forget your wave at home. Well the mobile app allows you to read these anywhere which is awesome. The support is also great they got back to me on a mobile app issue and fixed it in 2 days.This is black and white and I am not sure the color is really going to add a lot for my own use case described above. If you plan on working with pictures, read comics or are an artist (in any capacity) then those would be good reasons.All eink devices are a bit slow there really is no lag when changing pages in a book or writing or even opening closing apps. Speaker is fine don't use it much Bluetooth works great.Battery so far has been very good lasting anywhere from 3 days to a week depending on backlight and wifi usage.

This is a good, small, portable digital notebook. The pen that I received didn't work well. Luckily, I had a spare Kindle Scribe pen - which works fine. I'm not sure if the pen problems, that I experienced, apply just to the pen supplied to me or apply to all Mobiscribe pens. The other problem, that I've experienced, is connecting the device to Google Drive. This appears to involve some sort of complex ritual that I can't follow. I want to like this device because, with a good pen, it's an excellent, relatively low cost, digital notebook.