Lenovo Smart Paper Is An E-ink Note-taking Device, An eReader, And A Digital Voice Recorder

If you have not gotten into eReader because it is a dedicated device that does only one thing (read ebooks) and is not worth the price, then perhaps the upcoming Lenovo Smart Paper will change your mind.

In addition to having access to over two million books on eBooks.com, Lenovo Smart Paper is a note-taking device with pen support much like the Huawei MatePad Paper. It features a slim 10.3-inch, anti-glare E-Ink touch display wrapped in an all-metal casing that offers a pen-on-paper feel when taking notes.

It comes with an active battery-less stylus that stores within the included folio case when not in use. The Lenovo Smart Paper Pen, as it is aptly called, requires no charging and boasts a felt tip, up to 23-ms latency, 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, tilt detection, et cetera. All these make writing or doodling on the Lenovo Smart Paper feels like traditional pen and paper.

Did we also mention that it has 74 notepad templates to choose from? You can pick from ruled/line, graph, black, and more, to suit your purpose and make the device feels even more like a traditional writing medium.

The pen is versatile too, allowing you to choose from nine different pen settings, including ballpoint, pencil (wooden and mechanical), marker, calligraphy, and more.

The device offers 50 GB of storage, which is good for over 50,000 note pages. You can easily manage your notes, such as deleting the notes, moving the notes around, and organizing them into folders.

The Lenovo Smart Paper further boasts keyword searches that let you search across thousands of handwritten notes, as well as digital books and articles saved on the device, in seconds. Speaking of handwritten notes, it can also convert handwriting to text too.

Using the Lenovo Smart Paper app, you can access your notes and books from anywhere, and cloud sync to back up the files which can be synced across different Android, iOS, and Windows devices. This brings us to the final and probably rare feature of a smart paper device: an integrated microphone.

It is not one but two mics that allow the device to serve as a digital voice recorder. This allows you to audio record a meeting or class lecture while you are taking notes. With the recorded audio, you can do this:

“If you can’t remember the verbal context around a note you took during one of these recorded sessions, you can simply select the specific text you wrote to hear a brief playback of what was said in that moment in time, or they can listen to the entire recorded lecture again.”

But that’s provided that you are actually taking notes as you record. OK. Perhaps that is not the most powerful feature. However, it can transcribe audio recordings and translate text into various languages. But how well this feature performs in the real world remains to be seen.

Other spec sheet details include a 10.3” e-ink display with 1,872 x 1,404 resolution, a quadcore RockChip RK3566 processor, 4 GB RAM, 24 bright levels (automatic adjustment), 23 adjustable temperature tone, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2, USB Type-C interface (USB 2.0), and a 3,550 mAh battery good for reading 8,500 pages or writing 170 pages of notes on a single charge.

It runs on Android AOSP 11.0 and the device also features email, calendar, clock, and calculator apps, as well as the ebooks.com app.

The Lenovo Smart Paper officially debuted at CES 2023 earlier this month. It will be available in late 2023 with a starting price of US$399.99.

All images courtesy of Lenovo.