As there is a lot of chatter about the Viwoods AI Paper in the e-ink community, I thought I would chime in with my own opinions and explain why I won’t be buying one (at least not at this early stage).
What is the Viwoods AI Paper?
The AI Paper is a new 10.6″ monochrome e-ink tablet that was recently launched on Kickstarter by a company called Viwoods.
It has a 300PPI Carta 1300 e-ink screen (resolution of 1920 x 2560) and will be the thinnest e-ink tablet on the market, with a width of 4.5mm (undercutting the Boox Go 10.3 by 0.1mm and the reMarkable 2 by 0.2mm).
It has great hardware specs (2.0GHz octacore CPU, 4Gb Ram and 128Gb storage).
It runs Android 13 and has several preinstalled apps, but at present does not appear to have access to the Google Play Store by default.
On paper, it looks like a nice device.
Note: There’s also the 8.2″ Viwoods AI Paper Mini.
Why I won’t be buying one
And now for my take…
Throughout my experience of reviewing e-ink tablets, I’ve seen many devices that were funded by crowdfunding campaigns, and many of them were utter failures.
For examples, check out the Topjoy Butterfly, Reinkstone R1, and Bigme Galy. The Topjoy and Reinkstone suffered from long delays, and some backers didn’t receive their units. For all three of these devices (including the Bigme Galy), the final product was very poor and pretty much unusable (at best, more of a prototype or proof-of-concept than a fully-fledged consumer product).
I’m not saying that all crowdfunded projects are doomed to fail (and I acknowledge that they are a good source of capital for worthwhile projects that may have otherwise not had any investment), just that they have a lot of inherent risk, particularly in the realm of e-ink tablets – personally I have very little faith in this method of capital generation and am not prepared to risk my money on them.
What is Crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding is the strategy whereby manufacturers raise capital for a project by asking customers to make a monetary ‘pledge‘ before the project is complete. In return for their pledge, the customer receives a device (or some other perk) in return for their money upon project completion.
On top of this, I have no idea who Viwoods are. They just appeared out of nowhere and seem to have no previous business activities that would perhaps inspire me with some confidence in them. They do have an official website (viwoods.com) but there is no physical address or contact phone number on there (only an email address). Their domain name registration info suggests that they are based in China.
As suggested by Voja over at MyDeepGuide, Viwoods also sounds remarkably similar to Wiwood (manufacturers of the aforementioned Reinkstone R1). This could just be coincidence but it does trigger an alarm bell.
And without having an established brand, questions will arise about their sustainability over the longer term. There’s no guarantee that they will continue to provide regular software updates and bugfixes after the pledges have been collected.
A more subjective gripe that is probably more personal to me is that I view all technologies that have the acronym ‘AI‘ in them with a healthy dose of caution. I’m not against AI per se, but it does seem that marketing departments are tagging it onto everything in anticipation that this buzzword will sell more units. In addition, many AI features (particular generative AI) are not carried out locally on the device, but instead externally on the cloud. This means that Viwoods will presumably have to pay a third-party for these services, which may not be sustainable for them over the longer term.
Finally, the Viwoods AI Paper does not appear to offer anything that particularly appeals to me.
From what I’ve seen of it, the screen and chassis look very nice, it has decent hardware specs and runs Android (so has the potential to install third-party apps, even though the Google Play Store is not currently available on it). The thing that probably most excites me about this tablet is the flexible plastic screen (Mobius Carta), which is lighter and less prone to shattering than the glass backplane that is used with most other e-ink tablets.
But still there’s not a massive amount of difference between the Viwood and what is already currently on the market from more established brands.
Final verdict
I understand that some people will think my viewpoint is overly negative, but I always try to share my honest opinion.
For me, all Kickstarter campaigns have an inherent risk that I (as a fairly risk-averse person) am not prepared to take. I would much rather wait until a brand is well-established before I invest in their products.
And this perhaps comes from my experience over the years (as a result of running this website) of seeing several e-ink tablets hit the market and then disappear. A more recent example (albeit not a Kickstarter, but sold on Amazon) was the Ruertu tablet. Again, it was an Chinese-based Android e-ink tablet that sold a few hundred units and then vanished. They also had a lot of suspect five star reviews on Amazon that were subsequently removed (no doubt for being fake).
SIDENOTE: A cynic may suspect that one of the big brands of Chinese e-ink tablet manufacturers may be involved in setting up these smaller brands/subsidiaries to get a short-term capital boost, sell older hardware components, and test the market, before shutting them down. But this is just wild speculation (and has no evidential basis).
The fact is that I see a lot of these projects/brands come and go, leaving the customers that had faith in them high and dry. And I don’t think it is always to do with malicious intent – sometimes things just don’t go as planned with suppliers, shipping partners, etc. making the business no longer sustainable.
And I’m not saying that Viwoods will do this – they might be the next big thing to enter the e-ink tablet market and provide lots of wonderful innovations and healthy competition – in fact, I’d be very pleased if they do.
But, for me, there is too much risk in spending my hard-earned money on a product that may or may not be successful. I’d rather wait until such a time as I can have evidence and confidence that they will deliver on their promises and be around for the long haul…and this only comes with time.
About the author
Dan Dutton is passionate about E-ink writing tablets, which bring together the pleasure of writing on paper with the power of digital technology. When he bought his first tablet, he realised that there wasn't a lot of unbiased information available for people that were considering buying an E-ink tablet, and so he built eWritable.
Hello,
I tend toward caution as well. I might be a little more trusting if they had even some public exposure. Seeing real faces interacting with real people at conventions with a workable device would make them seem more credible, as opposed to videos with smiling faces over mysterious hardware.
Modos is a good example of the former- they have an idea, they are releasing their methods and codes into the public domain so others can use them, they have been going to conventions explaining their theories and methods, and showing off their rigged devices. While they have a website for crowdfunding, but they have not opened it up yet. They seem more credible because they are exposing themselves to public scrutiny.
This does not mean you cannot be cautious with them either, but seeing real faces taking a public risk (not the false mask of make-up-model smiley video faces) presenting real hardware (not cgi enhanced models) certainly makes them seem more credible.
Thanks for commenting, Martin.
Yeah I’ve seen some good examples of Crowdfunding campaigns (pretty sure the reMarkable 1 was a Kickstarter) and the thing that seems to inspire confidence is that the company have real faces and emanate a genuine passion for what they are creating and appear to work tirelessly to make it successful. The ones that are faceless tend to have a different agenda (e.g. shifting hardware components, quick short-term capital generation etc.) and, although they do sometimes create something, it is not at a competitive level – and rather than reinvest in improvements, the real investors disappear with the money.
Of course this is generally speaking based on my own limited anecdotal experience and there will always be exceptions.