Hyread has been making e-readers and digital note taking devices for a couple of years and their primary market is Taiwan and China. They have a bookstore that is pre-loaded on the e-note, but all of the content is in Chinese. Does this mean this is another product that is only relevant if you speak Chinese? Not necessary, it has a fully functional English mode, so you can sideload in all of your favorite books, apps and take advantage of the note taking features.
The Hyread Gaze Note Plus features a 7.8 inch E INK Carta e-paper display with a resolution of 1404×1872 with 300 PPI. The WACOM enabled screen is compatible with the stylus that comes with it and has 4096 degrees of pressure sensativity. You will be able to read in the dark via the front-lit display and also has warm light with amber LEDs. You can upgrade the performance of the Gaze with turning on A2 mode allows you to quickly refresh the screen, perform partial refresh for the content, shorten the screen refresh time, and produce slight afterimages. Therefore, A2 mode is suitable for browsing web pages or reading comics, which can increase the smoothness of visual perception and reduce the flickering phenomenon of full screen refresh.
Underneath the hood is a Quad-core processor 1.8 GHz, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. You should have amble room for your book collection, but since you will likely want to import a bunch of PDF documents to edit, there is an SD card that is capable of an additional 512GB, which is really amazing. The vast majority of e-readers or enotes on the market have abandoned SD cards, but Hyread is a pleasant exception. There is a USB-C port to charge and transfer data to the device, it also has Bluetooth 4.2 so you can listen to audiobooks, podcasts or music with wireless headphones. If you don’t feel like using headphones, there is a single speaker that has a capable audio system. It is powered by a 3200mAh battery and can become fully charged in only about 2.5 hours. It also has a built-in microphone for voice communications or audio dictation.
The Gaze Note Plus is running Google Android 11. Although it doesn’t really have an app store, it is possible to sideload in your favorite content such as Kindle, Kobo, Libby, Moon+ Reader or basically anything you want. If you already have an extensive book collection you can also sideload in EPUB, PDF, MOBI, DOC, TXT, FB2, RTF, HTML/HTM, DJVU/DJV.
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.
