Topjoy is a new company that has developed a writing tablet with a 6 and 7.8 inch screen and raised capital to produce the devices via various crowdfunding platforms. They raised $660k on Kickstarter and another $713k on Indiegogo. Topjoy missed numerous shipping dates and hundreds of comments were proclaiming them as a scam, the company remained quiet about the whole situation, that certainly did not help to build confidence. However, Topjoy has started to ship out both models to customers and tracking numbers have been dispatched. It looks like Kickstarter customers were the first ones to receive email notifications about tracking numbers and it remains to be seen when Indiegogo backers will receive their units.
The Topjoy Butterfly features a 7.8 inch screen that is using DES Slurry color e-paper technology. It has a black and white resolution of 1872×1404 and 300 PPI, color will be displayed at 150 PPI. It has an EMR layer, which is compatible with a number of stylus, but Topjoy provides their own and it has 4096 degrees of pressure sensitivity. There is a robust note taking app, where you can select from dozens of colors, brushes, pens, pencils or highlighters. This will give users the ability to freehand draw, sketch or handwrite on the screen. There is a front-lit display with a series of LED lights on the bottom of the bezel, that project light, evenly across the screen. You can control the brightness with the dropdown menu via a slider bar.
The Butterfly 7.8 has a piano black color scheme and the screen is flush with the bezel. It has a power button on the top, and it is silver. This is also where the single speaker is. This is ideal for listening to audiobooks, music or podcasts. On the bottom is the USB-C cable, a noise cancelling microphone and status indictor light.
Underneath the hood is a 1.8GHz 4 Core processor, 2GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage. There is WIFI, and Bluetooth 5.1, so you can use a pair of wireless headphones. It is powered by a 3200mah battery, which should give you a month of battery life.
The Butterfly 7.8 is running Google Android 11 and comes with a number of pre-installed apps such as Amazon Kindle, Google Chrome, Facebook and number of note taking and ebook readers. Right now, this device is able to read TXT and PDF files, with more formats on the way soon.
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.