Onyx Boox Go 7 as Instapaper single-tasker

I am a heavy user of Instapaper. Anything that I want to read on the web gets saved and goes through the app: this buffers my time so that I don't get too sidetracked with long reads, and it lets me read more on an eInk device that doesn't give me eyestrain or keep me up at night.

But the process of transferring articles from Instapaper to my Kindle is annoying. Instapaper does it by sending an email to a special kindle email address with an ebook, and Amazon takes a long time to receive that email and deliver it to my Kindle. Then once it's on the device, my highlights don't sync back to Instapaper and I can't easily mark things as done or 'like' then in Instapaper. It's a drag.

So: what about the Boox Go 7? It's vaguely Kindle-like in size and functionality, with an eInk screen, but it runs Android, so it can run the Instapaper Android app. Is it a better solution?

No. I bought one and am returning it tomorrow. In summary, I really don't like Android and I think that the Boox version of it isn't very well-customized to the hardware. Instapaper does work on the device, but it all felt like too much of a hack and the setup lacks the simplicity I want for a mono-tasker.

• The first-run experience was lackluster. There was a new firmware update for the device which installed correctly, but then another that failed to install, and the firmware updater had English grammar and punctuation mistakes.
• I was able to install Instapaper, but page turn buttons didn't work until I remapped the 'volume' buttons to control page turning.
• The device boots to a 'Library' screen, so I'd have to switch to the 'Apps' screen and then go to Instapaper and select an article to start reading. I tried a minimal launcher - eLauncher - to simplify this process but it wouldn't let me add Instapaper to the application list. Maybe it didn't have access to other third-party apps? I don't know and don't really care to debug that.
• The gestures are terrible. Long-pressing an application icon works if I use my index finger but is treated as a tap if I use my thumb. By default, the OS hides the launcher bar at the bottom so there's no home button and you're supposed to swipe up to switch apps. It's terrible at detecting this gesture: whether it's a swipe up, a scroll, or not detected at all, is a tossup. You can enable a bar at the bottom with a 'home' button but it also has four other buttons and it's a small touch target. Highlighting text in Instapaper is a pretty bad gesture too: highlighting isn't great on the Kindle either but at least it's reliable.
• The screen is technically good, but in practice with Android apps that aren't designed for eInk screens, it's pretty bad. This was the real dealbreaker with the device: I couldn't find any way to get highlighted text in Instapaper to look highlighted: whatever color the app was using got converted into a super light shade of gray that was barely visible with the backlight off and invisible with the backlight on.

Overall: nah. I'll admit that I've never enjoyed using an Android device and that didn't prime me well for using this one, but I was hopeful that Onyx would have figured out some good defaults for the Boox and I'd be able to tweak a few settings, get Instapaper up and running, and use this as a single tasker.

But the defaults aren't very good, the typos and visual flaws add up, and the device requires too much fiddling. There's a whole community of people who love fiddling, but that isn't me: outside of work hours, I have no love for configuring digital technology and I suspect neither do most people. Mostly the Boox is running an operating system and applications that expect a high refresh rate, color screen, and multi-touch display, but it has none of those things. They've done some work to smooth over that problem but it's much less unified than the experience of using a traditional eInk device where everything is designed with the hardware in mind.

Hopefully that Kobo + Instapaper integration lands later this summer and I will eagerly buy one of those things.