I submitted a ticket to return yesterday. I agree with most of what you said.
Good points:
- European! I have a Boox device to read and browse the internet without hurting my eyes, but wouldn’t want to have my email or messages on it, for various reasons: privacy, not sure if it will be fixed properly if something gets broken, …
- No big company following my every move.
- Size: one of the smallest devices on the market that runs a modern operating system. Although I agree it could have been thinner.
- Battery.
- Being able to see the screen in daylight.
Things I don’t really care about:
- I personally made phone calls and listened to voice-only podcasts on speaker and bluetooth earphones and found the sound to be not great but certainly acceptable. I don’t listen to music.
- I didn’t plan on using any of the built-in apps apart from the phone, text messaging, and camera, so I was not disappointed by missing features.
Acceptable disappointments which may be fixed in future releases:
Acceptable disappointments which cannot be fixed by software updates:
- As you say, screen resolution could have been better.
- I like the idea that the offline switch is a hardware feature, but this makes it less customizable. For instance, I would have liked to set it up so that I would get no notifications except phone calls. There is nothing so important that my family should not be able to reach me in emergencies.
- I would have liked a better camera.
Deal breakers for me at the moment:
- WhatsApp: even with the tips on the forum, WhatsApp does not give me reliable notifications. I have allowed the app to run in the background, but sometimes it just doesn’t. I’m glad that the notifications are not on the lock screen, and don’t mind not having a notification badge, but I do expect to get a notification when someone sends me something.
- Support: many bug reports and feature requests currently only get the answer that it will be “passed on to the team”. It is not clear what things will/will not be implemented, or what the priority is. And it is also not clear what parts of the software, if any, will be open sourced.
Now, both these points breakers can be fixed. And I appreciate that things must be extremely busy at the moment! But that does mean, unfortunately, that within the two weeks I have to evaluate the device and cancel the purchase, it won’t become clear how things pan out. Then I prefer to return it now, and possibly come back in half a year to see how things stand. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, there are so many good points that are so hard to find in other devices: small size, e-ink, privacy-minded, European. As you say, I really want this to work, and I feel like it’s almost there…