MobiScribe Wave Color 3: 30-second review
The Amazon Kindle was launched in late 2007 to general acclaim, and the market for e-publications was born along with an army of imitators.
One of the innovations that made the Kindle possible was E-Ink, a branded electronic paper (e-paper) display technology developed to hold an image without the need for continuous power.
An evolution of the Kindle, the MobiScribe Wave uses a similar form factor and technologies. Still, instead of the four grey levels of the E-Ink in the Kindle, this pen-driven solution offers no less than 4096 colours in its 7.8-inch display.
It differs from many contemporary products because it doesn’t use a proprietary operating system but Android 12, and it can connect using USB, WiFi or Bluetooth.
The primary purpose of this device is note-taking, but it can also be used as an e-reader, and it has some other functions. However, while it might be running Android, it doesn’t come with a browser.
You can install apps on it, including a browser, but MobiScribe isn’t encouraging that type of use.
Here, we have a small Kindle-like device with an odd pastel-coloured display that lasts a reasonable amount of battery life if you don’t use the glow light.
That seems a small niche compared to typical Android devices, but it might fit a specific use for somebody.
MobiScribe Wave Color 3: price and availability
- How much does it cost? From $340
- When is it out? Soon
- Where can you get it? Direct from MobiScribe or through online retailers
There seems to be plenty of confusion about the name of this product, which MobiScribe wants to promote to as broad a customer base as possible.
It sells three versions of the Wave. The product reviewed here is the Color Kaleido 3, which also makes the Wave Color and a Wave B&W. These are priced at $340, $320, and $285, respectively, from MobiScribe.
There was a Kaleido 2 previously, and the colour display on the Kaleido 3 is an improvement on that technology, and the Wave Colour has the Kaleido Plus display.
All devices come with a cover, a stylus, a set of extra stylus tips, and a tool for replacing those tips.
The MobiScribe Wave Color 3 should be available soon,
That pricing is close to what other colour E-Readers are priced, with the Bigme B751C being $299 and the Bigme S6 being $419.
Compared with Android tablets or monochrome E-Readers, this technology is pricey.
- Value score: 3/5
MobiScribe Wave Color 3: Specs
MobiScribe Wave Color 3: Design
- Easy to carry
- Pen control
- Waterproof
Picking up the Wave for the first time, it’s easy to be impressed. While it might be entirely plastic, it's been made to similar exacting standards as Apple products, and it feels pleasant to hold.
The rear of the reader has a deep blue, slightly rubberised material that won’t easily slip from your grip, and the front has the screen recessed so you can’t swipe the pen over the edge of the display. That’s a good feature, and more of these devices should do this.
There are two buttons on the top edge, one for powering the device on and another for activating a backlight. The only other external feature is the USB-C port on the bottom edge, which is used to charge the device and connect it directly to a computer.
The lack of page-flipping buttons dictates that everything is done with the pen, which is a most underwhelming device.
You might expect something special in the pen at this price, but it’s a plastic pencil with a flexible tip that eventually wears out and needs to be replaced. It’s the same one a dozen other Kindle-like products use and has no buttons. This input device is wholly passive, and it isn’t possible to use it properly without one. Yes, you can flip pages with a finger, but many interface controls need the pencil tip to jab.
According to MobiScribe, the Wave is waterproof to a metre depth for 30 minutes, making it ideal for those who like to read around the pool or on the beach.
Design score: 4/5
MobiScribe Wave Color 3: Hardware
- Slow system
- Kaleido 3 technology
Because of the nature of this device, it’s hard to know if the horrible delays that can occur using it are because of the lack of processing power or the colour E-ink technology.
We suspect the display because even the cheapest phone is faster than the Wave, irrespective of whatever is asked.
Considering the fluidity of modern Android devices, this is a highly jarring experience. For numerous seconds, you can wonder if the device even recognised the pen press.
The heart of this hardware is a 64-bit ARM processor by Allwinner that uses four Cortex-A53 cores and has a PowerVR Rogue GPU. The clock speed of this chip is below what a modern phone might reasonably use, peaking at 1512MHz.
However, whatever the processor was, it had an almost immovable object between it and the user in the form of the e-paper display.
For those who have never experienced this display technology, it's not like anything else and certainly not like a conventional LCD panel.
One of the oddities we noticed is that the screen is often not completely erased between selections or apps, presumably to speed up response times. This optimisation leaves ghost versions of what you previously worked on, which can be visually distracting.
The display on this model is the latest version, an improvement over the Kaleido Plus display used on the previous model, labelled as the Kaleido 3.
For those used to the typical 16 million colours that most screens can, in theory, generate or more with OLED, the Kaleido 3 can produce only 4096 colours. The pre-installed applications provided don’t generally offer the user more than 16 at any given time. These colours are pastel in nature and curiously muted in tone. Greens, in particular, all look very similar.
The colour on this hardware isn’t spectacular, and it wouldn’t be something a designer might want to use for creative design work.
- Hardware score: 2/5
MobiScribe Wave Color 3: Software
- Note-taking
- Book reading
- Awkward Android apps
It isn’t easy to know where to start when talking about the software. However, given the wide scope that running Android provides, the pre-installed app selection is markedly underwhelming.
The top-level menu offers Notes, Books, Calendar and Tools, which provides an interesting insight into what features MobiScribe considers the most important.
For note-taking, the concept is that you can scribble your musings using a peculiar selection of graphical tools onto pages that you can convert to text using OCR or download as pictures to a USB-connected computer.
The Notes app looks like a simple pixel editing tool, but this obscures its vector nature. The advantage of vectors is that it is much easier to use layers and change and remove things, as there is no definitive bit image that the user can alter.
As incredible as that might sound, it also means that you can’t do any of the normal things you might expect, like flooding an area with colour or even creating solid shapes. Instead, you have multiple types of pencils and markers, and erasers can remove a specific squiggle.
It’s an entirely different mindset from most graphical tools users will have encountered, and it has some annoying quirks. One of these is that you can create multiple pages and reorder them, with the exception of the first page, which can’t be moved or deleted.
Books, as its name suggests, is an eReader, and MobiScribe pre-loaded a manual conveniently for first-time customers.
We will skip over the Calendar for the moment and go to tools, where the promise of Android applications lives. A selling point of this product is that it has access to the Google Play store, though this isn’t like any access this reviewer has previously encountered.
For starters, when you try to run the store, you are told that the device isn’t Play Protect certified and that you must apply to have it approved.
This process can take some time, apparently, as ours was never certified in the period we had it. Why this wasn’t worked out beforehand is something only MobiScribe understands, and most of their customers will wonder.
Instead of jumping through hoops that should never have been there, we took to side-loading applications simply by dropping the APK files onto the file system and installing them from there. That worked fine, and we loaded Dolphin to provide some browser functionality.
As part of our attempt to get access to the Google Play Store, we provided a valid Google account and logically wondered if this might connect the Calendar app to our Google Calendar information. No, it doesn’t, making it decidedly less useful.
Overall, the application side of the Wave 3 is a major disappointment, considering how heavily the marketing leans on the Play Store, something that won’t work out of the box.
- Software score: 2/5
MobiScribe Wave Color 3: Verdict
Out of the box, we want to like this product, but a few of the issues we mentioned entirely undermine the user experience. Let’s cut to the chase - this is another eReader device that includes Google Play, and you can install apps from that platform on the Android platform.
However, being able to install things doesn’t make them run.
You can put Netflix or Disney+ on the Wave, but the display technology can’t show videos, and often, it takes 2-3 seconds to respond to the instruction to scroll a page.
As an eReader, the size of the unit is a hindrance, and to provide the ideal clarity, you need to activate the backlight, if only a little, undermining the whole ethos of e-paper technology.
Using the glow light impacts battery life and removes the one aspect that makes these devices superior to conventional Android tablets.
In every other respect, this device is inferior to one, especially when you consider that for this money, you can buy a Chinese-made rugged tablet with the same waterproof specs, a massive battery, and the ability to install and run almost anything on the Play Store.
The Wave 3 is too niche a device competing against products sold on their flexibility.
It highlights that eReader makers are still hoping that the next generation of e-paper technology will deliver the power efficiency customers want, allowing them to show moving images using the minimum of power. The Wave underlines how this future has failed to materialise in any practical way.
The disturbing conclusion is that this device is too small to be a regular eReader and too slow to be used as a viable Android system.
Should I buy a MobiScribe Wave Color 3?
Buy it if...
Don't buy it if...
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