Review: iFlytek AINOTE Air 2 notetaking e-ink tablet

Review unit provided by iFLYTEK

iFlytek AINOTE Air 2 is an e-ink tablet with useful note taking and powerful transcription features targeted at professionals and students.

Price at the time of review is USD 479 from their online store. And here in Singapore, it's priced at SGD 549 and is sold at Popular book stores located at Bras Basah Complex, Causeway Point, Tampines Mall, Nex Mall, Bukit Panjang Plaza and Northpoint. I went to the store and the price was lower.

Bottom line

The iFlytek AINOTE Air 2 is a device with very focused use cases. One key feature is voice-to-text which can transcribe speech instantly into text. While the transcription is not 100% accurate, you can always edit the text later. The other key feature is text-to-voice which can convert ebooks or PDFs to audiobook. This feature is great for learning a new language (limited currently to Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean).

The tablet excels at note taking, and can even record audio while taking notes, such as during a meeting or at a lecture. And you can use AI to create a summary. You can then click on you notes to jump to the audio in time. And there's handwriting-to-text conversion feature that recognises 83 languages.

The tablet can also be used to handle scheduling and to-do lists.

The included pen uses Wacom EMR so pen performance is good. And writing on the textured matte display provides a nice tactile experience.

Kindle and Libby are available for installation, and these two apps will give you access to unlimited ebooks online. Libby will give you access to your local library.

Downsides? This tablet is not one of those multi-purpose e-readers like Boox or Bigme since there's no Google Play Store. E-ink quality is good but there's no e-ink customisation so you cannot improve the page redraw speed which can feel slow. ChatGPT 4o AI is not smart or useful enough. A user account with iFlytek is needed for syncing to work.

This is not a device that's trying to do everything, but it does what it's advertised to do well enough.

Specifications

• Display: 8.2-inch E-Ink screen
• Resolution: 1440 x 1920, 293 PPI
• CPU: Quad-core 1.8Ghz
• Writing Experience: Ultra-low latency, paper-like writing
• Handwriting Recognition: Converts handwritten notes into text in 83 languages
• Voice-to-Text: Real-time transcription in 15 languages
• Translation: Supports real-time translation in 10 languages
• AI Features: GPT-4o-powered meeting summaries and AI-generated notes
• Supported formats: PDF, EPUB, TXT, MOBI, AZW3, DOC(X), XLS(X), PPT(X), JPEG, JPG, PNG
• Storage: 32GB internal storage
• RAM: 4GB
• Camera: 5MP
• Microphone: Four
• Speaker: One
• Connectivity: Wifi 6, Bluetooth 5
• Cloud Sync: Secure cloud storage for easy access
• Battery: 2600mAh
• Stylus: Wacom EMR pen
• Brightness Adjustment: 24-level warm & cold light
• Connectivity: Type-C charging port
• Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.2-0.25 inch (193 × 137 × 5 to 6.4mm)
• OS: Android 11
• Weight: 5.1lbs (231g)

Main thing to note here is internal storage is just 32GB which is kinda small, and there's no microSD card slot. It the limited storage does become an issue in the future, you'll have to export your notes out.

Things included

• Tablet
• USB-A to USB-C charging cable
• Card that says magnets can affect pen performance
• Pen
• User guide

A navy or black colour case is available for purchase at US$40. Extra pen tips cost US$16 for 5 pieces. You can use Wacom EMR pen tips. Just get the felt or plastic ones, and not the soft tip.

Design

Design of this tablet is clean and simple. Screen to body ratio is 88.5%. Bezels are quite thin and corners are rounded. The metal body has solid build quality. This tablet looks and feels well made. There's no obvious branding on the front so the design is inconspicuous.

There are four mics somewhere on the tablet and one speaker. The speaker sounds alright, not too bad, and thankfully not hollow sounding.

The metal back is matte textured and quite susceptible to fingerprint. The horizontal top bar that protrudes slightly allows you to place the tablet on the table without any wobble so that you can write on a stationary surface.

The 5MP camera at the side of the top bar can be used for document scanning. That camera will convert detailed photos into high contrast document-like images, just like a photocopier. When scanning one document, the software will automatically let you crop the image, but when scanning multiple images you have to (tediously) enable crop mode manually for each scan.

Document scanning quality isn't that good from the 5MP camera and processing, but usable I guess. A higher resolution camera would be able to capture more details.

At the tip is the power button with finger print scanner, and the USB-C charging port.

The side profile is quite thin. This tablet weighs 231g which is considered lightweight for a 8.2-inch tablet.

The included pen can attach to the side of the tablet magnetically and the magnetic strength is strong, but with enough force there's still a chance to knock the pen off.

The 8.2-inch e-ink display has a resolution 1440 x 1920 (293 PPI). The e-ink canvas is not too dark so reading at night is possible as long as your room is well lit.

Visuals look sharp enough but the sharpness is affected by the matte textured surface and also the slight thickness of the surface. The anti-glare works well enough to diffuse reflections.

This tablet works well as an e-reader.

8.2-inch may be a bit small for reading comics though. After you install Kindle and Libby from the Apps section, you can have access to countless books. Having Libby is a key feature because it lets you access books from your local library.

Coloured images obviously will be converted to black and white. Gradated colours will show banding so that tells me the number of gray levels this display can show is quite limited, but that's acceptable since this tablet is made for writing and reading text.

PEN

The included pen is lightweight, feels a bit plasticky but solid enough. There's an eraser at the back and one side button. The pen tip is a felt pen tip that provides good tactile experience when writing on the matte display.

The pen uses Wacom EMR technology so pen performance, accuracy, is good. And palm rejection works well. Extra pen tips are not included but you can buy inexpensive pen tips made for the other Wacom EMR pens such as Samsung S Pen. I recommend you get plastic or felt pen tips which will let you write faster on the display.

OS

When setting up the tablet for the first time, the tablet will ask you to create an account with iFlytek. For those who have privacy concerns, I guess you can create a new email account specifically just to use it with this tablet.

The three main sections are Notes, Schedule and Reading. Quite self explanatory.

Look to the right of the taskbar at the top and you can see shortcuts to document scanning, email, more apps, settings, search, task switcher and the pulldown menu.

There is no Google Play Store, but the company has included bookmarks to some apps that you can install, namely:

• WPS Office
• Libby
• Kindle
• Kobo Books
• Outlook
• APKPure
• Two Korean apps
• One Chinese-English translation app

After adding my Gmail account, I could only send emails but not receive emails. And the email app just works quite slowly when retrieving old emails. The Outlook app from the More Apps section works fine.

In addition to the usual controls you get with the pulldown menu, e.g. wifi, rotation, screenshot etc, you also get to set the amount of front light, and choose pen style and stroke width.

For finer adjustment of the front light, you have to go into the settings and there you can adjust the 24 levels of warm and cool light and set your own custom lighting presets.

At the bottom of the display, you can swipe from bottom left inwards to open the AI chat assistant, and swipe from middle up for the task switcher, and from the bottom right inwards to create a quick note.

The AI chat assistant is said to use ChatGPT 4o but I find it to be quite useless. When I asked for the date, the AI said it cannot provide real-time information. When I requested for the pros and cons of this tablet, the AI said it does not have details beyond Oct 2023, which suggests to me that this AI is not connected to the internet and hence cannot source information from the internet.

There is no way to adjust e-ink quality and set the refresh rate. Since the e-ink quality is good, the compromise is higher refresh latency, so when typing and when flipping pages, so animation can look choppy.

Voice-to-text

The main selling point of this tablet is the voice-to-text transcription and translation features.

Transcription can actually be handled by an app so why buy a tablet for transcription? Because the transcription service on this tablet is free but most transcription apps are not and are based on subscription model. One downside here is transcription require internet connection.

The tablet can be used to record a meeting or lecture and create ongoing transcription. You can also take notes while recording audio. After recording, you can click on your notes and playback the audio to the time you wrote those words. For example, you can write down names or details, and if the transcription got the names or some info wrong, you have your notes as backup. And you can use AI to create a summary of the recording.

The 32GB internal storage can only record up to 6hr of audio.

Voice-to-text supports for the following 15 languages:

• English
• Chinese
• Japanese
• Korean
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Cantonese
• Russian
• Malaysian
• Vietnamese
• Arabic
• Thai
• Indonesian
• Hungarian

The tablet also supports instant translation and these are the 10 languages supported:

• Chinese
• English
• Japanese
• Korean
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Hungarian
• Arabic
• Russian

After the translation is created, you can search the text.

NOTE TAKING
Note taking features are quite limited but as least you can use different writing tools, adjust stroke width and use eraser of course. You don't get as many writing tools compared to other e-ink tablets.

Since the pen uses Wacom EMR technology, you can expect good pen accuracy and palm rejection works flawlessly. The tablet and pen can capture my handwriting style quite accurately.

There's handwriting-to-text conversion and 83 languages are supported, namely: English (UK), English (US), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong), Czech, Welsh, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Irish, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Turkish, Latin, Afrikaans, Arabic, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Breton, Bosnian, Catalan, Cebuano (Philippines), Esperanto, Colombian, Mexican, Estonian, Basque, Persian, Faroese, Western Frisian, Galician, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Luxembourgish, Luganda, Limburgish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malagasy, Macedonian, Mongolian, Malay, Maltese, Burmese, Oromo (Ethiopia), Romanian, Slovenian, Somali, Albanian, Serbian (Latin), Serbian, Swahili, Tajik, Tatar (Russia), Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek (Latin), Vietnamese, Waray, Kurdish, and Uzbek (Cyrillic).

You can share your handwritten notes or converted text as images, PDFs, Word doc. Send them via email or QR code. To share via QR code, the notes have to be saved to iFlytek cloud, and you can choose how long those notes remain online, e.g. 1 day, 7 days, 30 months, and lock them behind password.

Notes can be organised with tags and folders.

Scheduling

The tablet can be used to handle scheduling and create to-do lists. There's a calendar but unfortunately it cannot sync with Google or Microsoft calendars.

Downside here is you can't write into the schedules, you can only type.

Reading

To import reading materials or files to the tablet, you can use a cable connection or download from Microsoft OneDrive. The Microsoft OneDrive syncing works quite well, thankfully, and since you can store your ebooks on your own cloud, you won't be limited by the small internal storage capacity.

File formats supported are PDF, EPUB, TXT, MOBI, AZW3, DOC(X), XLS(X), PPT(X), JPEG, JPG, PNG.

Text to voice

This tablet can read the text-based ebooks you've imported, and turn those ebooks into audio books. The languages are limited to English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

This is great for learning a new language because you can see the words, and the tablet will read those words for you.

Battery life

This tablet is made so thin so it can't fit a big battery.

Battery capacity is 2,600 maAh and that's actually considered small. But since this tablet is mostly used for note taking, and the only time it needs the internet is when syncing notes or downloading ebooks, it does not use much battery.

Battery life seems good enough to last for several days, but I cannot confirm the actual number of days. I don't have any issues with the battery life although I wish battery capacity could be larger.

Conclusion

The iFlytek AINOTE Air 2 is the device for those looking for transcription, translation and note taking features. It can do voice-to-text and text-to-voice. Converted handwritten notes can be searched so that's quite convenient.

This tablet cannot do many things that other tablets can do. You can see that as a downside or upside. The upside is there's nothing to distract you so this device is made purely for utility and productivity.

Even though the tablet supports many languages, there's no way to download more languages, which can be really useful for the text-to-voice feature.

Handwriting experience is great.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Clean and simple design
+ Lightweight
+ Compact, portable
+ Solid build quality
+ E-ink canvas has good contrast
+ E-ink looks sharp enough
+ Matte display with anti-glare
+ Writing experience is good, responsive
+ 24 levels of warm and cool light adjustment
+ Tablet can lay down flat without wobble
+ 83 languages supported for converting handwritten notes
+ 15 languages supported for translation
+ Instant live translation and transcription
+ Transcription service is free
+ Converted handwritten notes can be searched
+ Has text-to-voice feature, but only 4 languages supported
+ Easy QR code sharing of notes
+ Document scanning feature
+ Fingerprint unlock
+ Has Kindle and Libby app
- Transcription requires internet connection
- No option to install more languages
- AI assistant not that useful, AI not connected to internet
- 32GB internal storage isn't much
- No Google Play Store
- E-ink page refresh is slow as no e-ink settings customisation possible
- iFlytek user account needed for syncing

Availability

iFlytek AINOTE Air 2 is available from the iFlytek online store.

If you're in Singapore, you can buy the tablet at Popular book stores located at Bras Basah Complex, Causeway Point, Tampines Mall, Nex Mall, Bukit Panjang Plaza and Northpoint.