This year has seen a wealth of innovative E Ink e-readers, with Amazon all-but perfecting the Kindle with the new Kindle Oasis, the stylus-enabled ReMarkable tablet allowing you to get arty, and now there's this: the Onyx Boox Max 2 Professional.
Its unique selling point? Not only is it a giant E Ink tablet, but it's also capable of doubling up as a second display for your PC.
That's a first in the world of e-readers, but that's not all this 13.3-inch, 2200 x 1650 touchscreen slate has going for it.
Feature rich
As well as its standard e-reader features and its HDMI output option, the tablet is also compatible with the Wacom digitiser, letting you scribble away on the screen.
Internally it's no slouch either, at least as far as e-readers go. Running a version of Android 6.0, it's got a 1.6GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage space. A 4100mAh battery gives it four weeks worth of standby time, while file format support includes PDF, EPUB, TXT, MOBI, JPG, PNG and BMP.
Compatible with Windows, Linux and macOS, it's also got a headphone jack for MP3 and WAV music playback and a built-in mic – which presumably is for Android voice control features. Though how they'd fare here is unclear, given the screen tech.
How well it works as a monitor, too, would be interesting to observe – Windows on an E Ink display, with a low refresh rate, might be a bit of a challenge, making it better served for static documents.
Up for pre-order now, expect to pay around $800 / £600 / AU$1,060 when it starts shipping from December 27th.
