A Weird but Interesting reMarkable Alternative - Sharp WG-PN1

One of the nicest things I ever used was a simple LCD writing board for a few euros. Just write it down and it stays there, always visible. I loved it, but I wished there was something a little more permanent, with more pages than just one. In other words: Something like my writing board, but with a proper display, and yet not as distracting as a full-featured tablet.

LCD writing boards are simple and great, but is there something slightly more advanced? Image by MIKI Yoshihito: I buy gadget, therefore I am. | Paperless LCD writing tablet… | Flickr, CC BY 2.0 DEED

My LCD writing board died some time ago, but I did not forget it. Recently, I was distracting myself by searching for various distraction-free devices. There is reMarkable, Freewrite and King Jim Pomera. And then I found this little e-reader-shaped thing from Sharp. There was very little information in English about it, but the price for a second-hand device was low enough to take a chance.

Sharp WG-PN1. It looks like an e-reader but it is not! Product description.

Sharp WG-PN1 is a part of long family of similar devices starting already in 2013 . Previous models had a special LCD without any backlight. They offered great battery life (even much better than WG-PN1), but they were quite difficult to read in the dark. This latest model is from 2019 and is the first to feature an e-ink display. The battery is worse as well as the response time, but the…