What was it we said about compact e-readers yesterday? Honor has launched its own version, the Honor Life S3. It’s got several factors in its favour, most notably the price. Some points about the little E Ink slate aren’t quite as impressive. The worst of these is that the Life S3 is exclusive to China for the present.
Which is a pity, based on the device’s local pricing. At ¥360, local readers could expect to pay just R900 for one of these critters. If you happen to know someone on business in Beijing, it’d be trivial to bring an S3 back in your luggage. Or jacket pocket. Or stuck to the rear of a smartphone. The folks at Customs would never even know.
Reading Life S3
The Honor Life S3 offers readers a 3.68in E Ink display stuck into some fairly wide bezels. It looks, in terms of design, fairly close to earlier-generation Amazon Kindles. It’s a touchscreen panel, and there don’t appear to be any physical controls. It does include USB-C charging and a very compact battery. The Chinese brand is using a 650mAh power source, but you’ll also get Wi-Fi 6 and a microphone. It sounds like there might be a dictation function or possibly an AI integration planned at some point.
Honor is keeping the price down by not including storage. There’s a mere 16MB onboard for the basic operating system, but a microSD card slot lets owners expand their book hoard up to 1TB. But you’ll need to be picky about your formats. Unlike the Boox Picco, the S3 is limited in terms of supported formats. Everyone’s favourite, EPUB, makes the list, with PDF and MOBI books also included. Otherwise, there are only basic document formats supported — .doc, .txt, and .docx.
But, as we mentioned, the Life S3 is only available through Chinese sources. There’s no indication that it’ll ever travel outside of that country. The Boox Picco, on the other hand, won’t be quite as hard to locate. It’s also twice the price, but it supports far more reading formats and has a large display and battery. It’s hardly a tough call, unless you’ve got a mate who regularly travels to China. In which case, ask them to bring a Life S3 back for us, too.
