iFLYTEK Firmware Review (Version 1.6)

Current sub-version: 1.6.8

This page takes a deep dive into the firmware that is pre-installed on iFLYTEK e-ink tablets to help potential users decide if these devices have the software functionality that they need.

Operating system

The iFLYTEK AINote 2 runs Android 14, and access to the Google Play Store substantially broadens its software ecosystem, at least in theory. In practice, as with all e-ink hardware, one must temper expectations: many third-party apps were never designed with slow-refresh e-ink screens in mind, and the friction between app design and e-ink constraints can lead to sub-optimal performance. Still, the mere option to install them adds versatility.

Navigation

The main home screen is centred around note-taking productivity. It displays a list of notebooks and their folders, which can be filtered or sorted by various criteria. Additional shortcuts link to the reading library, schedule, email client, app list, settings, and recycle bin (I will examine the reading app, schedule and email client more closely in later sections). Across the top sits a small status bar showing battery, Wi-Fi, and time.

Curiously, some of the native applications – particularly the reading library, the schedule, and certain utilities – include a small button for task switching, yet this button is conspicuously absent from the primary home interface. This creates a faint sense of inconsistency, as if the UI adheres to slightly different design principles depending on which part of the system you occupy. It is not a major usability flaw, but it does stand out.

The navigation model relies heavily on gestures:

• Swipe down from the top right → opens the Control Centre
• Swipe down from the top left → opens Android notifications
• Swipe left / right → page turning
• Two-finger tap → manual screen refresh
• Swipe up from bottom centre → task manager / app switcher
• Three-finger swipe down → screenshot
• Two-finger slide / pinch → panning and zooming
• Three-finger swipe left or right → undo / redo

These gestures are fixed; they cannot be remapped, though most can be disabled if they prove intrusive.

The touch-sensitive Quick Bar along the bottom edge is a defining feature of the AINote 2’s navigation scheme. It provides:

• Swipe from left to centre → opens the Q&A AI assistant
• Swipe from right to centre → opens the Quick Note pop-up window
• Swipe left/right from the middle → page scrubbing or quick scrolling

The Quick Note pop-up is particularly effective. It overlays the current screen rather than replacing it, permitting swift annotation while browsing the web, viewing documents, or operating within third-party apps. It is a genuinely pragmatic tool – arguably the most immediately useful gesture on the device. The AI Q&A has some issues which I will discuss later…

The quick page-scrolling gesture, however, is situational. It works reasonably well for notebooks or documents with fewer than 20 pages, but beyond that, the gesture becomes too imprecise. A slight mis-swipe can catapult the user far beyond the intended page, making it more of a convenience for short documents than a functional tool for extensive manuscripts.

Control Center

The Control Center is accessed with a swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen, and it serves as a compact hub for essential system functions. Its layout is simple and functional rather than ornate, prioritising clarity over visual flourish.

Within this menu you can toggle the device’s primary connectivity options: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Airplane Mode. These switches respond reliably, although I did experience some sluggishness when turning the Wifi back on (after turning it off for a while).

Miracast screen sharing, allowing the tablet’s display to be cast wirelessly to a compatible external screen. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to test this as I didn’t have a device to use as a Miracast receiver and lacked the time to set something up.

Additional quick actions include:

• Manual screen refresh,
• Screenshot capture,
• Screen rotation (a necessity given the absence of a hardware G-sensor),
• Feedback submission to iFLYTEK, and
• A shortcut to the full settings menu.

More unusually, the Control Center also houses options related to annotating. You can change the default brush type directly from this panel, which is useful when shifting quickly between writing tasks, though it is not something I personally need frequent access to.

The final option is the ability to select between two display refresh modes; either Best Speed, or Best Quality.

This dichotomy is typical on e-ink devices. The faster mode reduces ghosting less aggressively but provides a snappier experience for scrolling or navigating complex interfaces. The quality mode emphasises visual clarity and ghosting reduction, at the cost of more noticeable refresh cycles. Having these modes accessible in the Control Center is practical, especially when switching between reading static documents and interacting with more dynamic third-party apps.

On-Screen / Virtual Keyboard

The virtual keyboard is, somewhat surprisingly, one of the more polished components of the software experience. It is extremely responsive, registering taps without hesitation and exhibiting no perceptible input lag – a notable achievement given the inherent latency challenges of e-ink displays. In regular typing, I did not encounter missed taps or delayed characters, even when typing quite fast, which makes text entry markedly less frustrating than on many comparable devices.

In addition to standard typing, the keyboard supports voice recognition, allowing dictation to be converted into text. This feature also works exceptionally well; accuracy is high, latency is low, and the recognition engine handles natural speech with a degree of fluency that makes it genuinely useful for composing notes or documents when typing is inconvenient.

The virtual keyboard also includes a handwriting-to-text option, though this is where the input experience falters. The recognition is consistently unreliable. Even reasonably neat handwriting is often misinterpreted, and the system struggles with letter shapes, spacing, and sometimes even the general structure of words. In its current form, it is not dependable enough to integrate into everyday workflows.

Task Switcher

The task switcher is accessed with a swipe up from the bottom-centre of the screen, and it functions much like a pared-down version of Android’s standard running-apps interface. It presents a grid of currently running apps, each represented by a preview card. Tapping any of these cards switches immediately to the selected application, while tapping the close icon terminates them.

There is also a clear and convenient button to return to the Home Screen, which helps anchor navigation when moving through multiple layers of apps and menus.

On an e-ink device – where multitasking is often more cumbersome due to refresh limitations – the task switcher proves genuinely useful. It offers a straightforward means of moving between notebooks, the reading app, email, the browser, and third-party apps without repeatedly retracing steps through the home screen or nested menus.

Global Search

The global search function occupies a prominent position on the home screen, and it is far more capable than its sparse interface might initially suggest. It allows you to search by filename/title across a broad range of content on the device: notebooks, PDFs and books in the reading library, and even tasks and events stored in the schedule. In terms of breadth, it covers virtually all of the device’s native data types.

What sets it apart, however, is its ability to search within handwritten notes – not merely by their titles. The handwriting search is remarkably accurate, often surfacing the precise page or notebook where a handwritten term appears. This is all the more peculiar when contrasted with the device’s handwriting-to-text OCR, which is notably poor. It seems that the system’s recognition engine is far more capable in a search context than in a character-by-character transcription context, an odd inconsistency, which possibly indicates the use of two of different models.

Adding another layer of sophistication, iFLYTEK’s AIAide model supplements the search by providing a summary of the results, offering a brief explanation of what the located files or notes are about. This transforms the search from a simple indexing tool into something more interpretive and context-aware. It is genuinely useful – particularly for getting an overview of the information in your notebooks without actually opening them up.

Overall, global search is one of the quietly impressive features of the operating system: fast, thorough, unexpectedly accurate with handwriting, and augmented by an AI layer that offers concise contextual summaries.

AI Features

AI functionality is woven throughout the operating system in a way that suggests considerable ambition, though the practical execution feels uneven. Some AI features demonstrate clear potential, while others struggle with inconsistency or partial implementation.

As described earlier, AIAide provides AI-generated summaries within global search results – a feature that works surprisingly well. In these instances, the AI performs a genuinely helpful interpretive role, distilling the contents of documents or notes into concise explanations.

Beyond this, the system offers two primary AI interfaces:

AIAide (Voice Assistant)

Activated via the dedicated hardware button on the top edge, AIAide accepts voice input and can perform a modest range of system-level commands. In principle, it operates similarly to a mobile voice assistant:

• You can tell it to create calendar events, such as “add dentist appointment at 3 p.m. today,” and it will successfully do so.
• It can open native apps like the notebook or reading library without issue.
• It can respond to basic factual questions or general requests.

However, the functionality is deeply inconsistent:

• Although it can create events, it cannot amend or delete them, often claiming it lacks access to the calendar – even immediately after creating an entry.
• When asked to open a third-party app, such as Chrome or ChatGPT, it simply redirects you to the app in the Play Store instead of launching the installed application.
• When issuing a search request, AIAide opens the search interface but uses your entire spoken command as the query rather than extracting the relevant keyword, resulting in no meaningful results.

The system feels half-implemented, with voice parsing and execution logic that appear to misunderstand intent in subtle but important ways.

Q&A Interface (ChatGPT-Style Window)

Accessed by swiping the Quick Bar, this interface resembles a minimalist ChatGPT chat window. Unlike AIAide, it uses text input (though voice input can be routed through the keyboard’s voice-to-text function). It saves prior conversations, making it slightly more structured and persistent.

Both AI interfaces appear to use GPT-5, but performance is noticeably constrained:

• Response speed sits around four words per second, which is slow enough to feel laborious, especially for longer answers.
• The responses themselves tend to be less accurate, less helpful, and less polished than those generated by the official ChatGPT app.
• Neither interface can access real-time data, perform web browsing, or leverage external context – limitations that significantly curb their usefulness.

The AI features collectively feel like good ideas held back by flawed execution. The slow response speed, inconsistent command handling, and conceptual overlap between the two AI interfaces create a somewhat disjointed experience. Having two separate AI systems, each accessed through different gestures and each behaving slightly differently, introduces confusion without offering clear functional differentiation.

In their current state, the AI tools are interesting but underdeveloped. They hint at potential – especially through features like contextual search summaries – but their practical day-to-day utility remains limited.

Filesystem

The filesystem is one of the more constrained and idiosyncratic aspects of the device. Although the tablet runs regular Android underneath, the user is not granted full access to the platform’s directory structure. Instead, iFLYTEK exposes only a limited subset of folders, and this restriction has practical consequences for workflow and file management.

Natively, you are allowed to view and interact with specific directories such as:

• Bookshelf (for imported books and PDFs)
• Screenshots
• Fonts
• Audio (exported voice recordings)
• Mail (email attachments)
• Office
• Template (custom templates)

While this curated set of folders may simplify things for casual users, it also means that important system directories remain hidden – notably the Downloads folder, which is the default destination for files retrieved from web browsers. The result is an awkward disconnect: if you download a PDF from the web, it may appear to vanish into an inaccessible corner of the filesystem. Without a more capable file manager, there is no straightforward way to retrieve it through the stock interface.

iFLYTEK does include a basic file explorer app simply called Files, but it displays only the restricted subset of folders mentioned above. In practice, this makes it almost inevitable that users will need to install a third-party file manager, such as Owl Files, to gain proper visibility and control. A similar limitation appears when connecting the tablet to a computer via USB: the computer only sees the same subset of folders. Thus, the restricted design is consistent across local and external access.

Cloud synchronisation offers a partial workaround but is also limited. If you create an iFLYTEK account, your notebooks can be synced to their proprietary cloud service and accessed via the companion mobile app. However, this sync applies only to notebooks (it does not sync your reading library or your schedule).

By default, 1Gb of cloud storage is provided, however, every single day I get an annoying pop-up urging me to accept a 90-day free trial of iFLYTEK’s upgraded cloud service which provides up to 1Tb of storage. There’s no option to say no, it’s either Accept or Decide Later, and if I choose the latter, it pops up again the next day. For me, this became very frustrating.

You can also bind the tablet to Microsoft OneDrive, which allows browsing and downloading files stored there. But again, the integration is partial because you cannot sync notebooks to it. In addition, OneDrive is the only cloud service supported at the system level, though apps for other services (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) can be installed separately from the Play Store.

Because OneDrive is supported natively, it can be used to import PDFs and ebooks onto the tablet through the Reading Library. Other methods include USB (a physical connection to another device), and wifi (over a local network from another device using the web browser).

Companion App

The iFLYTEK companion app is available across Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS, which gives it broad accessibility across most mainstream ecosystems. For my evaluation, I used the Android version on a smartphone.

In terms of functionality, the app provides a reasonably coherent extension of the tablet’s notebook system.

The companion app allows you to open and read your synced notebooks, including access to any audio recordings embedded within them. If the notes contain audio translations or transcriptions, the text of those transcriptions is also accessible. This part of the app works well and makes it easy to review material when away from the tablet.

Additionally, the app lets you create text-based notes using the virtual keyboard. These support basic formatting (bold, italics, bullet points) and even allow image insertion. However, these notes exist in a somewhat parallel universe relative to the tablet’s main native note-taking system. When you view these text-based notes on the AINote itself, the note-taking app interface is more limited than a regular notebook.You can add typed annotations and add basic text, but you cannot add voice recordings, or insert new pages (it is set to infinite scroll only).

This creates a mildly disjointed experience, as the companion app’s text notes are not first-class citizens within the tablet’s primary note-taking environment.

Within the mobile app, there are also a small number of preset AI operations. At present, these include the ability to generate a summary of meeting notes, and standardise formatting or layout of a note using AI. These features are not particularly deep or configurable, but they demonstrate an attempt to integrate the AI layer into the cross-device workflow.

Overall, the companion app is pretty good, but does have some limitations. It is perfectly adequate for reviewing your notebooks on another device and for playing embedded audio.

Native note-taking app

Notebooks are accessible from the homescreen and you can either open an existing notebook, or create a new one.

Canvas and Toolbar

The canvas system is notably versatile. Every notebook supports both paged mode and infinite scrolling, and you do not need to choose between these modes when creating the notebook. They coexist seamlessly:

• Swipe left or right to navigate between traditional pages.
• Two-finger pan downward to extend the canvas indefinitely.
• Pinch to zoom, with fairly smooth scaling and generally reliable touch recognition.

This hybrid model allows for structured, page-based writing while still accommodating large brainstorming, diagramming, or mind-mapping sessions that benefit from an unbounded workspace.

Toolbar Layout

The toolbar sits horizontally across the top edge of the screen. It cannot be repositioned – there is no option to move it to the side or bottom – but it can be hidden entirely, which helps preserve screen real estate during focused writing sessions.

The toolbar includes a broad array of tools:

• Brush selector
• Text insertion tool
• AI commands
• Voice recording tool
• Mind map creation
• Export options
• Quick switch to one of the most recently opened notebook
• Page overview

and an overflow menu containing a surprisingly deep set of additional features:

• Rename the notebook
• Change parent folder
• Add or remove tags
• Change template
• Adjust default text font size
• Link handwriting to audio time codes
• Change OCR language
• Search within the notebook (including handwriting)
• Sync to the cloud
• Encrypt the notebook
• Delete the notebook

Overall, the canvas and toolbar system is simple but surprisingly multifaceted, allowing structured note-taking, free-form sketching, and multimedia capture within a single unified interface. It has some unique features (such as voice transcription/translation, Smart Pen etc.) but is also missing some of the standard options that are available in other brands note-taking apps (e.g. you can’t resize/rotate selections, or perform handwriting-to-text without an Internet connection etc.).

Brushes/pens and eraser

The brush system in the native note-taking app presents itself as impressively broad on paper, offering eight distinct brush types:

• Ballpoint
• Fountain pen
• Fineliner
• Gel pen
• Pencil
• Marker
• Paintbrush
• Quill

However, the practical differences between several of these brushes are surprisingly subtle. The ballpoint, fountain pen, gel pen, and paintbrush – despite ostensibly representing very different writing instruments – produce strokes that are nearly indistinguishable in everyday use. The variations in line thickness, pressure response, and stroke behaviour are so minor that they amount to little more than flavouring, rather than genuinely different tools.

Similarly, the fineliner, while distinct in the sense that it lacks pressure sensitivity, still manages to feel remarkably similar to the aforementioned brushes.

Only three brushes stand out as truly distinctive:

• Pencil – produces strokes with a textured, grainy pattern reminiscent of graphite on paper; noticeably different and quite pleasant, though not as good as other brand’s implementations
• Quill – implements directional stroke differentiation, rendering thicker downstrokes and thinner upstrokes, giving it a unique calligraphic feel.
• Marker – yields bold, broad grey lines with a semi-transparent quality that sets it apart from the more paper-like writing tools.

As for performance characteristics, most brushes (except fineliner, marker, and quill) support pressure sensitivity, and none of the brushes appear to support tilt sensitivity, which limits shading or calligraphic nuance compared to more advanced EMR implementations.

Each brush has five preset thickness options, though there is no colour/grayscale selection.

While the brush selection appears expansive at first glance, the actual expressive range is more limited than the interface suggests. The few brushes that are distinctive work well, but the degree of similarity between the rest undermines the promise of diversity.

The eraser has four preset thicknesses, and behaves as an area selection, although you can configure the secondary function of the side button on the stylus to act as a selection eraser (instead of the default options to switch to the Smart Pen).

Undo and redo are accessible through buttons on the toolbar, or via three-finger swipe gestures (left for undo, right for redo), which are often faster once committed to muscle memory.

Smart Pen

The Smart Pen functionality is one of the more distinctive elements of iFLYTEK’s note-taking software. It can be activated either by tapping its dedicated icon on the toolbar or by pressing the side button on the stylus. Once invoked, the Smart Pen enters a special mode that offers both lasso-style selection and a set of ‘shape drawing’ commands intended to streamline organisation and task creation.

Lasso Selection

In its simplest mode, the Smart Pen behaves like a lasso select tool. You draw a boundary around handwritten content, the selection becomes movable, and you can reposition it anywhere on the canvas.

However, unlike the selection tools found on more sophisticated e-ink platforms, the Smart Pen’s lasso lacks the ability to resize, rotate, cut/copy/paste or otherwise transform selections. Movement is the only available manipulation. A small floating toolbar appears beside any selection, offering:

• Deselect
• Clear / delete selection
• AI Search – intended to convert the handwriting to text and feed it into the AI chat, but handwriting recognition is so inconsistent that this rarely works correctly
• Join Task – a mistranslated feature that attempts to convert the selection into a to-do item; again hampered by unreliable handwriting recognition

The overall usability of these features is therefore heavily constrained by the system’s weak OCR performance.

Shape-Based Commands

Where the Smart Pen becomes more conceptually interesting is in its shape-gesture commands. When you draw certain shapes, the system interprets them as structured organisational markers:

Drawing a star creates a Focus Star, essentially a marker for high-priority items. Any text following the star is added to a special section of the schedule for reminders and urgent memos. Focus Stars can be toggled on (important) or off (not-so-important) and are linked back to the note in which they appear.

Drawing a closed circle creates a Task in your to-do list. Tapping the circle marks the task as complete.

The primary difference between a task and a focus star seems to be that focus stars also appear within the schedule linked directly to their originating notebook, whereas tasks are treated more generically.

Drawing a triangle produces a section divider or heading marker, making it easier to navigate long notebook pages. These markers, along with stars and tasks, appear in the page overview, creating a structured map of the notebook’s internal layout.

The Smart Pen is, conceptually, a clever and genuinely innovative feature. The idea of using simple pen-drawn shapes to generate organisational metadata is elegant, and the integration with the schedule and page overview could have made it great for structured notebook management, linked to the schedule.

However, in practice, the usefulness of the Smart Pen is limited by the tablet’s poor handwriting-to-text conversion. Many of the Smart Pen’s most promising functions are dependent on accurate OCR, and without that foundation, the feature set never reaches its intended potential.

Page Overview

The Page Overview is an integral navigation tool within the note-taking environment. It appears as a vertical strip occupying roughly the rightmost 25% of the screen, stretching the full height of the display. This persistent side panel is designed to make navigating and organising larger notebooks far more manageable.

The overview contains two distinct modes:

1. Pages View

In the Pages tab, you are presented with a scrollable column of page thumbnails representing every page in the notebook. This is especially useful for visual navigation, as the thumbnails update in real time to reflect your handwriting, images, or inserted text.

From this panel you can:

• Move pages
• Hide pages
• Duplicate pages
• Delete pages
• Insert new pages at any position

These operations work smoothly and allow you to restructure long notebooks without having to jump repeatedly between distant sections. The thumbnails are perhaps not large enough to read the text/handwriting but can be recognised by the layout/formatting.

2. Marks View

The Marks tab presents a different kind of organisational aid. Instead of displaying visual thumbnails, it shows a list of:

• Tasks (created by drawing circles with the Smart Pen)
• Focus Stars (created by drawing five-pointed stars)
• Section markers / headings (created by drawing triangles)

This view is particularly effective for navigating notebooks that serve as meeting logs, study notes, research journals, or project planners. The marks act like anchors, allowing you to jump quickly to important sections without having to scroll through dozens of pages manually.

In larger notebooks, this becomes a significant efficiency boost. When combined with Smart Pen markers – assuming handwriting recognition cooperates – it creates a quasi-index system embedded directly within the notebook.

Text Tool

The Text tool provides a structured alternative to handwriting and is activated by tapping the “Text” icon on the toolbar. It allows you to insert typed text anywhere along the vertical axis of the canvas using the on-screen keyboard or the tablet’s excellent voice-to-text input. As previously mentioned, the handwriting-to-text conversion is poor, so not really an option via the virtual keyboard.

Typed text always anchors itself flush to the left margin and expands rightward. It behaves more like a sticky text block than a draggable textbox. It sits on a lower layer beneath handwriting, allowing you to annotate or draw directly on top of it. This layering is useful for combining typed structure with free-hand annotations, but the immobility of text blocks can be limiting in more design-oriented layouts.

The app supports a reasonable (though not expansive) set of formatting tools:

• Paragraph style (body text)
• Three heading levels
• Bulleted lists
• Tick/checkbox lists
• Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough
• Indentation
• Divider lines

These tools are sufficient for structured notes, minutes, outlines, or mixed-format documents. The formatting engine is stable but basic – functional rather than aspirational.

The text tool integrates deeply with AIAide for on-canvas text editing. You can prompt the AI to:

• Elaborate a passage
• Streamline or condense it
• Polish or refine the writing
• Adjust the tone (more formal, colloquial, humorous, or passionate)
• Apply custom user-defined AI transformations

The feature works, but, like all AI features, requires an Internet connection and the AI often adds unwanted preamble or closing remarks, rather than directly rewriting the text. These artefacts must be stripped away manually or by using custom AI commands to force cleaner output. Still, it is one of the more functional AI integrations, especially for users who routinely revise text.

Text excerpts can be selected, copied, and pasted via long-press. These actions work reliably, but there is no cut function, which is an odd omission.

AIAide Functions

Tapping the AI button in the note-taking toolbar reveals three preset AIAide functions, each intended to enhance productivity by automating parts of the writing process. Their usefulness, however, varies considerably.

1. Summary of Meeting Minutes

This feature uses the audio transcriptions embedded in your notebook to generate a concise summary of the recorded meeting. When it works, the output is coherent and reasonably structured, providing a quick way to distill lengthy discussions into digestible points.

Its reliability, unsurprisingly, depends heavily on the quality of the transcription. If the audio is clear and the transcription is accurate, the summarisation can be genuinely helpful; if the transcription is muddled, the summary inherits the flaws. Fortunately, in my tests, the transcription was usually very good.

2. OCR and Format

This is the most ambitious – and the most problematic – AI option. It attempts to convert the entire notebook into pure typed text (you cannot select individual pages to convert), and apply automatic formatting

I encountered a few issues with this. Firstly, the feature works only for very short notebooks. Anything beyond six or seven pages of full-page handwriting consistently triggered an error message:

“Blocked by the content security system.”

This appears to be a backend or policy restriction, not a technical limitation of the device.

Accuracy is inconsistent – sometimes it worked perfect, other times it was terrible, and sometimes it inserted strings of Chinese characters into the text.

Accepting the output overwrites the entire notebook, replacing all handwritten content with the converted text. The first time I tried this, the OCR wasn’t good and I was dismayed that my original handwritten notes had seemingly been destroyed. However, I was relieved to find that the original pages were still available in the page overview – they had just been hidden.

3. Create a Manuscript

The third AI function allows you to generate a manuscript-style text based on a given prompt. It supports things like:

• Speeches
• Marketing blurbs
• Story synopses
• Formal letters

The AI-generated content is inserted directly into the notebook as typed text. The outputs are generally competent, if somewhat formulaic. It is a useful idea, though not transformative.

These AI tools have clear potential, but in their current form, they feel experimental – useful in isolated cases, but not reliable enough to anchor a serious workflow.

Voice Recorder

The voice recorder is one of the more mature and fully functional tools in the note-taking suite. It is activated by tapping the microphone icon on the toolbar, which immediately begins an audio recording session. A small window appears at the top quarter of the screen, offering options to stop recording, apply tags, and select the recording mode.

The system offers two main modes:

1. Transcription mode: This converts spoken audio directly into text in 16 supported languages. The transcription occurs in real time, with the text appearing as you speak. When the audio is clear and the speech is deliberate, the accuracy is excellent. It handles English extremely well.
2. Translation mode: The system records speech in one language and outputs translated text in another (e.g. spoken Spanish → typed English). This also occurs in real time.

While I cannot fully evaluate multilingual accuracy beyond English (because I am notmulti-lingual), I experimented by feeding the recorder various short phrases in foreign languages – both spoken by me and sourced from YouTube recordings. The translations appeared surprisingly accurate, suggesting that the backend translation engine is robust.

The interface separates the two functions visually:

• Original → transcription in the spoken language
• Trans → translation output

The system only outputs the text associated with whichever button is currently active. Thus, if the interface is set to “Original,” only the original-language transcription is produced. You can switch between them during the recording, but it will only do one at a time (either transcribe in the original language, or the translated language)

Both transcription and translation require a persistent internet connection, which limits the tool’s usefulness in offline environments – something that is often expected of dedicated note-taking devices.

Interestingly, the app allows you to download local language packs for Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean. However, these packs display a small VIP badge, suggesting that they may be part of a future paid subscription tier (update: this is looking increasingly likely). Since my review account may have had elevated access, I cannot definitively determine the subscription model, but the presence of the badge indicates the likelihood of premium access requirements for local processing, perhaps at a future date.

Once the recording is finished, tapping Stop allows you to:

• insert the transcribed (or translated) text directly into your notebook,
• or rewind the entire recording and request a fresh transcription.

This is useful for correcting errors or experimenting with different transcription outputs.

Recordings and their associated text are also synced to iFLYTEK’s cloud, making them fully accessible through the companion app. This is especially helpful for reviewing meeting notes or voice memos when you are away from the tablet.

The voice recorder is one of the strongest components of the AINote ecosystem. It combines audio recording, transcription, and translation into a cohesive tool with genuinely high utility. It is the only brand I know of the integrates voice recording, transcription, and translation into it’s note-taking app.

Exporting Notebooks

The native note-taking app provides several export pathways for notebooks, each suited to different use cases. The system covers the essential formats – PDF, text, audio – and even includes a server-hosted HTML option for online sharing. The export options are functional and generally reliable, though they come with certain limitations and quirks.

1. Exporting Audio Recordings

If your notebook contains voice recordings, these can be exported locally in either MP3, or Opus formats.

The files are saved to the Audio folder, which is one of the few directories visible in the restricted filesystem. The device includes a basic MP3 player app, but there is no speaker built in, so playback requires Bluetooth headphones or speakers. There is no option to play back Opus files, which is odd considering iFLYTEK provide that export option.

The export process is straightforward, though limited to audio-only. You cannot export synchronized audio–text bundles or timestamp-linked data; the audio simply becomes a standalone file.

2. Exporting as PDF

PDF export is the most traditional and broadly compatible option. You can export:

• Locally → to the Bookshelf folder
• Via email → as an attachment, provided you have configured the built-in email client

The exported PDF includes both handwriting and typed text, preserving the visual layout of the notebook. However, you cannot export individual pages – it is always the entire notebook or nothing. For users who keep long or multi-section notebooks, the lack of page-selective export may be inconvenient.

3. Exporting as TXT

You can export a notebook as a plain text (.txt) file either:

• Locally → to the Bookshelf folder
• Via email → as an attachment, provided you have configured the built-in email client

This export type includes typed text only. All handwriting, sketches, shapes, and annotations are omitted. Because of this, TXT export is primarily useful for text-heavy notebooks or those created predominantly with the Text tool (or converted to text via AI).

4. Exporting as HTML (Cloud-Hosted)

The final option is the HTML share, in which:

• the notebook is uploaded to iFLYTEK’s servers,
• a shareable link is generated,
• and you can distribute that link via email (if you’ve configured the email client) or QR code.

This method is intended for quick sharing without the need to send large files, although again, only the whole notebook can be exported, not individual pages. The system also includes access controls:

• You can set a password for the shared document.
• You can define an expiration date (Unlimited, 30 days, 7 days, 1 day)

The obvious caveat is that this method requires cloud storage and internet access. And, for enterprise use, this would present some privacy/security considerations.

Templates

The note-taking app offers a surprisingly extensive library of built-in templates, covering most of the common structures one might want for handwriting and planning. The selection includes:

• Lined, dotted, and grid templates
• Daily, weekly, and monthly planners
• Work logs
• Cornell note layouts
• Various project and task-oriented formats

Some of these templates are stored on the device, while others must be downloaded from iFLYTEK’s servers the first time you select them. The download process is quick and unobtrusive.

You can import your own custom templates in PNG or JPG format. This is extremely useful for users who rely on personalised layouts, study frameworks, graphing backgrounds, or bespoke planner designs. Custom templates must be manually placed into the device’s Template folder. Oddly, when I first tried to add a custom template, I’m almost certain that the Template folder didn’t exist, but then when I came back to try again later, it was there – of course, this could just be an oversight by myself, but I had checked multiple times previously (including when I wrote about the filesystem above) without seeing it.

The app cannot import PDF templates, which is a significant omission for people that make use of third-party planners, calendars, and productivity systems are distributed as interactive PDFs, often with Hyperlinks, Embedded navigation elements, Tabbed sections, Layered designs etc. Other brands support importing such PDFs into the note-taking app to preserve these features (note that you can still use these planners in the PDF reading app, and annotate/write on them, but you will not have access to the full suite of features in the note-taking app).

Mind Map Tool

The Mind Map tool is an feature within the note-taking environment that allows the creation of structured logical diagrams and flowcharts. These mind maps can then be inserted directly into a notebook, functioning as embedded graphical elements rather than separate documents.

Although I was unable to explore the tool in great depth due to time constraints, its design appears promising. The interface suggests support for:

• Hierarchical branching
• Node-based layouts
• Connector lines
• Labeling and annotation

The ability to integrate mind maps directly into handwritten notes is especially appealing, as it enables a more flexible and visually expressive style of notebook organisation – something many e-ink devices lack altogether.

Based on preliminary impressions, the mind map tool looks interesting and potentially powerful, though a more comprehensive evaluation would require extended use. And although it can create neat-looking mindmaps, I feel it might be simpler just to create a freehand version.

Native reading app

The reading app supports PDF, EPUB, TXT, MOBI, AZW3, DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files. It is organised around a unified library interface with three tabs across the top that divide your reading and document ecosystem into clear functional areas:

1. Bookshelf (Main Library)

This is where all your PDF, EPUB and other ebook files reside. It functions as the primary reading library and supports a basic level of organisation, using hierarchical folders and the search function.

Books can be imported via:

• Wi-Fi transfer (over a local network using a web browser),
• USB cable, or
• Microsoft OneDrive, provided you have bound your account to the tablet

2. Office Centre

This tab consolidates all the WPS Office (see below) files you create or store on the device:

• Word documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations

These files are treated separately from the main ebook library, which helps prevent clutter and keeps productivity documents distinct from reading materials.

3. Bookstore

The Bookstore tab is a small curated collection of public domain classics that can be downloaded for free. It’s not a full-fledged ebook marketplace – more a modest library of out-of-copyright titles – so expectations should remain appropriately tempered. Still, it provides quick access to classical literature without needing to sideload anything.

The Bookshelf interface is clean, well-organised, and practical but does not allow you to organise ebooks with tags or into collections. Of course, it does not natively support DRM-protected ebooks, such as Kindle Books, or ADE-protected ebooks from Kobo and other online bookstores, but because it runs Android, the respective reading apps (Kindle, Kobo etc.) can be installed allowing you to read titles that you have purchased from these distributors.

Interface & toolbars

The native reading app offers a familiar, reasonably intuitive interface with thoughtful annotation tools, though it falls short in some key areas – most notably dictionary support. Navigation is generally smooth, and the overall layout is structured in a way that suits both casual reading and academic/document-intensive workflows.

Pages can be turned with a Swipe left or right, a Tap on the left or right margins, or with a Quick Bar swipe (though I found this too sensitive for long books) Tapping can be disabled if desired, but doing so also disables long-press text selection, which is a significant compromise. This restriction feels unnecessarily rigid.

Along the bottom edge of the reading screen is a minimal info bar displaying Chapter name, Current time and battery, Current page / total pages. It’s compact and useful without being visually intrusive.

The top area contains buttons for:

• Brush tool – makes handwritten annotations directly on the page
• Smart Pen – used for selecting text or lassoing content
• Handwritten Notes – for creating standalone handwritten notes
• Toggle for disabling page-turn taps / long presses – though this is intertwined with text-selection behaviour

These tools give a good range of annotation options, allowing mixed handwriting and text markup within ebooks or PDFs.

Text can be selected via a Long press or using the Smart Pen tool. Once selected, options include:

• Highlight (see below)
• Excerpt (see below)
• Copy to clipboard
• Inquire

The Inquire function uses AI to provide translations, offer definitions, and offer explanations. However, this requires an internet connection, and importantly, there is no local dictionary, nor can you install custom dictionary files. This is a significant omission for readers, especially those who frequently encounter unfamiliar terminology or foreign language content.

In addition, you can perform a Google search for the selected text or a text search within the book, jumping to other occurrences. These functions work reliably.

Tapping the Menu button in the top-left corner or somewhere in the middle of the screen opens a two-tiered system of toolbars.

The upper toolbar includes buttons for:

• Table of Contents (and list of Bookmarks)
• Search (text search within the book)
• Notes viewer (shows annotations, handwritten notes, highlights, and excerpts)
• Bookmark toggle (for the current page)
• Share screenshot (uploads a screenshot of the page to the iFLYTEK Cloud and generates a link or QR code)

These tools are sensibly grouped and streamline navigation within long or complex documents.

The lower toolbar contains:

• Progress bar (scroll or jump through the book)
• Page and text display options (layout, scaling, reflow modes depending on file type)
• Additional settings

These options give finer control over how books and documents are rendered, however you do not get quite as much control and customization as you would with the reading apps on other e-ink platforms.

Notes and annotations

The reading app offers a layered and surprisingly flexible annotation system. The system supports multiple note types, each suited to different workflows – handwritten annotations, handwritten ‘whole of book’ notes, highlights, and excerpts.

1. Handwritten annotations directly on the page

The simplest method is to write directly onto the book page, using the brush tool. This works well for PDFs and other fixed-layout documents, letting you annotate margins, underline passages, or add small sketches and arrows.However, in reflowable formats (EPUB, TXT, AZW3, etc.) the layout will shift when you do things like changing font size, switching margins, or altering line spacing (this is common with all e-ink tablets).

2. Handwritten notes

Tapping the Notes button opens a dedicated notepad that occupies the bottom half of the screen. This ‘mini notebook’ supports multiple pages, and can be rotated into landscape, effectively creating a split-screen mode (book on the left, notes on the right)

This is one of the more useful features for study, research, or academic reading. It keeps your marginalia separate from the main text and avoids the risks of misaligned annotations, however, your handwritten notes are not associated with any particular page. Rather they are linked to the ebook as a whole.

3. Highlights

Selected text can be saved as a highlight. These are simple copies of the text used to flag important passages.

4. Excerpts (Hybrid Notes)

Excerpts are more powerful than highlights. They save the selected text but also allow you to add handwritten annotations beneath the excerpt

This creates a hybrid structure similar to research notes or margin commentaries. It’s a useful way to capture a quote and immediately contextualise it with your own thoughts or sketches.

“All notes”

Tapping the All Notes button opens a consolidated view that includes a list of your annotations, notes, highlights, and excerpts (annotations are saved as a screenshot of the page, including your handwriting).

Each note is ‘tappable’ and selecting it will take you directly to the corresponding page in the book. You can also filter notes by type (highlights only, excerpts only, etc.), which is extremely helpful for large or academic texts.

The reading app allows you to export your notes as a Word document, PDF, or straight into the native note-taking app. These options give you a great deal of flexibility in how you process or archive your notes after reading.

Schedule/calendar app

The Schedule app is an organisation and productivity tool that has tabs across the top for your Calendar, Tasks, and Focus Stars.

As mentioned previously, tasks and focus stars can be added directly from the note-taking app, using the Smart Pen. Tasks are pretty much self-explanatory. Focus stars are very similar but link back to the page in the notebook – they can perhaps be thought of as reminders of things to go back to at a later date.

You can sync events from third-party calendars with the iFLYTEK calendar, however, it only appears to support Google Calendars at present – which is strange because as already mentioned, the only third-party cloud drive natively supported is MS OneDrive. One might have expected some consistency, either supporting Google Drive and Calendar, or MS OneDrive and Outlook Calendar to keep within the same ecosystem – I think it’s highly improbable that anyone would be using Microsoft for their cloud storage and Google for their Calendar! To me, this disparity added to the disjointed feel of the software. However, it does appear to support multiple Google Calendars.

There’s an icon to manually sync the calendar and a search bar to search for tasks, focus stars, and events (as well as your book library and notebooks).

Calendar

The top third of the screen in the Calendar section is split into two halves. On the right is a calendar grid, and you can tap on a particular date to view details about it in the lower section (e.g events, tasks, memos etc.) You can also view a week at a time, or a whole month (although the monthly view takes up the whole screen, it does insert tasks/events into each date). The left pane simply shows the date(s) of the day/week you are focused on and has a button to switch back to ‘Today’, but in all honesty it seems to be somewhat of a waste of screen real estate.

The lower two-thirds has tabs for your Schedule (which includes today’s events and tasks due to completed today), Memo (handwritten notes), an option to generate Daily Report (which uses AI to list your events and tasks for today and tomorrow), and handy links to all the notebooks you’ve opened on that particular day. If you need more space, you can add additional pages to the Schedule and Memo areas.

Mysteriously, there’s no button to create an event, but if you write something in pen in the Schedule section, it will be OCR’d into text and converted into an event. Once created, you can convert it into a task as well as fill in other details, such as the time, make it recurring, add a description (for events). You can also associate tasks and events with notebooks and set reminders.

Tasks

The Tasks tab shows all your tasks, and they can be filtered by All, Today (tasks due today), Your own custom categories, Inbox (for tasks not assigned to a category), and Completed.

Similar to Events, you can add tasks by writing them at the bottom of the list and they will be converted to text. Again the handwriting-to-text accuracy (for both tasks and events) is inconsistent and often does not work properly. It seems to work a bit better when connected to the wifi, but when disconnected, conversion is usually completely wrong.

Focus stars

Finally, Focus Stars are displayed as list, and tapping them takes you to the notebook they were originally created in (sadly, it doesn’t take you to the actual page of the notebook where it was created, which would have made it slightly more useful).

You cannot add Focus Stars from the Scheduling app (only from notebooks), but you can ‘turn them on‘ by tapping the star, which shades it black and puts it at the top of the list as a priority. There is also a menu of additional options for each Focus Star, some of which are cryptically worded, indicating poor translation from the original Chinese:

• Continue to pay attention/Cancel continuous attention – simply turns the Focus Star on or off (for prioritising)
• Locate the original text – simply opens the link notebook (even though I was expecting it to take me to the actual page the Focus Star was, it didn’t)
• Join task – Create a task with the the same name as the Focus Star
• Edit/delete – self-explanatory

As a sidenote, I noticed several areas throughout the system where the wording is obviously mistranslated from Chinese into English, but on the whole, most things are understandable.

Overall, the scheduling app provides a hub of productivity, allowing you to organise your daily events, tasks, and memos from a centralised hub. Unfortunately many of the features are underpinned by the handwriting-to-text conversion, which is unreliable.

Other apps

As well as the core note-taking, reading, and scheduling apps, the AINote also ships with a few other pre-installed apps.

E-Mail client

The E-mail client is necessary for things like sharing exported notebooks, and you can also use the stylus to write handwritten emails (these are sent as a JPG image embedded into the email, rather than an attachment).

I set up my GMail account on it (although other mailboxes, including Outlook, are also supported), and it worked first time for sending and receiving emails.

However, it is just so unbearably slow to read through your emails because it appears that only the headers (sender, subject etc.) are downloaded by default. It is not until you actually tap on an email in the list that it downloads the whole message, and, for me, it was taking an average of ten seconds to display each email. Once downloaded for the first, the next time you open it, it is quick to load, but I found it very frustrating, when for example, I’d have five new emails and I had to wait ten seconds in between reading each one.

Overall, as a basic email client primarily used for sending links to or copies of your exported notebooks, it works okay. But as a tool for reading your emails, it is just too painfully slow.

WPS Office

WPS Office is a third-party suite of office apps (documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc.) that is preinstalled on iFlyTek tablets.

I didn’t play around with this too much as I don’t regard e-ink as the best medium for performing this type of task (I’d rather use my laptop because it is clearer and faster). However, I did create a quick Word document. It is important when you’ve finished with a document to save it in one of the folders that the rest of the system has access to – as already mentioned, you only have access to a select list of folders, and to make office files available in your Reading Library, you need to save them into the Bookshelf folder. One of the WPS Office default locations is the Documents folder, and if you save it there, it will be lost to the rest of the system (unless you install a third-party file explorer to move it).

Files

The Files App is simply a folder/file browser that allows you to rename, move, and delete your files.

As mentioned previously, you are restricted to the Shared folders of Bookshelf, Template, Screenshot, Audio, Mail file, Fonts, and Office.

Cloud Drive

This is simply a tool for binding third-party cloud drives to the tablet so that you can browse and download files from them within the iFlyTek system. As already mentioned, this currently only supports binding to Microsoft OneDrive.

Web browser

A very basic web browser is included for viewing websites. There’s no icon to launch it as an app, but it opens up when you perform certain tasks (such as doing a Google Search on highlighted text in an ebook).

Third-party apps

Because the firmware uses Android, and has access to the Google Play Store, a wide variety of third-party apps are available for download and installation. Android 14 is also a relatively newish version (Android 16 being the latest version at the time of writing), so most apps will still be compatible.

However, as with all e-ink devices, third-party apps are very hit-and-miss in terms of performance and usability due to the inherently slower refresh rates of e-ink screens – even the most capable e-ink tablets (with colour eink and super-fast refresh rates) can have difficulty running apps smoothly and are never as good as their LCD/OLED counterparts.

Having said that, I was able to run several third-part apps successfully. Compared to other Android e-ink brands, there’s not really a lot of configuration you can do within the software to tweak the refresh and display settings in third-party apps (you can only really switch between best display and best speed modes, but the defaults seem to work okay for most things. Of course you still get ghosting and lower quality compared to LCD/OLED, particularly for things like video (which is virtually unusable), and third-party handwriting/sketching/drawing apps are also a hard pass because they’re never optimised for e-ink displays (and the stylus always lags). But for tasks like web browsing, it is perfectly usable, if not overly pleasant.

I would recommend installing a web browser because the preinstalled web browser is very limited, and also a file browser to access the entire filesystem. Personally, I installed Chrome and Owl Files for these tasks and they worked okay for me. And you will probably need to install a third-party cloud drive app if you don’t use MS OneDrive. As a sidenote, going back to limited folder access, I installed Google Drive, and by default files download into the Download folder, which is inaccessible without using a third-party file browser.

Realistically (and this goes for pretty much all e-ink tablets), you should primarily be using the native apps. Third-party apps are a useful ‘nice-to-have‘, but don’t set your expectations too high.

Final verdict

The iFLYTEK firmware presents a compelling but ultimately imperfect vision of what an AI-enhanced e-ink ecosystem might one day become. On its most felicitous days, the system exudes genuine sophistication: it runs modern Android with full access to the Google Play Store, instantly granting it a breadth of function that competing non-Android devices cannot match; its native note-taking and reading applications are well-constructed, competent, and frequently pleasant to use; and the structural integration between notebooks, tasks, focus stars, and the scheduling app forms the backbone of a surprisingly coherent organisational architecture. When these components harmonise, the software begins to resemble a unified, cross-linked productivity environment rather than a disparate collection of tools.

Several of its innovations merit particular praise. The ability to create tasks, sectional markers, and focus stars simply by drawing shapes with the Smart Pen is delightfully imaginative, and – at least conceptually -imbues handwritten notebooks with a quasi-semantic layer that few other devices attempt. The system’s voice recorder, with its real-time transcription and translation in numerous languages, is both technically impressive and practically useful. The global search, capable of scanning not only filenames but also the contents of handwritten notes while simultaneously generating AI-based summaries, is one of the most effective and genuinely intelligent features on the device. Together, these elements demonstrate a commendable willingness to push beyond the conventional boundaries of e-ink software.

Yet this laudable ambition is in constant tension with a pronounced lack of systemic coherence. The firmware frequently feels as though it has been assembled by multiple teams working in parallel, each with its own design philosophies, priorities, and technological foundations. The handwriting recognition exemplifies this discord. In some contexts – most notably the global search – the OCR is remarkably accurate most of the time, capable of parsing cursive ink with surprising subtlety. But in other areas, such as the handwriting-to-text system accessed through the virtual keyboard or the Smart Pen’s lasso tool, the recognition deteriorates dramatically, rendering the output often unusable without manual editing (there appears to be two OCR models at play, one on the cloud and the other local, because when wifi is disconnected, I always seemed to experience poorer OCR results). Even the AI-driven notebook-to-text conversion tool swings unpredictably between competence and calamity, succeeding one moment and floundering the next.

This inconsistency extends to the AI layer more broadly. The device perplexingly offers two separate AI interfaces – AIAide and the Q&A window – each performing overlapping but not identical functions. Neither is especially fast; responses appear at a languid pace, and the content they generate often lacks depth or precision. AIAide’s command execution is conspicuously unreliable: it can create calendar events but is incapable of amending or deleting them; it misinterprets search queries by inserting the entirety of the user’s command into the search field rather than the keywords; and it has not yet learnt how to open installed third-party applications. The cognitive dissonance between ambitious AI aspirations and faltering real-world implementation is unavoidable.

The filesystem restrictions further accentuate this sense of fragmentation. Although the tablet runs full Android beneath the surface, the user is permitted access to only a curated subset of folders. This means that files downloaded via the browser vanish into the inaccessible depths of the internal system unless a third-party file manager is installed. The same limitations apply when connecting the device to a computer via USB. These restrictions feel antiquated and unnecessarily obstructive.

The user experience also suffers from intermittent sluggishness and other irritations: the email client is conspicuously slow when it opens an email for the first time; the system serves a daily and undismissible pop-up imploring the user to upgrade to a terabyte of cloud storage; and “VIP” icons displayed with local language packs suggest the looming spectre of a subscription-based tiered service. Given that many of the device’s most attractive features rely on cloud-based processing (including AI functions, OCR, transcription, and translation), the possibility of paywalled functionality in the future seems possible. There’s also little areas that feel a bit unpolished, such as some of the translations into English aren’t quite correct, the inability to resize lasso-selections, latency when reconnecting to wifi etc.

Finally, the heavy reliance on cloud services means that to make the most of the device, you have to have an ‘always-on‘ Internet/wifi connection. Plus, it also raises legitimate privacy and security concerns. Although iFLYTEK maintains a privacy policy, the simple reality is that handwriting, voice recordings, and other sensitive data may be transmitted to remote servers – potentially located in foreign jurisdictions – for processing. Users working with confidential material may find this impossible to accept, regardless of whatever procedural safeguards are theoretically in place.

In sum, the AINote 2’s firmware is a study in contradictions: imaginative yet inconsistent, innovative yet unpolished, ambitious yet hindered by structural incoherence. It possesses meaningful strengths – the ingenuity of its Smart Pen gestures, the potency of its global search, the utility of its transcription tools, and the versatility afforded by Android itself. But these are counterbalanced by unreliable handwriting recognition, sluggish and inconsistent AI performance, filesystem constraints, and an overarching sense that the software has not yet completed its evolutionary trajectory.

It is, in its current incarnation, an intriguing and intermittently impressive work-in-progress rather than a fully mature or harmoniously integrated platform. For general day-to-day tasks, it works absolutely fine, and the cohesion between notes, tasks, and calendar shows considerable promise. The good news is that most of the negatives can be resolved with improvements to the firmware, and I’m very interested to see how iFlyTek’s ecosystem evolves over time…

Buying options

iFlyTek devices can be purchased from:

• iFlyTek (direct)*
• Some Amazon Stores*

Firmware Overview