Tablets are secondary devices for most of us, but there's one place where they outshine laptops: digital note-taking. Attempting to bridge the gap between analog and digital, digital notebooks offer a paper-like writing experience with all the pros of digital notes.

ReMarkable devices are probably the best known in this space, and they top our digital notebook guide, but I've always wanted something a little more versatile—what if I want to stream a baseball game on the same device I take notes on? E Ink, the technology employed by digital notebooks and e-readers, isn't the best choice in that case.

TCL's Note A1 Nxtpaper tablet uses a more traditional, though still matte, tablet screen to get as close to the E Ink writing experience as possible, while still being able to display video when you want to expand beyond just taking notes. It mostly works, but it can't completely mimic the feel of writing on paper, and there are a few quirks with the user interface.

The heart of any digital notebook is the screen—how well does it mimic paper? With E Ink, the answer is pretty darn well, but this is not actually E Ink. TCL's Note A1 Nxtpaper is built around a custom 1440 x 2200-pixel matte LCD panel with a 120-Hz refresh rate. At first glance, it looks like E Ink, and indeed it reduces glare and is easier on the eye than a typical tablet. At the same time, it's still an LCD panel capable of the color rendering and responsiveness of a traditional Android tablet. (The Nxtpaper matte LCD technology is proprietary to TCL.)