By Andrew Webster , an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 20

The Playdate makes a surprisingly good e-reader

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2024-07-05 15:00:03

By Andrew Webster , an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

From the Boox Palma to the Light Phone 2, it seems that everyone is looking for distraction-free reading, if only they had the right device. I don’t blame them: every time I pull out my phone to mindlessly scroll, I know my time could be put to better use. But as the owner of many fine gadgets, I also don’t really want another device in my life, so I was pretty excited to stumble upon a partial solution with a gadget I already have: the Playdate.

Yes, I’m talking about that little yellow Game Boy from Panic and Teenage Engineering, the one with a crank jutting out of its side. Since the launch of its on-device store, Catalog, the handheld has become home to quite a range of experiences. I’ve been playing tiny city builders and dungeon crawlers and egg touchers. Even still, I was surprised to discover Playbook, a full-fledged e-reading app. Perhaps even more surprising is that it actually works pretty well.

The app comes with a handful of classic books preinstalled, and I tested it initially by reading through most of Frankenstein. The Playdate’s black-and-white LCD screen is pretty great for displaying text, which shows up crisp and clear. The drawback is that it has no backlight for reading at night, and the screen is tiny. At one point, a single one of Mary Shelley’s sentences took up the entire display.