Pantheon is so so good

ice town costs ice clown his town crown

This is what I did with my Pixel 7 and I third it! As long as you go through a well-established refurbisher there is little risk and the phone will often come with a warranty/30 day return window. If you are US-based I used backmarket.com, where a P7 is currently $183 and a P8 is $298. Reasonable price, no money goes to Google directly, and I have been very happy with GrapheneOS.

I recently bought an XP Pen Magic Note Pad that I’ve been pretty happy with. It’s sort of a hybrid tablet/notetaker that’s going for a jack of all trades master of none vibe while still having an overall good writing experience and I think it succeeds at that

Pros:

• bought for $200 refurbished on an eBay sale directly from XP Pen (I think it’s $300 or so resfurbished normally)
• runs an OS based on Android 14 so full play/aurora/F-Droid access easily
• comes with a good pen, small folio case and notetaking app based on Jnotes
• screen is matte with a slightly textured feel. Can switch between a full color, paper color and grayscale display mode with a single button. 90hz, palm rejection while writing is very good.

Cons

• Came out this year but a little worried about continued OS support being a niche item
• built in notetaking app is great except for the handwriting recognition. I bought Nebo for that which is a one time license of $8 which isn’t bad at all and their handwriting recognition is like dark magic it’s amazing
• not a true e-ink, so battery life is more like a standard tablet. I’m usually getting 2-3 days of use wheras e-inks will give you weeks
• not a true paper-like writing experience but better than an iPad out of the box
• overall it’s a mostly fine android tablet with a few tweaks aimed at the note-taking market

All in all I do really enjoy it, and for $200 including a pen, case and software it was hard to pass up. I’ve locked it down a bit but you’re not going to get a totally degoogled experience. At $300 I would still consider it but probably wouldn’t buy new. Let me know if you have any other questions!