

These things are very heavily optimized for the singular purpose of reading books. They can’t do much of anything else, but they do that one thing very well and very efficiently. They run a custom, lightweight Linux OS that’s very aggressive with its battery management. Coupled with an e-ink display, they sip power and can run for weeks on a single charge. That’s not something a simple android can provide.
Because whitespace sensitivity makes it very easy to make a whole bunch of annoying mistakes when shuffling code around, or copying it from one source to another (from text in one application to the editor in your ide for example). I find it supremely unpleasant to work with. Looking kinda a little bit slightly messed up should not be a critical syntax error that breaks the whole code.