The Hannspree Hannsnote 2 is now available as well with more RLCD devices on the way. Biggest concerns with their first release include dark display (comparable to eink kaleido 3, but with more colors), no frontlight, and weak battery.
I have a MNT Pocket Reform on order just for this reason. I recently sold a Sony PGH (~2009 model) that still ran modern Debian just fine as I'm expecting to get my order soon. Edit: I also bought a broken HP 95LX so I could replace its innards with a RPi Zero 2w and a screen but I haven't made progress on that yet.
I have been using a Sony DPT-S1 and a reMarkable 2 for this for the last 4 years. The Sony has a nearly perfect display and weight but only supports PDFs and requires manual content transfers (usb, microsd, or download via a local non-https web server) while the rM2 has excellent transfer mechanisms but has a smaller display. The Sony is quite old now (released 10+ years ago) but still has excellent battery life and functionality - you can probably find it on eBay for a very low cost.
not sure I count as the HN crowd but I've been happy with Verizon and its owned MVNOs for a while (particularly Visible). The service is generally rock solid and the voice quality is imo better than the other 2 carriers. Also, Verizon seems uninterested in customer imprisonment atm - any device bought from them automatically unlocks 60 days after purchase. CS can be spotty esp. since they also seemed to have gone down the path of outsourcing - previously it used to be US-based afaict and very competent ime.
an option for easy backup in addition to the already-mentioned google photos is to use a hosted nextcloud instance (hetzner, shadow.tech) to backup photos from your phone. the nextcloud app available on the ios store will backup to the configured remote nextcloud instance and the corresponding nextcloud app on your laptop etc. can then sync these photos to you.
