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- The Onyx Boox Note Air is ideal for reading and doubles as a note-taking device with the included stylus.
- The crisp E Ink display and fast refresh mode even plays back video in the blink of an eye.
- It’s overpriced as a simple e-reader, but it can serve as an all-day laptop substitute for outdoor use.
The Onyx Boox Note Air is an e-reader for DIY enthusiasts. It blurs the line between a real e-reader and an Android tablet, delivering the specialized e-reader display without running on a locked fork of Android that limits utility. It may classify the Boox Note Air in a niche, but it stands out as a truly special product.
Using a 10.3-inch E Ink display, the Boox Note Air offers tablet screen space for everything from ebooks and PDFs to magazines and Word documents. By running Android, it also offers almost limitless options for accessing content, or even creating content.
Being a bit of a one-off device, the Boox Note Air doesn’t come cheap. At $ 479, it is comparable in price to some of the best Android tablets from Samsung or Lenovo, but it lacks the level of power and versatility of these devices. And yet, with a low battery-draining E Ink display, a surprisingly sleek design, and a competitive scanning layer, it’s not a tablet to erase so quickly.
Design
The Boox Note Air is downright breathtaking. Onyx has made this tablet incredibly thin and elegant, with a glass front and aluminum frame that gives it a premium air that matches the price. Even the Boox Note Air’s range of antennas are a bit pungent with their own coloring. There is a bezel around the screen and a larger space on one side of the screen, but it makes it feel like a real laptop.
The Boox Note Air includes a power button, a
Usb-c
with On-The-Go (OTG) support for USB drives and a small capable speaker on the side with the larger bezel. Since the Boox Note Air can orient the display in any direction automatically, there is no left or right side, in itself, so that users can hold it as they find it most comfortable.
The Boox Note Air’s E Ink Carta HD display is another point of excellence. It offers pretty crisp detail, making it easy to read even with thin, small text. Plus, this finesse allows her to create different shades of gray, a trick that helps her work around her lack of color. The E Ink screen is relatively bright (not too gray) without the Onyx reading lights on. In a dark environment, reading lights improve visibility and by combining lighting with two different tones, the color temperature is widely adjustable. There is a slight air gap creating a parallax effect on the screen, but it is only noticeable at the edges.
Mark Knapp / Insider
The Onyx Boox Note Air also comes with a stylus and supports 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity. The stylus is elegant, but rather simple. It matches the aesthetic of the tablet, but lacks an eraser or shortcut buttons. On the plus side, it magnetically locks onto the Boox Note Air next to the screen, which can also put the screen to sleep.
Characteristics
Configuration and interface
The Onyx Boox Note Air is ready from the first start. No special account setup is required to start reading eBooks or taking notes. It comes preloaded with a few apps for these uses, along with a basic web browser and app store. That said, getting the most out of the device does require a bit more work.
The Boox Note Air has a plastic screen protector which is a good idea to put on, but it is not pre-applied. It may not be necessary, but the feel of the stylus on the screen protector looks a lot more like paper than directly on glass.
And, even though the Boox Note Air runs on Android, there are a few hurdles to jump over to activate the Google Play Store and access Android apps. It’s a short process that takes 10 to 15 minutes, but it would have been nicer to have the Google App Store present from the start. Having access to Google Play’s breadth of Android apps is worth it and a big part of what sets the Boox Note Air apart from other E Ink e-readers and tablets like the Remarkable or the Kindle Oasis.
Part of the Boox Note Air interface will be familiar to Android users. The launcher is specialized, with different groupings along the left side of the home screen. However, the notification shade looks a lot like what you’ll find on other Android devices. There is a special floating button, called the navigation ball, which can be positioned anywhere on the screen and provides navigation controls and shortcuts. Otherwise, swiping up from the bottom of the screen provides basic navigation.
Mark Knapp / Insider
You will also find settings such as Wi-Fi,
Bluetooth
, volume and orientation in the quick settings menu. A special addition to this menu is screen refresh, as E Ink works differently from traditional LCD or OLED screens. Since different apps can benefit from different styles of screen refresh, this shortcut allows you to quickly change on the fly.
Performance and Features
The Onyx Boox Note Air is an Android tablet, but it doesn’t always look like an old Android tablet. It’s impressive that it runs Android 10 and is powered by a Snapdragon 636 chipset. It’s not a performance beast and can feel a bit slow at times to launch apps, but part of it could be down to the response. screen slower. Still, the device was fast and powerful enough to quickly boot up and run Google Docs, YouTube, Kindle, and Khan Academy alike. It can even switch to split screen mode to easily run the built-in note app side by side with another app.
It’s easy to forgive some of this slowness, however, as this tablet is not a sprinter but rather a marathon runner. It gets some of the benefits of an Android tablet, especially when it comes to text-based media, and combines them with the huge advantage of e-readers: battery life.
The Boox Note Air can sip its battery all day. And, unlike a traditional display which requires more power to be viewed in brighter environments (like outdoors), the Boox Note Air display is only easier to see when the surroundings get brighter. This opens the door to some special use cases, as it is a proficient device for writing documents, taking notes, and sending emails, thanks to its support for a Bluetooth keyboard and pretty much any Android app you want to install on it. This review was written in the sun on the Boox Note Air.
Mark Knapp / Insider
On a single charge I read a 200 page book with the lights on and it barely damaged the battery. Between that, mixed use and writing this review in a Google Doc with Bluetooth and 5 GHz Wi-Fi connected (a total of over 8.5 hours of active use), the battery had only drained by 37%.
As well as the Boox Note Air works for text-based tasks, it’s impressive how well it can handle graphic media. The fine lines and shades of gray go a long way in presenting a decent picture, and I have often found the grayscale book covers in the Kindle app to be easier to distinguish than the colorful alternative on the Onyx. Boox Nova3 Color. The Boox Note Air’s faster refresh modes even make video an option, although the faster setting comes with a lot of ghosting that spoils the text.
Fortunately, Onyx nailed one thing. Pen support in stock and note reader apps is phenomenal. Although the display refresh mode is not the fastest, the screen response to the stylus is almost instantaneous. It feels like writing on paper. Those who want to get a little creative in third-party applications will likely find the increased input latency a bit more of a problem, although the lack of color is likely more of an issue. Having said that, the stock notes app is quite feature rich and you can export the notes for use elsewhere.
The bottom line
The Onyx Boox Note Air is a special device. It might not be a replacement for a computer or tablet in all cases, but for anything text-based it’s phenomenal. Whether it’s reading novels, taking notes on PDFs, or writing documents, the Boox Note Air is a trusted partner with battery life that other devices with backlit displays can’t. just not achieve. It won’t be for everyone, but it will be a real treat for people who need what it offers.
Mark Knapp / Insider
Should we buy it?
For some, the simple combination of an E Ink display with a quality digitizer and keyboard support may be reason enough to buy this tablet. As a simple e-reader, it can be too big and expensive. And, it doesn’t have the same versatility as an Android tablet. But, for writers and editors, there probably is no more magical device.
What are your alternatives?
While not all of the Android perks are much needed, the Remarkable 2 is a similarly sized E Ink tablet with a scanning layer for taking notes. At $ 399 for the tablet itself and $ 49 for the stylus, however, it only offers small savings for the loss of versatility.
If you can’t quite live without color, the Onyx Boox Nova3 Color runs much of the same hardware and software, but has a color LCD layer over the E Ink display, giving it a little of both. E ink ends up getting a bit darker and the color isn’t amazingly crisp, but there are some tremendous benefits to having color available. This tablet is a bit smaller and less stylish, but it’s also cheaper.
Benefits: Incredibly powerful e-reader, Wacom scanning layer, marathon battery, excellent E Ink display, runs Android 10, sleek design, two-color reading lights.
The inconvenients: Expensive for an e-reader, grayscale that doesn’t always replace color, ghosting with higher refresh, no eraser or buttons on the pen, workaround required for Google services
