![]() Crossing a threshold Palma on top of larger e-readers.īut after testing numerous Boox readers before ultimately putting them back in their boxes and concluding they just didn’t do it for me, I find myself feeling different about the Boox Palma. Some apps were better at this than others. Ideally, Boox could override every app to support page turns on the press of a button and to reduce contrast so that text will pop on the E-Ink screen. This means that scrolling on the Palma is manageable, but imprecise-and leaves the display looking a bit smeared. One of the challenges of E-Ink screens is that they don’t refresh as fast as the LCD or OLED screens that most devices use. I found reading in the Kindle and Kobo apps, as well as the Libby app for library e-books, to pale in comparison to using a more generic e-reading app such as Moon+ Reader. But they’re all optimized for phones! As a result, the third-party app experience felt a lot better on the Palma.ĭisappointingly, the biggest app failures on Android are the apps for the big e-reader companies. Previous Boox devices I’ve used have tablet-sized screens, and many Android apps still don’t run well at those sizes. I do think that in the case of the Palma, the strengths of Android itself are also coming to the fore. Some of its early devices felt like they’d die after a few hours, on or off, but with Wi-Fi off the Palma can last for weeks while asleep and offer dozens of hours of illuminated reading.) (Boox also seems to have made some strides in regulating battery life. Boox offers per-app overrides to modify Android apps to be more E-Ink friendly, and they almost always did the job. And Boox’s system utilities worked wonderfully to let me map the device’s volume buttons to support page turns and its side button to force a refresh of the E-Ink screen when things would occasionally get dingy. While I don’t love a lot of the Boox-written software that’s preinstalled on the device, I was able to log into the Play Store with ease and download other apps. Boox lets you optimize Android apps for E-Ink reading.Īll that’s pretty much gone. On early models, I had to use workarounds to even enable the Play Store, and the Boox add-ons to manage the unique needs of E-Ink devices felt clunky. In the past, using Boox products was like wading through mud. Part of that is that Boox’s own software game appears to have elevated. ![]() ![]() It’s on the software side that I feel like Boox has taken a big leap forward. But on the other hand, this was a supremely portable reader, like a beat-up paperback you can take just about anywhere. And to be fair, I was less comfortable while reading on the Palma, since I needed to grip the device more tightly with my whole hand and stretch my grip to reach the volume buttons (repurposed as page-turn buttons) on the device’s side. I’ve really come to love the design style shared by the Kindle Oasis and Kobo Libra 2, both of which feature seven-inch displays with physical page turn buttons you can rest your fingers on. I’ll admit that I didn’t expect to like a phone-shaped e-reader. It doesn’t have cellular connectivity, but otherwise it feels like a generic Android (version 11) phone, with four different side buttons, a USB-C charging port, and a camera on the back that Boox says is for “document scanning,” though it feels more like it was part of a reference phone design that had to come along for the ride. The $280 Boox Palma is slightly smaller than an iPhone 15 Pro Max, with a 6.13-inch E-Ink screen. But now, at last, I’ve gotten perilously close to finding an alternative to dedicated E-Readers.Īnd it’s shaped like a phone? One handed E-Ink An Android-based E-Ink reader offers the promise of a single device for E-Ink reading from disparate sources.Į-readers from Boox have offered appealing hardware, but keep letting me down with inferior software. The advantage of an Android E-Ink reader is that it can run any app-Kindle and Kobo, but also Libby and third-party ebook readers and newspaper apps and RSS readers. Boox Palma review: A phone-shaped e-readerīoox Palma (center) surrounded by more traditional Kindle and Kobo e-readers.Īs a big fan of e-readers, I’ve been experimenting with Android-based alternatives to the dedicated Kindle and Kobo hardware for a few years now.
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