Onyx Boox Note AIR 2
I want to state from the beginning that
this is not intended to be an impartial, objective review, but my
personal opinion and feel after using for several months the Onyx
Boox Note AIR 2.
Onyx
Boox Note AIR 2 is one of the very few gadgets with an e-ink screen
that is not only an e-book reader, but a full fledged tablet. I
wanted something like this mostly to read and write without tiring my
eyes on an LCD panel, be it a monitor, phone or tablet. Having an
open Android 11 OS, I could install on it all the apps I use all the
time, directly from Google’s Play Store. Now I am able to read all
those huge articles from the net on a great electronic paper screen,
just like I would read from a paper, and write all my articles,
stories and plans.
The
main things I use this tablet for (although I know it can do a lot
more) are:
-
Read books. It’s 10.3” screen is great for book reading using
tablet’s NeoReader or any other good book reading program. If you
have a Scribd account, that is awesome too.
-
Read articles from the net and surf the web using tablet’s default
web browser, NeoBrowser, or any Android web browser loaded from Play
Store, like my favorite Vivaldi browser.
-
Write notes on the notes section and entire articles, books and other
texts on an Office suite. For example I like Collabora Office. For
writing, the included handwriting recognition modules worked
unexpectedly well in english and other languages. It feels great to
write by hand and have my text automatically converted on selectable
Writer text.
-
Comics and Manga look great but I am not a fan of Boox NeoReader for
these, as I feel it blurs the image a little. Fortunately, other
comic readers like Moon+ Reader, do the job perfectly.
As
I said, reading and writing text on this screen from all sources is a
pleasure and a joy for the eyes, this being the great strength of
this tablet. Now, the bad part: refresh rate and color. Being an
e-ink screen, is refresh rate is from bad to terrible. There are
several refresh modes that let you trade accuracy and ghosting for
more speed and they are indeed very useful in alleviating the problem
to a certain degree, but this is still a slow e-ink screen that is
not suited to display things in motion. Of the fastest mode you can
even watch clips and movies on it, and it works, but the image is
displayed like an old paper photo in movement. As for games, I didn’t
even wanted to try.
About
colors, they are great, but completely missing. This is a black and
white e-ink screen able to display all shades of grey, but that’s
all. There are options to adjust the displayed image in several ways
though, like Dark Color Enhancement and Light Color Filter, witch
helps a lot to improve the image for different scenarios, but no
colors. There are some colored e-ink displays on the market, but even
on those, the colors are dim and totally inferior to the great colors
of IPS LCD’s or even better OLED ones.
Once
started, the tablet offers six menus on the left side to access it’s
main functions.
-
Library: is the place for all books. I don’t really use it because
I don’t like the way it mixes all the books and comics on a
cluttered disarray. Instead is way easier for me to see them on the
Storage section where I can arrange them by folders.
-
Store: is the store of Onyx company and I didn’t find anything on
it to capture my interest.
-
Notes: is the place to write notes by hand and draw. Writing with the
pen is very cursive and intuitive and it feels a lot like writing on
a glossy paper. The entire writing experience is very fluent and
easy. I like I can add my own custom backgrounds for notes by
inserting a custom PNG image on Layers. Is great to keep lists,
diaries, ideas for articles, quick notes and so on. I like I can
select and move text on the page, insert more pages or even using
handwriting text recognition. I noticed that this function does not
produce results so accurate as like I write by hand directly on the
Onyx Keyboard.
-
Storage: the way to access the internal memory of the device, usb
sticks, etc..
-
Apps: my installed apps. The tabled comes with a good Calendar Memo,
a voice recorder, a good music app and a web browser, among others.
One of the apps, BooxDrop, let me synchronize notes and other things
on the tablet with the Boox cloud after I make an account, giving me
5Gb of space.
-
Settings: access to device’s settings, firmware update, user’s
manual, etc.
One
thing I did not like is that it does not support re-charging the
battery with an USB HUB while using the same hub for accessing USB
sticks or LAN internet. As the USB hub consumes a lot of energy, it
basically cannot be used.
Conclusion:
A great device to read and write text without stressing the eyes. Bad
to watch color photos, clips, movies and play games. For me, that I
read and write A LOT, is a godsend device that protects my eyes way
better then any device with Super AMOLED, OLED, IPS, VA or God
forbid, TN screen.
