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.
