[ad_1]
E Ink tablets are only gaining popularity thanks to the announcement of Amazon’s Kindle Scribe, but Onyx has been in the game for years, refining the formula before releasing the best E Ink tablet to date, the Boox Note Air 2 Plus.
Onyx doesn’t stop with pills; it also makes an ePaper monitor, and its largest tablet, the Max Lumi 2, has a large 13.3-inch screen, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. But it’s the smaller Note Air 2 series that has the biggest appeal.
In a little more detail, the Note Air 2 and Note Air 2 Plus (we’re testing the latter) are Android E Ink tablets. They are very thin, feel premium and have monochrome screens. Shipping with a pen, tablets want to be primarily notebook and reading devices, but also offer the versatility to run Android apps.
The Note Air 2 Plus’s main competition comes in the form of the Huawei MatePad Paper, ReMarkable 2, and Amazon Kindle Scribe, which we’ve covered briefly. But can Onyx hold its own with its thin E Ink slate, or is recent competition putting the one-time E Ink pioneer on the back foot?
Boox Note Air 2 / Plus: Price and release date
(Photo credit: Basil Kronfli)
The Boox Note Air 2 Plus is available now for £500 in the UK, $500 in the US and AUD$780 in Australia. You can currently purchase it from the official Boox website (opens in new tab) if you’re in Europe, the US or China, it’s only available on Amazon UK at the time of writing this review.
The Note Air 2 Plus comes in a 64GB variant and will be launched alongside the slightly cheaper Note Air 2, priced at £470 in the UK, $450 in the US and AUD$780 in Australia (same price (except surprisingly). The main differences between the two are the Plus’ improved magnets and larger battery.
The new superior magnet system on the Plus attaches the folio case to the tab without the need for the physical cover shell or stickers used to attach the case to the vanilla Note Air and Note Air 2. The Note Air 2 Plus also has the same features. 3700mAh battery versus the 3000mAh battery in the standard Note Air 2.
Boox Note Air 2 Plus review: Design and display
(Photo credit: Basil Kronfli)
The first thing you’ll notice about the Boox Note Air 2 Plus is how thin it is. At 5.8mm, it’s roughly twice as thick as the USB-C port used for charging. Thin doesn’t mean flat, and the Note Air 2 Plus is a solid slab of metal with rounded sides that curve to a flat front and back.
Unlike the original Note Air and vanilla Note Air 2, the Plus is forest green instead of dark blue. It has orange accents that add pop to the package, and the styling is one of the tablet’s best features.
There’s just one port and one button, and they’re on the left side of the Note Air 2 Plus. It is an interesting place for both; After all, the spine of the folio case sits side by side on the same side. This means that the tablet cannot be charged while it is in its case. This can be justified as a control for the first gene product, but the second time it makes no sense to us.
Photo 1 of 3
The star of the show is the Note Air 2 Plus’s 10.3-inch HD Carta glass screen, and between its matte finish, crisp visuals, and dual-tone backlighting, it’s serious entertainment.
Now, E Ink doesn’t transition smoothly from frame to frame, it stutters a bit, so this tab isn’t a good option for moving content like movies or games. For reading and writing, however, it’s perfect.
Onyx also provides many screen refresh modes to choose from, so you can customize each app to display just the way you want.
On top of the smart software, the Note Air 2 Plus display hardware looks great. Thanks to the finish of the screen, it feels very smooth and doesn’t rub against the finger, but there is a tactility close to paper when using the pen with it. This pen screen experience perfectly complements the Apple Pencil-like slickness that takes a little getting used to on most tablets.
The pen experience comes with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, and the touchscreen can tell the difference between a pen and a finger, so you can control which one does what in basic apps like Notes. It feels rich when writing on the Air 2 Plus display, and whether it’s writing or drawing, the hardware is on its own.
As for resolution, with a resolution of 1404 x 1872, the Note Air 2 Plus is sharp, with 227 pixels per inch of screen (PPI), no less than the iPad Pro (265PPI) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra. (240PPI).
Photo 1 of 3
A tablet without light looks like a sheet of paper, or rather a sheet of card. A little more diffuse than printed paper, but more natural and organic than an LCD or OLED screen.
Dial in the backlight, and things look a little more like a traditional screen, though still monochrome. You can manually control the warm and cool backlighting, and this is a key differentiator for Onyx’s tablet line. Light coverage is also excellent across the display, and this feature gives a real difference to the non-illuminated ReMarkable 2 for those who find themselves using the tab in the dark.
We were able to read with the Note Air 2 Plus for long periods of time, including before bed, and didn’t notice eye strain with the slate. Not a lab test, but still a testament to the eye-friendly nature of E Ink technology.
Boox Note Air 2 Plus review: performance and battery
(Photo credit: Basil Kronfli)
When it comes to specs, whether it’s the ReMarkable 2 or the Onyx Boox slate, you’d better stop waiting for E Ink devices. With a modest Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 inside, processing power is not the name of the game here.
For a little more than you’d pay for the £500 Note Air 2 Plus, you can get a powerful gaming tablet with the same brilliant screen and power as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 or the standard iPad Air. And you can buy a new iPad (2022) for the same price.
In addition, the Note Air 2 Plus, with its low refresh rate E Ink screen and emphasis on eye comfort, doesn’t really need more power than it does. It never stuttered or crashed while using it, which is impressive considering how heavy Android is.
The core of the tablet is Android 11 with full access to the Google Play Store. The UI is divided into Library – a place for your books, Store – you can download new books; Notes is a smart writing app, Apps is where all your apps are located; and Settings. All of these options are lined up vertically on the left side of the main screen, making it easy to navigate through.
Photo 1 of 2
The Onyx Note Air 2 Plus doesn’t miss out on 128GB of storage for the price; instead, 64GB is included and there is no SD card slot to increase it. That limited storage might sound alarming, but shouldn’t be a problem for an E Ink tablet. Finally, you’ll be looking at static content on it – e-books, PDFs, and text files that are generally smaller than 5MB. And while you can download audiobooks and podcasts to the Note Air 2 Plus, it doesn’t make sense to use it for audio files instead of your phone. Moreover, its speakers are not good.
Longer battery life: It’s hard to drain the Note Air 2 Plus in a day or two, even with heavy use. It has a large 3700 mAh battery, which is higher than most E Ink tablets. This great battery life is one of the main reasons to choose the Plus over the vanilla 3000mAh Note Air 2 version.
If you keep the backlight off, the tablet will last for an hour of reading and writing for a week or more. Turn on the backlight, and this time is significantly reduced, but you can still expect a few days of regular use of the bright Note Air 2 Plus.
Boox Note Air 2 Plus review: Verdict
Photo 1 of 4
The Onyx Boox Note Air 2 Plus is an expensive gadget that won’t replace your iPad or Android tablet. It won’t play movies, it’s not a powerful gaming slate, and it’s not even good for fancy digital photography – it has a monochrome screen, so no colors, just shades of grey.
If you want a textbook and aren’t a fan of the Kindle’s small screen and limited app support, this is a great move for those who can justify the price. Running Readly – a magazine and newspaper app – is great and shows comics well with apps like Marvel Unlimited and DC Infinite, and its large 10.3-inch eye-friendly screen works great.
The Boox Note Air 2 Plus is also a winning tool for notepads, sending with a pen and feeling more natural as a writing tool than standard tablets. This is partly due to its matte textured screen and partly due to the E Ink lines, which look like they were created with real pen and paper.
Whether or not the Boox Note Air 2 is right for you, E Ink gets what you want from your tablet. If you want simplicity – a clean, simple tool for notes and reading, then you’ll find Onyx’s Boox user interface too complex and should turn to the beautifully streamlined ReMarkable 2. However, the Note Air 2 in the E Ink package may be your best bet if you’re after the highest flexibility in the market.
Also consider
ReMarkable 2 is the main competitor of Boox Note Air 2 Plus. It’s a simple tablet that can’t compete when it comes to app support, but it’s still feature-rich and ultimately feels like a bit of a software upgrade over Onyx’s E Ink alternatives.
What’s most impressive is the extent to which ReMarkable 2 has improved since its launch. Now it supports direct screen mirroring to MacOS or Windows device, cloud storage support and many other features.
Huawei’s paper MatePad is another alternative to the Note Air 2 Plus, but is less appealing due to a lack of software experience. As for the Amazon Kindle Scribe, it’s an unknown number at the moment, given that it won’t be released until the end of November. If it’s a hit, it will be the tablet that gives the Boox Note family the biggest bang for its buck.
[ad_2]
Source link