Boox Palma 2 Pro review: One step forward, one step back

Year after year, model after model, the Boox Palma has gotten a little closer to my dream device. Onyx, the company that makes it, has found a formula that sticks Simple and fun: It’s a gadget roughly the size of a smartphone, with access to the full range of Android apps, but with an E Ink display that gives the Palma a more focused presence.

My Palma is dedicated almost entirely to four things: reading (via Kindle and Readwise), listening (via Pocket Casts and Spotify), taking notes (via MyMind and Workflowy), and controlling my Roku TV. Palma can do many things, but it only does a few things well. And the battery life is great.

On paper, New Palma 2 Pro He is the first to tick all the boxes. the New device for $399.99 It is Palma’s most expensive car to date, but it is also the most technologically advanced. Most importantly, it has a SIM card slot to add cellular connectivity (for data only). It also has a color screen, a newer version of Android, more RAM, stylus support, and a host of new software features. This may be the simple device we’ve been waiting for to do it all.

After testing the device for a while, I’m sorry to report: it’s not. The idea remains a good one, and the SIM card slot and stylus support have made the Palma useful in new ways. But one of this device’s “upgrades” is actually such a significant downgrade that I almost immediately found myself using the Palma 2 Pro less than any of its predecessors. It’s such a glaring problem that I wouldn’t recommend purchasing this device at all; Buy Palma 2 instead. Or wait a little longer, and hopefully Onyx will figure out how to give us all the right features at the same time.

Let’s do this first: The problem is the screen. The Palma 2 Pro has a 6.13-inch color display, based on the company’s Kaleido 3 E Ink technology. The Kaleido 3 technology is a few years old, and is essentially a color filter placed over a standard black-and-white e-ink display.

You can find Kaleido 3 displays in a lot of gadgets, and none of them look great, but a lot of them look good. The technology comes with some inherent drawbacks, most notably its resolution — 150 dpi is half the resolution of a modern black-and-white e-ink screen — and its brightness. Amazon Kindle Colorsoft Based on Kaleido 3, for example, but Amazon Rebuild the entire display stack To make it clearer, brighter and more accurate. Amazon was very clear that it didn’t think Kaleido was good enough on its own.

And Amazon was right. The Palma 2 Pro screen is a mess. It’s so dim that I had to turn the device’s lighting much higher than previous models just to see text on the screen. The low pixel density makes any small text essentially unreadable, and it still looks vaguely out of focus even when I’m reading text against a blank background. I’ve spent what feels like hours fiddling with the display settings (lots and lots and lots and lots) on the Palma, and I still can’t get it to the point where I like to look at it.

And why? Sure, the Palma 2 Pro displays things in color, but those things look like impressionistic paintings rather than sharp images. It supposedly supports 4,096 colors, but in practice it turns most things into a weird brand of rust red. The screen is relatively fast, which makes it fun to pan and zoom comic book pages, but the shadow effect is very harsh and everything looks fuzzy. In all my testing, there wasn’t a single time I was happy to have this color screen instead of the Palma 2’s sharper, brighter, and more enjoyable black-and-white panel.

It’s a shame the screen is a deal-breaker too, because the SIM slot is the best thing that’s ever happened to a Boox Palma. I bought a $20 data-only prepaid SIM card, put it in the slot on the bottom of the device, and never thought to connect again. Since you’re unlikely to be using this device for a lot of video streaming, a little data goes a long way, and automatically updating your reading lists and podcast queues solved one of my few problems with living the Palma life.

I use the Palma as a sort of combination of an iPod and Kindle, but adding cellular connectivity means you can use the Palma 2 Pro as a phone. It’s surprisingly decent: the microphone sounds pretty good, although not great at canceling background noise, and the speaker isn’t great but it’s certainly good enough.

The Palma may not be a phone for making phone calls (though Some adventurous users It seems to prove otherwise), but you can easily use the calling features of almost any messaging app. I’m not sure I’d recommend this or any E Ink phone as an iPhone or Pixel replacement, but the Palma 2 is a great backup phone or weekend device. And maybe, because it’s all that and A Kindle alternative, the $400 price tag is a little easier to stomach. maybe.

So, there’s the worst thing about the Palma 2 Pro, and the best thing about it. Everything else is pretty much on par with the Palma course. It still feels a little plastic and brittle. It’s still comparable to a mid-range phone from four years ago, and although the numbers are slightly higher than the Palma 2, I don’t really notice the difference. The camera is still more for scanning QR codes than it is for making memories. The battery still lasted the better part of a week.

There are a few smaller upgrades but they are still nice. It has 8GB of RAM and runs Android 15, both of which are a great sign of the device’s overall longevity. (I’ve always been concerned about how long the Palma would be useful, given the typical mix of legacy chip and legacy software.) The Palma 2 Pro also supports Onyx’s $46 InkSense pen, which writes fairly smoothly and can be used for everything from taking notes to actually writing text if that’s your thing for some reason. It’s not the best pen experience I’ve ever had, but it works.

Other than a wealth of customization options, Boox offers your typical set of built-in apps for reading, file sharing, and a few other things. You can safely ignore most or all of them, as I do. The AI ​​Assistant is more urgent and harder to ignore, threatening Palma’s not-entirely chaotic existence. With a little work, you can still stop everything and get back to the things you want to do.

In the end, Palma – like most Onyx ships, a lot Other Boox devices — it is exactly the sum of all these parts. The company doesn’t do a lot of internal development or come up with big new ideas about software. Instead, he is constantly reshuffling parts and spec sheets to try to find the right combination for the right device. The Palma range (Smartphone, E Ink, Play Store) remains an excellent range. Data connectivity makes all three parts better. The color screen may be as well. But not this one. This brought me straight back to the Palma 2. It’s black and white, and only works on Wi-Fi, but at least it’s nice to look at.