#Onyx boox note air vs ipad android

Seriously, if you have anything other than freshly washed hands, expect some real grime to accumulate. Speaking of the screen, its matte finish attracts smudges like crazy. You can see the screen mask just slightly overlapping the text. Not a deal breaker, but definitely something to look out for. The screen is also set about half of a millimeter behind the glass, and the mask that Onyx uses to paint around the screen is actually slightly off on my model, meaning that if there’s text that’s aligned all the way to the left of the screen, it will be just slightly obscured by the screen mask. For one thing, the paint that Onyx is using scratches very easily. We’ll come back to this.įor a device maker out of China that you’ve probably never heard of, the Note Air is only slightly worse than you’d expect after seeing the pictures. Samsung’s Tab S7 has a 8,000 mAh battery, or about 2.6x as much power. One thing you’ll notice, though, is that the battery is surprisingly small at 3,000 mAh.

32GB of internal storage (there is no SD card slot).

#Onyx boox note air vs ipad android

Plus, the Note Air comes with a fairly modern processor and Android 10, so at least within this niche, the Note Air really stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to raw performance.īut let’s focus on the physical device. Instead of a generic gray slab with an E Ink display, the Note Air was unveiled with a handsome blue paint job with orange accents, and even though that might not be for everyone, it looks like the team at Onyx really tried to give this device some identity. When I saw the Note Air announcement, I thought that had really changed. Past versions have shipped with very old versions of Android and lacked a real, coherent industrial design language. Onyx has actually been making Android E Ink devices for a while now, but the Note Air and the larger Max Lumi are the company’s first that really look like fully-baked consumer products. So can the Note Air be the all-in-one convergence E Ink device that makes all these special-purpose reading and writing machines irrelevant? Almost. Perhaps there are doctors and lawyers out there that need to read academic papers? I should be able to load up Pocket and slurp down articles like a pro. I should be able to load up the New York Times or the Washington Post app and enjoy the paper on, uh, e-paper.

Another is ancient the Alphasmart Neo 2, which performs similarly but has an older black-and-white LCD.Īs an editor, distraction-free writing was high on my list of things to try on an E Ink tablet, but reading naturally follows close behind. One of them is the Freewrite, which also has an E Ink display (albeit a smaller one) and a dedicated keyboard. Other writers and editors at Input have taken the plunge on a couple of distraction-free writing devices. It should also be extremely easy to read and take notes on. In theory, a device with an E Ink display should have insane battery life. The dreamīefore we get into the specifics of the Onyx Boox Air, let’s talk about these use cases. Though, as we’ll see in a moment, not every Android app that runs is compatible with the E ink display. You can run regular Android apps, opening the door to a number of use cases that feature-specific e-readers like the reMarkable, Kindle, and Sony’s Digital Paper, just don’t offer. Unlike the reMarkable 2, the Note Air runs a modified version of Android 10, which is why it first caught my attention. This 10.3-inch display has found its way into the reMarkable 2 tablet that Ray Wong, our reviews editor, wrote about back in November, and it’s the display that powers the Onyx Boox Note Air that we’re talking about today. E Ink is a brand, and its 10.3-inch Carta displays are finally making their way into consumer electronics. Perhaps most importantly is the E Ink display technology itself. Right now we have to choose between paperback-sized e-readers like the Kindle or the Kobo and full-blown tablets like the iPad or the Galaxy Tab S7, but technical-book-sized E Ink readers either haven’t been available or have been so absurdly priced that they haven’t really reached the mainstream. What I lacked then, and what we still kind of lack now, is an E Ink platform for textbooks. If it weren’t for older editions and crudely scanned textbook PDFs, I literally would not have been able to study along with my fellow students. I could hardly buy food, let alone books. Like 17-dollars-in-my-bank-account broke.