Something completely different today. I’ve been using my Onyx Boox Note Air 2 for half a year now and I thought it’s a good time to share my thoughts on it.

tl;dr The Onyx Boox is a great device for writing and reading, however iPad could’ve been just as good for me.

What’s Onyx Boox?

I like to write down things at work, in free time and I was always drowning in sheets of paper lying around. One day I’ve learned about Remarkable and Onyx Boox and I was like “yeah, that’s what I need”. Remarkable and Onyx Boox are e-ink tablets that you can write on with stylus.

Why Onyx Boox?

After reading reviews I saw that while they’re comparable in terms of price, Onyx Boox don’t have a subscription model (with Remarkable you have to pay for cloud storage for your notes). Additionally, Onyx Boox has Android and backlit screen, which is a huge advantage for me.

What was my experience?

Let me just use bullet points here:

  1. When it comes to writing, it’s great, it feels like writing on paper.
  2. I guess that it’s great for reading and annotating scientific papers.
  3. The battery lasts for ever, the tablet is turning of automatically which is great.
  4. Android works, you can check mails, browse the internet, visit slack. However, mobile phone is much better for that.
  5. The notes I make are not beautiful, but I discovered it’s because of me, not the tablet xD
  6. Everything is smooth and nice, the screen is very sharp.
  7. I thought, I’ll read books on it and browse the internet, but mobile phone / Kindle are much better for that.
  8. The backlit is great. You can adjust the color temperature and brightness which is great.
  9. The UI is very… simple. I mean it’s intuitive, but it’s not very pretty, which is a shame.

Conclusions

I’m happy with my purchase. Recently Onyx released a new model, with color e-ink screen, which is very tempting. However, I don’t think I need it. What I’m thinking actually is whether an old iPad with stylus would be better for me. I paid ~2300 PLN, 570$ for it, for this price I could get a decent iPad, some mate screen protector and a stylus. Some people say, they’re distracted by iPad, but I think I could manage that. And well, with iPad all the experience outside of writing would be much better. That being said, I’m happy with my Onyx Boox. I’m using it every day and my notes are nicely organized.

So this is the review, I hope you find it useful.