Preview: Boox Upgrades Their Trendy Smartphone-Sized E-Reader With the Palma 2

It’s rare that tech products truly “trend;” where a community of people get excited about one product and it becomes an of-the-moment sales success. An iPhone will always sell, as will a new PlayStation or pair of Bose headphones. But a small e-reader from a relatively unknown company?That, however, was the case with the Boox Palma — a little device that stole the hearts of many in the technology press and technology nerds generally. Though Boox makes a range of Kindle-competing e-readers, the Palma stood out by its unique form factor; namely, it’s basically just a phone. It can’t take a SIM card, so you can’t actually replace your phone with it, but it runs Android, you can download any app you want to it, and it looks and feels just like a smartphone. Apart, that is, from the screen, which uses the same eye-comforting e-ink technology you find in a Kindle.The new Boox Palma 2 is very similar, at the same $280 price, but upgrades the TK chip — making it faster — and adds a fingerprint scanner for login. It’s available for preorder now.Boox Palma 2. Courtesy of BooxHaving not tried the new version, I can’t speak to the performance improvement, but I can say whether this device is for you, informed by my experience with the last version.If you like reading PDF articles and e-books while you commute, this is just great. You can put your phone away and have a far less distracting reading experience while you’re on the go, and the adjustability of the backlight brightness means that your eyes will always be comfortable. Additionally, because it’s just running Android, you don’t need to use Boox’s preinstalled apps and can use any you want from the Play Store, and could even read email newsletters.Personally, however, the software and the screen together are what let it down. E-ink refreshes in a particular way, wiping and redrawing the screen, and companies like Remarkable tune this refresh to be as smooth and system-conforming as possible; but Boox can’t really do that as they’re just using Android, and the operating system often interacts with it in a jarring, glitchy fashion. You can tweak the refresh rate and screen fidelity settings very quickly, and I’ve spoken to people who own a Palma and have it dialed in perfectly for their preferences; but in my case, I could never find a setting that just seemed to work how I’d expect. This is bad for a page-by-page reading experience like a PDF or e-book but generally just unpleasant when trying to read an email newsletter.Though the Palma 2 uses the same screen as the original Palma, that was running a slower chip and older version of Android, and even so, despite my grumbling, none of these were deal breakers. It’s a really charming little device, at a great price, and if you are the type of person who likes reading a Kindle on your commute, then you should definitely give it a try.

Preview: Boox Upgrades Their Trendy Smartphone-Sized E-Reader With the Palma 2

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