It also has a rather nice feature whereby the display has two separate backlights that you can adjust independently one has a bluish light, one is more red, so you can adjust the colour balance of the display to get a more relaxed reddish light if you’re reading before bedtime, for example. But, on the other hand, the Note Air runs a heavily modified version of Android with a bunch of bespoke apps and stuff, so perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. So on one hand, I have absolutely no idea where anything is or how any of it works. I’ve run Windows, Linux, macOS, and multiple iPhones and iPads, but until today I’ve never actually owned a device that ran Android. This is the point where I should confess that this is the first Android device I have ever owned. It’s crisp, it’s smooth, it’s perfectly even without any rogue bright spots. The packaging is seriously classy, the device itself looks amazing - 6mm thick, fantastic build quality, and the e-ink screen is stunning. When you first open the box, it’s clear ONYX has paid a lot of attention to first impressions. Battery lasts about 15 hours - that’s using various apps, with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled the whole time.Google Keep and Microsoft OneNote are unusable.Evernote, Notion, Microsoft Word work (as long as you’re typing rather than handwriting).The pen stylus works brilliantly on the built-in Notes app, but most third-party apps have too much display lag to use with handwriting.Bluetooth audio works beautifully, and it’ll run Spotify.Most apps run whether they’re usable or not all depends how well they handle the e-ink display.It’s not Google “Play Protect” certified, so you need to jump through a few hoops to get the Google Play store on it.It’s an e-ink tablet that runs full Android 10.0, and costs about £420 here in the UK.I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days now and it’s delightful.Ĭheck out the full video review at to see all the various features in action: TL DR: The ONYX BOOX Note Air (which I shall refer to hereafter as just the Note Air) looked like exactly what I was after, and, well, it’s been a rough couple of weeks and buying gadgets is one of my coping mechanisms, so I ordered one from Amazon. Last week, after a particularly bright and sunny day which I spent indoors, with the curtains drawn, because I had work do to and every screen I own is so super-shiny and reflective, I asked on Twitter for any recommendations for an e-ink device that supported an external keyboard, and Scott Hanselman pointed me to a review he’d just done comparing the reMarkable 2, the ONYX BOOX Note Air and the ONYX BOOX Nova 3. Ditto the reMarkable – although there’s an active hacker community working on extending the capabilities of those devices, they’re still a closed platform and for me that’s a deal-breaker. They run an “experimental” web browser that’s just about good enough to sign in to airport Wi-Fi if you’re patient, but there’s no filesystem access, no app store, no way to connect an external keyboard or install your favourite writing app. I’ve owned every generation of Kindle, and loved them all dearly, but they’re closed devices. (I recall reading that Neal Stephenson wrote all 2,600 pages of the Baroque Cycle longhand, using a fountain pen, and I get carpal tunnel syndrome just thinking about that.) I own many pencils, and an embarrassing collection of notepads, sketch pads and jotters, but when it comes to getting words out of my head and onto a page, give me a QWERTY keyboard every time. But I’m one of those people who vastly prefers typing to handwriting. There are some wonderful handwriting devices out there – I tried out a reMarkable tablet a few years ago and was blown away by how good the UX was. Something that’s digital, connected, lightweight, syncs to the cloud - but with an e-ink display I can use outdoors, in bright sunlight, and that doesn’t feel like using a computer. For a long while, I’ve been looking for something that does for writing what Kindle does for reading. Maybe the odd heading or bullet list, but really it’s just getting a few thousand words out of my head and into an Evernote document, where I can review, edit, and eventually do something useful with them. Conference talks, blog posts, articles, song lyrics, training material – almost everything I do starts off as words. The ONYX BOOX Note Air: Android 10.0 on an E-Ink Tablet Posted by Dylan Beattie on
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