+ Both the color Boox Note Air3 C and the monochrome (grayscale) Kindle Scribe are a joy to write on, with textured anti-reflective surfaces that allow you to use most Wacom-compatible EMR pens. Both devices have metal frames, so magnetic pens can be stuck to them. They both have a high build quality.
+ The Boox Note Air3 C is harder to learn but more versatile than the Scribe. The Boox requires many firmware updates as soon as you get it! It also may not be as versatile as you would think, even though it has Android 12 and you can install many apps. You’ll have to test the apps you want to use: OneNote for instance is not one of the apps that works well on the Boox (read below). The built-in Boox Notes app, though, runs great. UPDATE: in the last 10 days or so, my device has not hanged again like it did 3 times during the first three days of setup and testing, but I have only used it since then to look at PDFs and take notes with built-in apps.
+ Kindle Scribe has whiter white and higher contrast. The Boox Note Air3 C has color, and, though it is muted color, it is useful (read below). It is difficult to see thin colored lines, however, in note-taking apps or in PDFs, but colored regions and fills work OK, like in manga, websites, and comic books.
+ The Boox can use many cloud services, like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox, though you’ll have to feel comfortable storing your passwords with Boox.
+ Unlike the closed-system proprietary Kindle environment, the Boox has an Android 12 operating system that lets you install apps from Google Play, which might be more useful with color. Are the apps really that useful, though? Unless you have a killer app that you want to run on Android, this might give you a false sense of versatility. For instance, as mentioned, OneNote for Android runs poorly on this device and you’ll probably want to use the very good Boox Notes app instead.
+ The Boox Notes note-taking app is mature software and very well designed. Boox has been in the game for a long time. I have not tested every note-taking app, but I did test OneNote and it was not usable. Boox Notes is very good but the point of having Android is to be able to use many different apps. OneNote runs well enough to tease you, but it is super glitchy. YMMV, but you definitely will have to test your app to see if it works as you’d like — don’t assume it will work just because this device is Android.
I’ve been taking notes electronically with pen-abled tablets since 2009, and I still even have my Dell XT2 from back then. I write for hours every day. Only in the last few years have I been excited by advancements in the pen-abled tablets, though to give credit where it is due, I think the Remarkable “Paper Tablet” started it.
First impressions: I got the Kindle Scribe running almost immediately, right out of the box, but the Boox Note Air3 C required two firmware updates and, to my surprise, completely hanged 3 times, which I’ve never had happen with a Boox device. Even after the firmware updates, it hanged completely. I might have a bad device. The backlight dies and then the screen stops responding to every touch — after 10 minutes of this, I give up and have to hold the power button down to reboot. I took a video. It is a new product and maybe it will stabilize, but nothing like this ever happened with my other Boox, my Max Lumi 2.
I like the pastel colors. No, they are not “vibrant” and 4096 are not so many colors. The colors do make a big difference if you are trying to read a web page, for instance just logging into a captive portal at a coffeehouse or at your university. E Ink tablets still are not great for browsing the Internet – that is not what they are for, but at least with color you can see what’s going on.
For taking notes, the color is so muted that I can’t even tell the colors of thin lines: they all look gray. The color works best on solid fills. There is a workaround: just make sure colored lines are at least of width 7. That’s the width where I can start to see the color, though I use width 9. If you think the background is too gray, just crank up the brightness. You will not get Kindle “paper-white” background, but it is usable.
Installing apps on the Boox might be a huge benefit to some people, but there are not that many apps that I’d personally even want to use, even on the color device. Kindle of course can be installed on the Boox. I installed Geogebra to turn this into a large graphing calculator. Even though the Boox Notes app is excellent, I tried OneNote. OneNote is very glitchy: the pens “forget” the color you are drawing in, and often there is so much lag that it is worse than apps from the early 2000s. Sometimes (rarely) there is no lag in OneNote, so the hardware can keep up, and maybe the problem is OneNote for Android? Boox Notes is good but OneNote stinks on this device. Maybe some other Android note-taking apps work well, I did not try every single one. If there is a killer Android application that you need to run in color on an e-reader, like maybe reading manga, then the Note Air3 C is very good.
You can install proprietary textbook apps like VitalSource that your university might force you to try, but they are unbelievably slow and terrible – it’s a joke. This is NOT Boox’s fault nor an issue unique to the Note Air3 C!!! If you buy the textbooks and then *legally* get PDFs of them — if you can figure out a way to do that — then the PDFs will be readable and annotatable on a Boox or on any device. Boox’s NeoReader works great for PDFs.
PDF pages turn fast, and both the Boox Note Air3 C and Kindle Scribe have great built-in software for reading and annotating. Keeping with the theme, the Kindle is easier to use, but the Boox has more options and power if you take the time to learn all its capabilities. I may have a dud Note Air3 C, though: pinching to zoom is surprisingly slow compared to my Max Lumi 2, even though the Note Air3 C has a comparable or even slightly better processor. As mentioned, it also freezes: 3 times in 3 days.
Because of the minimalist design of the Boox Notes app, this small 10.3-inch screen feels larger than it is because I can write with greater detail and need fewer toolbars, but I still prefer the size of my Surface Laptop Studio’s 14.4-inch screen, though it does not use space as efficiently.
I still use the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio for most of my notes, but for one reason only: I have presbyopia and can’t read small print that well. The Boox’s 10.3-inch screen even in landscape is not that big for me, though it is billed as a large-screen device.
The writing experience is superior on this Boox (and on the Scribe) compared to any tablet computer, including the Surface Laptop Studio, though that is subjective. You can use many pens and tips to fine-tune the feel. The pens don’t need a battery. For comparison, on the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio — the best PC I’ve tested for taking notes — the pen glides and the screen is annoyingly glossy, and the handwriting is still noticeably generated on a tablet. On these new E ink devices like the Note Air3 C and Scribe, there is feedback from slight texture, and it feels like you are writing with a pencil that never loses its sharpness.
For people with better eyes than mine, this Boox Note Air3 C already might be close to perfect at this screen size for taking notes — but probably only if you use Boox Notes, and ONLY if your device is stable! Usually Boox devices are stable, so I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming I got a bad one. I can’t have it hanging once a day. The 4 stars is assuming that most devices don’t do this or that Boox will sort it out, based on past experiences with their devices.
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