Some people use chamomile tea, others do breathing exercises, but for me, the most reliable tactic for fast sleep is to avoid screens before bed. However, doing so requires some creativity if I want to keep up to date with online news. My current system is to save articles to the Instapaper later reading app, which sends a daily summary to my Kindle every evening. But it is a hacker approach where articles are often not properly formatted and sometimes do not appear at all.
It could switch to a Kobo, which offers native integration with the rival Pocket rear-reading app, but the Onyx Boox Nova Air C offers a much more attractive alternative. Unlike a Kindle or Kobo, its E Ink screen is color-capable and has a modified version of Android that allows you to download and run a variety of applications that go far beyond reading ebooks. It opens the door to many after-reading applications, as well as full word processors and third-party note-taking software. It even includes a handwritten note pencil.
At $ 420, it’s expensive compared to Amazon’s Kindles, which often cost well below $ 200. But this price is closer to a full Android tablet than an e-reader. It is a pity that the total package does not fully deliver on its promise.
Good material
- Wide compatibility with Android applications
- Long battery life
- Includes pencil
Bad things
- Many applications are not optimized for E Ink
- Complex configuration and interface
- The colors fade
The Onyx Boox Nova Air C is a modest device, with large bezels around its 7.8-inch screen and a generally plastic construction. Its power button is on the top left, while a USB-C port is on the bottom next to a pair of speakers down. They’re about as bad as I expected, but it’s better than nothing. (Amazon Kindles haven’t been included for years.) Internally, the Nova Air C runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
The main attraction here is the E Ink color screen. The Nova Air C is equipped with the Kaleido Plus E Ink display, which uses a layer of color filter on top of a more typical E Ink panel to deliver 4,096 colors. The approach comes with some obvious drawbacks. For starters, the screen can’t display color content with the same resolution as black and white, so while the screen is 1404 x 1872 in black and white (300ppi), it’s limited to a whopping 468 x 624 (100ppi) when displayed in color. . And even then, the colors are much quieter than you would get even with a cheap LCD panel, whose color range can be counted in the millions, not thousands. My former colleague Sam Byford described the colors of the Kaleido-equipped PocketBook Color as “a diary that has faded in a few days,” which seemed like a very accurate description of the Nova Air C.
Book covers (shown here on the Kindle app) especially benefit from the added color. The screen can struggle with complex color images.
And yet, even basic color is better than no color. The colors of the Nova Air C may look blurry and low-resolution, but the essence of the image remains, unlike a Kindle, where color images only seem broken. It would almost seem to use the Kaleido screen to watch a foreign movie with subtitles; you lose a lot of subtlety, but you can still understand basically what you’re looking at.
I briefly tried to watch the video on the Nova Air C screen via YouTube, but would not recommend it. The content looks incredibly complicated thanks to the low refresh rate on the screen, the colors fade and there are a lot of ghosts. You can see what’s going on in a pinch, but I’d rather watch the video on literally any other screen.
The default power saving setting is a bit conservative
Despite the color, the tablet retains the benefits of an E Ink screen. I had no problem reading the Nova Air C in the sunlight, and with a small boost to its screen lighting function, I was also able to read it in low light before bed. without eye fatigue. Battery life is also as impressive as any other e-reader. I’ve been using the tablet on and off for most of two months, and its battery level is still at 55 percent.
That said, it is likely that part of the reason for this impressive life is the aggressive power management settings of the Nova Air C, which, by default, sees the tablet turn off completely if you don’t use it for only 15 minutes. This can mean waiting about 27 seconds for the tablet to start each time you want to use it. I would suggest adjusting the “Shutdown Time” in the settings to one or even two days, which will allow the laptop to wake up in a couple of seconds when you want to use it. But be prepared to sacrifice some battery life for this increased responsiveness.
Taking notes is a breeze in the built-in app. It may take a while to boot from a complete shutdown.
The highlight of the Onyx Boox Nova Air C is its integrated note-taking application. Handwriting notes feel great with the included pencil, with pencil strokes that appear on the screen almost instantly, and 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity that offer a lot of versatility. There are a variety of different brush styles and colors, and the software can try to transcribe your handwriting into written text and even emoji.
This character recognition worked well in limited cases, but it struggled with long passages. Once typed, it’s easy to export notes to a PDF or PNG file simply by scanning a QR code with your smartphone or sharing them with another tablet application. All this makes the Nova Air C a great handheld device.
DRM e-books are impossible
But trying to use the tablet like a traditional e-reader is more complicated, and you’ll have to jump through more hoops than on competing devices like the Kindle. Although the Nova Air C technically includes a built-in “Store”, in practice it looked like it was full mostly of public domain works and I didn’t find any of the modern books I was expecting to read.
This leaves you with a couple of other options. You can download e-books from other Internet sites and then transfer them to your tablet, and it supports a wide variety of file types, such as PDF, ePub, TXT, RTF, and MOBI. But when I bought an ePUB from eBooks.com and tried uploading it to Nova Air C, I found that it is not compatible with the Adobe DRM that the store uses. (The only DRM supported by the e-reader is China-focused JD DRM.)
Fortunately, Onyx is using a heavily modified version of Android 11 as software on Nova Air C, which means you don’t just use its built-in software. You can download and install most of the Play Store apps as if you were using any other Android tablet, most notably Amazon’s Kindle app. Setting up Google Play Services on your device is a rather weird process that requires jumping through a couple of weird hoops. But once set up, it was relatively easy to take advantage of my pre-existing Kindle library. While I was there, I downloaded a couple more Android apps: Instapaper to read all the web articles I bookmarked to read later throughout my day; Obsidian for taking notes; and Comixology to read comics.
It is perfectly possible to download and use the Kindle app along with other Android apps. When in monochrome, the text is nice and crisp.
This is what I expected to be the superpower of the New Air C: the ability to download and install any Android application you want.
Take notes. The Nova Air 2 includes a decent note-taking app that works great with pencil. But it works less well for written notes, which you may want to do if you have a Bluetooth keyboard to pair with your tablet.
So instead, I downloaded the Obsidian note-taking app. It worked well, and allowed me to write notes much faster than I could ever write by hand. And unlike when I use a laptop or my phone, I could happily do it at night without having to look at a bright screen. You can use any word processing or note-taking software you like, as long as you have an Android app. It is also possible to download alternative apps compatible with pencil sharpener, but my experience was a bit successful. OneNote worked fine, but INKredible felt delayed with the Onyx stylus.
Many applications work with few problems
I was also able to launch Instapaper with minimal hassle. I had full access to all my saved articles ready to read without having to go through the complicated syncing process required for Instapaper Kindle integration. Comixology worked well for reading comics, but the screen was a little too low in resolution and too small to look like it was making the most of the experience.
But, very quickly, I started to find problems with these apps that obviously had never been designed with E Ink screens in mind. You control the apps on the Nova Air C with a combination of taps and slips, just like you would on any other Android …