Onyx Boox Note Air
This A5-sized E Ink tablet runs Android apps and comes with a stylus.
If you’re using way too much paper and soaking up too much blue light at night, then the Onyx Boox Note Air offers the ideal solution. Despite the concept of the ‘paperless office’ being around for decades, a surge in home-working and homeschooling has resulted in a spike in sales of printers. However, you won’t need a printer if you can afford the Onyx Boox Note Air.
While this 10.3-inch E Ink tablet is expensive, it’s a unique product that in some ways goes beyond LCD tablets like the iPad Pro and Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus. We already know that E Ink is a wonder of modern electronics, but it hasn’t been as revolutionary as maybe it should have beyond its use in the Kindle e-reader.
In the Onyx Boox Note Air – a stable-mate of the impressive (and slightly larger) Onyx Boox Max3 – the tech comes into its own, where the focus is less about reading and more about annotating textbooks, PDFs and any other A5-sized documents using the (included) passive Wacom stylus.
A 10.3-inch E Ink tablet with a front light, the 5.8mm-slim Onyx Boox Note Air boasts 32GB of storage, plus it comes with beefed-up processors and – perhaps most importantly – an open Android 10 operating system. The latter means access to Google Play apps including office favorites such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Pocket, Evernote and OneNote.
It can also run the Kindle and Kobo ebook apps, effectively turning the tablet into a luxury ebook reader. If you frequently read PDFs then the Onyx Boox Note Air is a dream tool – although the screen is only black and white.
The Google Play apps are the Onyx Boox Note Air’s secret sauce, allowing the device to equal Android tablets’ easy access to popular productivity apps. It soundly beats those devices in terms of weight and ecocredentials, but the Onyx is found wanting for battery life, which is odd for an E Ink device.
The Onyx Boox Note Air also impresses with its software, flexibility with files and endlessly customisable text. Refresh rates can be tweaked. You can create bigger margins when annotating PDFs and books, and even split the screen into two. The front-light LEDs can be set to cool or warm.
A lightweight, digital note-taking device that can sync with the cloud, the Onyx Boox Note Air updates E Ink tech with an impressive piece of hardware and some flexible software. But it does seem expensive when compared to mainstream LED tablets.
A fluent pen-and-paper experience awaits anyone looking for a power-efficient slate for annotating PDFs and taking notes via the included Wacom stylus. Glare-free readability and an ability to deal with all kinds of digital files, the Onyx Boox Note Air is prime paperless office tech – although short battery life and a slippery design are disappointing at the price.
Jamie Carter