Some people use chamomile tea, others use breathing exercises, but for me the most reliable tactic for falling asleep quickly is to avoid screens before bed. Still, it actually requires some creativity if I want to keep up with online news. My current system involves saving articles to the Instapaper app for later reading, which sends a daily diger to my Kindle every night. But this is a hacking approach in which articles are often not formatted properly and sometimes do not appear at all.
I could switch to Kobo, which offers natural integration with a competing later reading application Pocket, but Onyx Boox Nova Air C offers a much more attractive alternative. Unlike the Kindle or Kobo, its E Ink display is capable of displaying colors and works with a modified version of Android that allows you to download and run various applications that go beyond reading e-books. It opens the door to many later reading applications, as well as full-fledged word processors and third-party note-taking software. It even includes a stylus for handwritten notes.
At $ 420, it’s expensive compared to Amazon’s Kindles, which often cost well under $ 200. But this price brings you closer to a full Android tablet than an e-reader. It is just a pity that the whole package does not fully fulfill the promise.
Good things
- Wide compatibility with Android applications
- Long battery life
- Stylus included
Bad things
- Many applications are not optimized for E Ink
- Sophisticated setup and interface
- The flowers are washed
Onyx Boox Nova Air C is an unpretentious device with large frames around its 7.8-inch screen and overall construction with a plastic feel. Its power button is on the top left, while the USB-C port is on the bottom, along with a pair of speakers pointing down. They are about as bad as I expected them to be, but better than nothing. (Amazon’s Kindles haven’t included them in years.) Internally, the Nova Air C is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of memory.
The main attraction here is the E Ink color display. Nova Air C is equipped with an E Ink Kaleido Plus screen that uses a color filter layer on a more typical E Ink panel to offer 4,096 colors. The approach comes with some obvious drawbacks. For starters, the screen cannot display color content at the same resolution as black and white, so while the display reaches 1404 x 1872 in black and white (300ppi), it is limited to a negligible 468 x 624 (100ppi) when displaying color. And even then, the colors are much more muted than you would get even from a cheap LCD panel, whose range of colors can be counted in the millions, not thousands. My former colleague Sam Byford described the colors of a similar PocketBook Color equipped with Kaleido as “a newspaper that has faded in a few days”, which seems like a very appropriate description of Nova Air C.
Book covers (shown here in the Kindle app) especially benefit from the added color. The screen can struggle with complex color images.
And yet, even the base color is better than no color. The colors of the Nova Air C may look washed out and low resolution, but the essence of the image remains – unlike the Kindle, where color images just look broken. I would almost liken the use of the Kaleido screen to watching someone else’s subtitled movie; you miss a lot of the subtleties, but you can still fundamentally understand what you are looking at.
I briefly tried to watch a video on the screen of Nova Air C via YouTube, but I would not recommend it. The content looks incredibly gloomy due to the low refresh rate of the screen, the colors look blurry and there is a huge amount of ghostly images. You can see what’s going on in steps, but I’d rather watch the video on literally every other screen.
The default power saving settings are a bit conservative
Despite the color, the tablet retains the benefits of the E Ink display. I had no problem reading Nova Air C in bright sunlight and with a little boost to the screen backlight function, I was able to read it in low light at bedtime without eye strain. Battery life is just as impressive as any other e-reader. I’ve been using the tablet on and off for most of the two months, and its battery level is still 55 percent.
However, part of the reason for this impressive life is probably the aggressive power management settings of the Nova Air C, which by default show that the tablet turns off completely if you do not use it for only 15 minutes. This may 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 for one or even two days, which will allow the laptop to wake up in a few seconds when you want to use it. But be prepared to sacrifice a little battery life for this increase in responsiveness.
Taking notes is easy in the built-in application. It may take some time to start after a complete shutdown.
The highlight of the Onyx Boox Nova Air C is its built-in note-taking app. Handwriting notes feel great with the stylus on, with stylus strokes appearing on the screen almost instantly and 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity that offer a lot of flexibility. There are a variety of different brush styles and colors, and the software can try to transcribe your handwriting into typed text and even emojis.
This character recognition works well in limited cases, but struggles with long passages. Once written, it’s easy to export notes to a PDF or PNG file by simply scanning a QR code with your smartphone or sharing them in another tablet app. All this makes the Nova Air C a great handheld note-taking device.
DRM ebooks are banned
But trying to use the tablet as a traditional e-reader is more complicated and you’ll have to jump through more hoops than competing devices like the Kindle. Although the Nova Air C technically comes with a built-in Store, it actually seemed to be full of works that were in the public domain, and I couldn’t find any of the modern books I had hoped to read.
This leaves you with a few other options. You can download ebooks from elsewhere on the Internet and then transfer them to your tablet, and it supports a good range of file types, including PDF, ePub, TXT, RTF and MOBI. But when I actually bought ePUB from eBooks.com and tried to load it into Nova Air C, I found that it didn’t support the Adobe DRM that the store uses. (The only DRM that the e-reader supports is the China-oriented JD DRM.)
Fortunately, Onyx uses a heavily modified version of Android 11 as Nova Air C software, which means you’re not limited to using its built-in software. You can download and install most apps from the Play Store as if you were using any other Android tablet, including, most importantly, Amazon’s Kindle app. Setting up Google Play services on your device is a bit of a weird process that requires you to go through a few weird hoops. But once I was set up, it was relatively easy to take advantage of my existing Kindle library. While I was there, I downloaded a few other Android apps: Instapaper to read all the web articles I mark for reading later in the day; Obsidian for taking notes; and comics for reading comics.
It is quite possible to download and use the Kindle app along with other Android apps. When monochrome, the text is nice and sharp.
This is what I hoped to be the superpower of Nova Air C: the ability to download and install any Android app I want.
Keep notes. Nova Air 2 comes with a decent note-taking app that works very well with the stylus. But it works less well for typed 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, allowing me to enter notes much faster than I could write them by hand. And, unlike using a laptop or phone, I could happily do it late at night without having to look at a bright screen. You can use whatever word processing or note-taking software you like – as long as there is an Android app. It is also possible to download alternate stylus-compatible applications, but my experience was a bit overwhelming. OneNote worked fine, but INKredible felt behind the Onyx stylus.
Many applications work with small problems
I also managed to run Instapaper with minimal problems. I had full access to all my saved articles, ready to read, without having to go through the cumbersome sync process that requires Kindle integration on Instapaper. Comixology worked well for reading comics, but the screen was a bit too low resolution and small enough to make me feel like I’m getting the most out of the experience.
But very quickly I started encountering problems with these applications, which were obviously never designed with E Ink screens. You control Nova Air C apps with a combination of touches and swipes, as you would on any other Android …
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