Year after year, model after model, the Boox Palma gets a little closer to the device of my dreams. Onyx, the company that makes it, found a formula that remains both simple and delightful: it’s a gadget about the size of a smartphone, with access to the full breadth of Android apps, but with an E Ink screen that gives the Palma a much more focused existence.
My Palma is almost entirely for four things: reading (via Kindle and Readwise), listening (via Pocket Casts and Spotify), taking notes (via MyMind and Workflowy), and controlling my Roku TV. The Palma can do many things, but it does only a few things well. And the battery life is great.
On paper, the new Palma 2 Pro is the first to tick all the boxes. The new $399.99 device is the most expensive Palma yet, but also easily the most high-tech. Most significantly, it has a SIM card slot for adding (data-only) cell connectivity. It also has a color screen, a newer version of Android, a faster processor, more RAM, stylus support, and a bunch of new software features. This could be the do-everything minimalist device we’ve been waiting for.
After testing the device for a while, I’m sorry to report: it’s not. The idea remains a good one, and the SIM slot and pen support have both made the Palma useful in new ways. But one of this device’s “upgrades” is actually such a huge downgrade that I almost immediately found myself using the Palma 2 Pro less than either of its predecessors. It’s such a glaring problem that I can’t recommend buying this device at all; buy the Palma 2 instead. Or just wait a little longer, and hope that Onyx figures out how to give us all the right features at the same time.
Let’s just do this first: the problem is the screen. The Palma 2 Pro has a 6.13-inch, color screen, based on E Ink’s Kaleido 3 technology. The Kaleido 3 tech is a few years old, and it’s essentially a color filter layered over a standard black-and-white E Ink screen.
You can find Kaleido 3 screens in lots of gadgets, none of which look amazing, but many of which look fine. The tech comes with a few inherent drawbacks, most notably its resolution — 150ppi is only half as sharp as a modern black-and-white E Ink screen — and its brightness. Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is based on Kaleido 3, just to name one example, but Amazon rebuilt the whole display stack to make it sharper, brighter, and more accurate. Amazon was very clear that it didn’t believe Kaleido was good enough on its own.
Amazon was right. The Palma 2 Pro’s screen is a mess. It’s so dim that I have to turn the device’s light up much higher than on previous models just to see text on the screen. The lower pixel density makes any small text essentially unreadable, and it still feels vaguely out of focus even when I’m just reading text on a blank background. I’ve spent what feels like hours fiddling with the Palma’s (many, many, way too many) display settings, and still can’t get it to the point I like looking at it.
The Palma 2 Pro’s screen is my least favorite of all the Palmas. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
And for what? Sure, the Palma 2 Pro renders things in color, but those things look like impressionist paintings rather than sharp photos. It supposedly supports 4,096 colors, but in practice turns most things into some weird brand of rust red. The screen is relatively fast, which makes it fun to pan and zoom around the pages of comic books, but the ghosting effect is pretty rough and everything just looks fuzzy. In all my testing, there hasn’t been a single time I’ve been glad to have this color screen instead of the sharper, brighter, more pleasant black-and-white panel on the Palma 2.
It’s a shame the screen is such a deal-breaker, too, because the SIM slot is the best thing that ever happened to the Boox Palma. I bought a $20 prepaid data-only SIM card, popped it into the slot at the bottom of the device, and never thought about connectivity again. Since you’re not likely to use this device for a lot of video streaming, a little data goes a long way, and having my reading lists and podcast queues automatically up-to-date has solved one of my few issues with living the Palma life.
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