GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
Without thinking, I scribbled over what I’d just written.
It’s what I would have done if I was writing with pen and paper. But I didn’t have a pen in my hand; my canvas was an LCD and the letters on my page were just pixels. Score one point to the TCL Note A1.
TCL’s Note A1 Nxtpaper tablet (its full government name) is supposed to make you forget that you’re using a tablet. It has one of the company’s signature low-glare matte displays and ships with a stylus. The pen’s haptics even mimic the scratching of a pencil on paper.
On the software side, the A1 takes a lot of cues from the Remarkable tablet. Instead of a typical Android home screen, you get a page with shortcuts to recent notes and a snapshot of the day’s calendar events. You can download any app you want from the Google Play Store, but that would spoil what I think is the A1’s nicest feature: the ability to trick you into forgetting that you’re using a gadget at all.
The Note A1 occupies the space between a full-fledged tablet and a low-distraction E-Ink device like the Remarkable Pro. It has a full color LCD screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. You can watch videos and scroll a website as you normally would — something that just doesn’t work on E-Ink tablets. But the A1 is a note-taking device first and foremost, shipping with a pressure-sensitive stylus with adjustable haptics to mimic the scratchy feeling of writing on paper. It’s not like, “I can’t believe it’s not real paper” levels of convincing, but it’s good enough that you can lose yourself in the act of writing. I did, at least, enough to forget about the “eraser” on the other end of the stylus.
Unfortunately, the Note A1 falls into the classic trap of trying to offer the best of both worlds: it ends up feeling like it’s not quite here nor there.
As a tablet, it’s just okay. Its 8GB of RAM are enough to help it chew through a media-dense web page with a little juddering. The LCD is honestly nicer than I expected, with generous viewing angles and vivid colors. But its blacks aren’t as rich as an OLED’s, and a little dimming in one corner of my review unit gives it away. The built-in speakers are fine in a pinch but sound tinny, and there are no physical volume buttons, which is a bizarre thing to omit.
The stylus attaches magnetically to the side of the tablet, where it also charges.
As an e-reader and note-taking device, it does the job but lacks the precision of a purpose-built device like the Remarkable. The home screen looks like a generic notes app’s main screen, plus a collapsible side panel where you can access other apps and system settings. I love a minimalist home screen as much as the next overstimulated millennial, but I wish it was more customizable. You can hide the two widgets at the top of the screen, including the “Inspiration Space” (more on that later) and change how your assortment of note collections appear, but you can’t do much more than that. Neither can you create your own cover design for your note collections — you’re stuck with some bland options that have TCL branding on them.
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