While I have always understood the advantages of e-books and the reason for their rise over the past two decades across all age groups, I have never quite made the leap. I'm more into the smell, the feel, the sight, even the sound and, yes, the weight, of real books, but I also admit that my commitment has a shelf life. Over the summer I have been testing the Boox Palma in various situations and environments, and although I am not yet ready to make the final leap, the truth is that its reduced form factor and additional features have convinced me a little more.
Until now I had occasionally tried medium-sized eReaders from other manufacturers, mainly Amazon's popular Kindle. I had never experienced an eReader as small as the Boox Palma, and I have to say that before I did I thought it was going to be too small. All in all, with its dimensions of 3.5 x 10 x 17.6 cm with 6.13 inches of readable surface it's like the screen of a big mobile phone, and we all know what it's like to read on a mobile phone, especially when you're over 40. And if I increase the font size too much, what will it fit? Ten words per page?
Well, nothing could be further from the truth. My experience with the Boox Palma as an eBook has been fluid, comfortable, pleasant... addictive. I quickly found a sweet spot for the font size, and at no time did it seem out of place. At first I noticed some annoying ghosting or burn-in on the e-ink letters, but that was also solved by turning up the refresh rate in the settings.
Of course there are always larger and smaller physical books, also with more or less legible fonts, but let's just say that dissolving my main concern (rather an unfounded prejudice) in a matter of minutes gave me joy. The ePaper's screen is very good to look at, both in daylight and in dark interiors, even if its illumination is not evenly distributed. The resolution of 300 dpi is more than sufficient, and navigation is as snappy as you can ask of this technology these days.
So, as a small eBook, the Boox Palma is more than enough for me. But its second quality, the one that makes it a hybrid device, is the one that should decide your purchase. It turns out that, apart from being a book reader, the Boox Palma can also behave almost, almost, like a smartphone. It's an Android device, in its operating system, and boasting an 8-core CPU and 6 GB of RAM... For what? So that you can do everything you do with your mobile, but without leaving your book.
You're already getting the idea. The idea is that you can do several of these things, but with the eye-pleasing and much healthier feel of eInk on display. For example, chatting on WhatsApp, surfing the web or even watching videos. On an almost moral level this is not what I ask of an eBook, because what I want is for reading to be my haven of mindfulness, to detox from screens, to delay my conversion to the ADD generation, to tame my OCD of looking at various apps just for the sake of it for a while. A moment of mindfulness.
That said, once you have the Boox Palma in your hand, the truth is that it's a curious experience to do all that in a "healthier mode". And of course it is very useful to have all these possibilities in your reading device. It's no better than a mid-range mobile, nor does it pretend to be, starting from the elephant in the room that is the black and white screen and its refresh rate, but there's something soothing and friendly about it that makes those fleeting, empty glances at social networks make you feel a little less guilty.
I used it basically for surfing the web, which is all about reading, which after all is what you can do best on an eBook. You can watch videos too, but it's more interesting to have Spotify there for background music for your reading, or WordReference for translations, or maybe your storage apps, directly for your books and PDF documents. By the way, its (average) 16 MP rear camera is more for scanning and digitising documents on the go, than for taking a vintage selfie, but whatever...
Otherwise, the finish is solid (and somewhat resistant to splashes in the pool), the feel is very good, the performance is decent (it sometimes got a bit warm with apps) and the weight is light enough to make you consider carrying it as a second device even if you don't carry a backpack or bag, something that never happened to me with other eReaders... or with any physical book, of course.
You may think the price of around 300 euros is expensive, and it is, but remember that in this world smaller is more expensive and you are paying for smartphone functionality. If you are looking for a small form factor with all those added possibilities in the same device you use for relaxing reading, I think you will be satisfied. In any case, this is an innovative hybrid concept that I hope will generate competition and evolution in the years to come.