Excuse me but what's the point of this? First I thought that it's a phone and I was really into it, but then I realizes it's just a phone shaped e-reader so what gives? What's wrong with the traditional e-readers that have the aspect ratio of a ... book?
If I wanted to read books on a phone shaped e-reader I'd just use my phone without carrying an identically shaped device for the same purpose, and if I wanted a separate device just for reading e-books then I want that to have the aspect ration optimized for e-books, not to mention the lower price tag that regular e-readers come with not something expansive just to read books.
It just feels pointless on so many levels.
I've been trying to find information on actual battery life in practice – the promise of e-ink is stonking long battery life - and it looks like it gets 8-12 hours of "active use" battery life, unfortunately. [1]
I am an avid eink tablet user (brand is irelevant, ~10inch form factor, good writing experience) and I love it. I can't imagine using the same technology for a phone.
To me phone is: a camera in your pocket, a wide array of chat apps for different friends and communities, a music player, a navigation device and a bunch of other similar tools. For others it's also a gaming device.
Swapping to calming eink is cool and all, but you give up a camera, you give up your fast mobile typing experience for chats, and you don't really get much back. You need a larger surface if you want to read, write or sketch comfortably.
I love love love the high aspect ratio devices. I'd love to see more 21:9 or what-not mobile devices.
One things thats weird to me though... when reading my phone, I notice fairly often I'm really only looking at the top ~15%. I keep scrolling content into the same area of space, rather than viewing down.
It suggests such weird things to me. At simplest, it suggests using a device like this in landscape mode. But more, it suggests that pure consumption doesn't need a big device. Yes, we need to navigate & browse, and that takes space, but actual reading? When we and the machine are in-line, knowing what's happening, on a straight path? At that point we actually only need a very small display area to work very well.
I'm almost always glad when form factors get explored & tried. Markets are so centrist, regurgitate the already proven schemes without exploring boundaries. This is stasist & centrist, a self reinforcing cycle, and it is against my nature & what moves me, but I understand it. I salute the attempts at different. Even if, in this case, I'm not really sure what the major advantage is. Very short scanlines feels weird, feels like it means moving one's eyes quickly back and forth. But at least it's a friendly portable form factor, better than most epaper devices. I wish it well.
I don't know what I'd use this for, but the pictures are hitting that part of me that loves grayscale Palm devices really, really hard.
Kit Betts-Masters has some good videos on this and other Boox devices, I think he said that the regulations on entering the phone market are a bit of a nightmare which is why this doesn't have mobile phone capability at the minute.
I love the idea of this and want one... I've had to use various command-line or web UI in-house tools in direct sunlight on boiling 40°C days out in the field. Dreamed of setting up a Kindle with VNC or something displayed in a web browser (before I knew about the full-size Boox tablets) but had higher priorities.
This makes me wish there were more e-ink smartphones… Really nice execution on the hardware and software!
Oh my god, Onyx is such a weird company.
They could've made it an actual phone and I'd have considered buying it (their devices are quite easily rootable). The only competition (Hisense) is even sketchier.
This is just a weirdly shaped E-Reader, but with a camera for some reason. Crazy.
At least they're releasing something actually new again instead of the same hardware for the third time.
I'd really like to see BOOX focus on having a smaller range of devices that are supported with updates for longer.
They just have so many devices in their range.
Paperwhite is cheaper and bigger.
Phone is about same price, and higher FPS with color.
It's nice to see improvements in other spaces, but I don't need this.
i just bought the hisense hi reader pro. it has 4G/LTE, a headphone jack, and (slightly) larger battery. thankfully it has no camera (i hate camera bumps and i have enough of them), unlike the palma. my only real gripes with the hi reader pro are the lack of sd-card slot and no easily user-serviceable battery.
Opening this on mobile automatically redirects to an ecommerce website...
A security hazard in September 2026. There should be laws against this.
I see a Google Play icon in their pictures. There's absolutely no way this thing could have the play store without a color screen, right? The pictures show a camera, what on earth are you doing with a camera strapped to an e-ink screen? This thing is baffling.
Anyone knows if one can run custom code on these?
It’s a modern Palm Pilot. I think I love it.
TLDR; a phone sized e-ink reader without the phone capabilities
Does anyone know any more about Boox & GPL compliance?
The wiki page effectively says they are in violation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_Boox#GPL_Compliance
> As of 2022, Onyx International Inc. has declined[20] to release the source code with Linux kernel modifications licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 in response to a written request by a user. The GPLv2 license states that if a modified version of a covered work (such as the Linux kernel) is released, the corresponding source code must also be released under GPLv2.[21]