Things I learned in the first week with my Boox Note Air 2 Plus

I have a huge collection of pdfs, books, magazines, old scripts from university and so on. Unfortunately, I found that I rarely enjoy reading them, because reading on a laptop screen is uncomfortable on the couch and not that good for your eyes. My wife has had a Tolino e-book-reader for a couple of years now, and its awesome for reading e-books. However, the 7" screen is just to small to comfortably read most pdfs. So, after some researching, I landed on the category of e-ink-tablets. Of course, they can do a lot more then just display documents and therefore are more expensive. But there is just no pure e-reader with a big enough screen (>10") with a high enough resolution on the market, at least none that I found. Besides that, I like to sketch in my free time, so there was an additional use case for me.

After some more information gathering, I zeroed in on the Boox Note Air 2 Plus. The main reasons that speak for this device in my opinion:

• Full, rootable Android 11, with access to the Play Store
• Therefore completly open as far as file-formats and software go, especially NOT tied to any specific store (like Kindle Scribble or Kobo Elipsa)
• Won the "reading" category in many online reviews, which is the main thing I want to use it for

The downsides on the other hand:

• Onyx Boox (the company that manufactures the device) has apparently violated the GPL by not releasing its changes to Linux kernel source code.
• Likes to phone home to China, thereby sending all kinds of data.
• Expensive

The GPL violation is a huge problem for me and I fought with myself for couple of weeks. But as I mentioned, there are just not that many devices of this category out there, and I just could not find another device that came close to it, so I bit that bullet and ordered anyway.

I have used the Boox for one week now and what can I say, so far it has been fantastic. Here is a list of things that I like and learned so far:

• Boot-Time is rather long, it takes ~30 seconds. Therefore, I set the shutdown timer to 1 day.
• Battery wise, this does not seem to be a problem at all. I have used the device for ~2 hours a day for 7 days now, and the battery is down to 70%, starting from 94% when I unpacked. Incredible!
• I have no comparison, as I put the screen protector on right away, but the DooDroo protector is awesome. Writing and drawing on it really actually feels like paper. There is just a liiitle bit of lag on the input, but its barely noticeable and at least I have gotten used to it already.