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The Onyx BOOX Note Air3 is an ePaper tablet with a 10.3 inch, 1404 x 1872 pixel E Ink Carta 1200 glass display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of RAM, and a pressure-sensitive pen that lets you write or draw on the screen.
Announced this week, the Note Air3 is available for purchase for $400 and should ship by the end of the month. But if you’d prefer to pay a little more for for a color display, there’s also a Note Air3 C version that sells for $500.
Both tablets have the same basic design and specs, including an unspecified 2.4 GHz Qualcomm octa-core processor, LPDDR4X memory, UFS 2.2 storage, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.2, and a capacitive touchscreen plus a pen with support for 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity.
But the color model features an E Ink Kaleido 3 display with a resolution of 1860 x 2480 pixels for black and white content or 1240 x 930 pixels for color. That’s 300 pixels per inch for black and white or 150 pixels per inch for color.
By comparison, the Note Air3’s display can’t do color. Instead if can show up to 16 shades of grey and features 227 pixels per inch.
Keep in mind that Kaleido 3 technology brings support for color content to devices like the Note Air3 C, but it’s still an E Ink display. That means you get thousands of colors instead of millions, colors won’t look as vibrant as they would on an LCD or OLED display, and the screen refresh rate is much lower. In other words, this sort of device is meant primarily for viewing static content like eBooks, magazine articles, or other documents rather than high-motion videos or games.
Other features common to the Onyx BOOX Note Air3 and Air3 C include an Android 12-based operating system (with a heavily customized user interface), a USB-C port, microSD card reader, fingerprint reader embedded in the power button, stereo speakers, dual microphones, and 3,700 mAh battery.
Both models are also the same size, at 226 x 193 x 5.8mm (8.9″ x 7.6″ x 0.23″), but the black and white model is a tiny bit heavier for some reason, at 450 grams (15.9 ounces) compared with 430 grams (15.2 ounces) for the color model.
via Onyx BOOX blog and The eBook Reader
Prices are too high for end devices. There is no quick refreshing, colorful (full color range as in e-Ink Gallery) reader. Kaliedo scares me away. The fast reader from e-Ink Gallery 3 is a game changer (unfortunately, I don’t know how long it will take for such a screen to appear in the reader).
It’s a shame the color resolution is basically half that of the black and white version. I need to read a lot of scientific papers (i.e. PubMed, et. al.) and there’s a lot of color graphs that can’t be read if it was just greyscales. Printing those articles to actual paper results in print with a really small font. Something like this would be nice to avoid that, and should be a better reading experience than my iPad.