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The Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra C is tablet with a 10.3 inch E Ink Kaleido 3 color display, support for touch or pressure-sensitive pen input, and an Android 11-based operating system.
Basically it’s a big eReader, a decent-sized note-taking device, or an Android tablet with a slow screen refresh rate, depending on how you look at it. But it’s one of a growing number of E Ink tablets, and one of the few with E Ink’s latest color display technology. And while its $600 price tag isn’t exactly cheap, the Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra C costs just $40 more than the black and white Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra that the company launched last year.
The new tablet is pretty much identical to its grayscale counterpart in most respects. Both have octa-core Qualcomm processors, 4GB of LPDDR4x memory, and 128GB of UFS 2.1 storage. And both come with a BOOX stylus with support for 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity.
What’s different is the display.
The original Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra has a 10.3 inch E Ink Carta display with a resolution oof 1872 x 1404 pixels and a density of 227 dots per inch.
The new model has a 10.3 inch E Ink Kaleido 3 display that can show 2480 x 1860 pixels (1860 dpi) in black and white or 1240 x 930 pixels (150 dpi) in color.
Reduced screen resolution is a price to pay for color when using E Ink’s Kaleido display technology, which adds a color filter layer to E Ink displays in a way that allows multiple pixels to work together to show color content. In my experience with an earlier version of Kaleido, colors don’t look as vibrant as they do on an LCD or AMOLED screen, bearing more of a resemblance to a faded newspaper than a glossy magazine. But some content is certainly going to look better with some color than no color.
Both the Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra and Ultra C feature front-lights with adjustable color temperature, microSD card readers for removable storage, and 16MP rear cameras for snapping photos, scanning documents, or, I suppose, shooting video or making video calls if you don’t mind the slow screen refresh rate on an E Ink tablet.
Both models measure 225 x 184.5 x 6.7mm and weigh about 480 grams.
They’re also both designed to work with an optional magnetic keyboard case.
Other features include a 6,300 mAh battery, stereo speakers, dual microphones, a USB-C port, and a fingerprint reader built into the power button.
The Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra C is now available for $600. The BOOX Tab Ultra with a black and white display was also priced at $600 at launch, but it’s now selling for $560.
I really think that sample image really embodies the utterly sterile corporate culture of “never do anything that’ll prompt an angry email that can’t be easily dismissed”.
“Be different! Here’s some similarly-sized boxes with similarly-sized rectangular holes and some similarly-sized spheres demonstrating being different, or perhaps not being different. Be like these geometric objects, not different from them. Or maybe be different from them. Oh, you don’t get it? Well, maybe you’re stupid, maybe you’re insensitive. You really want to question it and find out which?”
…Oh the tablet? Yeah, it’s fine I guess.