Boox Palma 2 Review
Pros
- Great for reading
- Long battery life
- Install third party reading/document editing apps easily
- Fits in a pocket
Cons
- Fingerprint sensor is hit-and-miss
- Runs an old version of Android
- Not much of an upgrade on the original model
Key Features
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Review Price: £279.99 -
Powered by Android Easy to download apps, like Kindle
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Not your standard 'phone' screen The display similar to what you'll find on the Kindle range
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Pocketable size 6.13-inch display and a body that weighs just 170g
Introduction
The first Boox Palma became a cult hit device when it launched. Will the Boox Palma 2 have the same impact?
The original Palma wasnn’t smartphone nor is the 2024 model, but can it be a device for those seeking a digital detox from their smartphones?
As much as I love reviewing the best phones and best tablets, there’s something incredibly charming about the Boox Palma 2 – even if it isn’t without issues.
Design
- It looks very much like a smartphone
- Rigid, grippy body
- Missing some standard phone features
So from that outside, you might look at it and think – “well that’s just an E Ink smartphone”. It’s smartphone-shaped, it runs Android, and you can install apps on it. But, it’s missing crucial phone features – like actually having a phone app for making regular phone calls.
It’s also missing an earpiece, so you can’t hold it to your ear if you make voice calls via other platforms. There’s also no NFC, so you can’t make contactless payments.
With that said – you can pair Bluetooth earbuds or headphones. And you can install communication apps like WhatsApp or Telegram. Both of these have the option to make voice calls, so it’s not completely impossible to use them to speak to people. But you’re reliant on a Wi-Fi connection to make that happen.
So really, it’s more of a mini tablet with an E Ink display than a phone. But it might still represent a little oasis. A calm desert island away from the world of full-colour, attention-hogging, eye-straining smartphones.
If smartphones are bustling cities full of high rises, bustling with crowds of people and instant convenience – with endless objects of fascination vying for your attention – the Palma 2 is a quiet rural village with a single shop, a chapel and a fish and chip shop that still sells soda you haven’t seen since the 1990s.
A place where you have to be more purposeful to find something to fill your attention. It’s your retreat away from the chaotic tension-inducing world of constant pinging and doom scrolling.
For those familiar with the first Palma, very little of note has changed. Even from a purely aesthetic or design standpoint, it looks and feels practically the same.
The back has this unusual textured finish which oddly makes me think of the rough, pale, textured interior wall finish you’d probably find inside the British home in the 70s and 80s.
The plus side of this finish, is that it’s grippy. Combined with the rigid plastic framing around the outside, this is a device that never feels like you need to be precious over it. You don’t really need a case for it, although you can get folio cases that cover the display, and then auto-wake the device when you open it.
There’s a USB-C port on the bottom and a customisable shortcut button on the left side. You can set it to do several preset tasks like refreshing the screen or taking a screenshot, or set it to launch any app. As always with any shortcut key, I use it to launch Shazam and tag a song.
Then there’s a wake/sleep button with a built-in fingerprint reader just above the volume rocker. It’s pretty slow and unreliable from my experience, a bit of a pain in the end. It’s certainly something to improve on.
Features
- It runs Android
- Access to apps via Play Store, including Kindle
- Not the quickest device around
The phrase “less is more” is used often to champion a sense of restricting quantity, mass or volume, in favour of a quality experience. And it sort of applies here.
This restriction is all down to the fact the device has an E Ink display. No matter how good E Ink has become, it still isn’t anywhere as bright, vibrant, colourful or fast to refresh as the LCD or OLED display on the best phones and the best tablets. And that means it’s absolutely terrible for watching videos or playing games.
But that’s the joy of this device. You’ll never get stuck in those endless recommendation feeds on TikTok, or spend hours lost in YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels. You could try, but you’d soon get fed up and give up on it.
It almost makes the decision to base the software on Android counter-intuitive, but again, that’s also a good thing. We’ve seen devices like the Kindle or ReMarkable’s paper tablets locked into a custom operating system where you can’t really install anything extra, with this device you could have any apps you want installed. Well, almost any.
E Ink is ideal for anything text based. So you can install any document editing apps, and it’s great for that. Plus, you can install Kindle, or any other popular ebook reading library service, where an actual Kindle will restrict you to just the Kindle Store unless you’re happy to go through the hassle of downloading and sending documents individually to your Kindle library.
It doesn’t have to be Kindle either. You can have Barnes and Noble’s app on there, or apps like Libby and Borrowbox – so you can access ebooks for free from your local library, helping support those, and not needing to hand over any cash to big tech companies like Amazon.
So if you like reading on your commute to work, you can just take this with you and read, listening to podcasts or music at the same time, without being distracted by any social video feeds in the process. The limitations of E Ink doing wonders at keeping you from being distracted. Keep your actual phone in another pocket, locked away, and avoid social media. It’s bliss.
In my time using it, it was primarily a device for reading books on the Kindle app. But at the same time, I had WhatsApp and Telegram installed so I could stay in touch with close friends and family using popular messaging apps. I even had Chat GPT installed to do some basic research, and for the most part it works well, but it’s not the fastest experience.
The lag between touching, tapping or swiping on the display and getting a response from the interface is still quite noticeable. I could still type pretty quickly and accurately on the Google keyboard, so it didn’t hinder too much, but I don’t see any major speed or response improvements over the last model. It’s still an E Ink device after all.
Still, Onyx – the company that makes the Boox – says it has a new octa-core processor, but probably more important is that it runs Android 13, which is an old – by not quite as old as Android 11 – software by modern tablet and smartphone standards.
It does have a camera too, although this is just there for those rare occasions where you might want to scan something quickly. If you just need a digital copy of a physical document, or you want to scan a QR code, it can do it, but it’s not much good for anything else.
Still, because it’s quite limited, that does mean that there’s not a huge amount that can be done hardware-wise to upgrade on this experience. So if all you want is something small and portable to read on, this will do that, for years.
Screen
- Carta 1200 Monochrome Screen
- 300PPI resolution
- 6.13-inch size
There are two very real benefits to E Ink as a display type. Despite its slow refresh, it’s great for two things: readability and battery life.
If you’re in a bright environment, it uses the ambient light around you to make the display visible. So you can read clearly whatever is on the display without using any back or front lighting at all.
The brighter the environment, the clearer the screen is. It’s opposite to LCD or OLED in that regard, which struggle to remain as clearly visible when you’re in really bright environments. It’s perfect for reading.
As I’ve already mentioned, it’s not great for more visual stuff. Particularly animations, which are janky and stuttery. But at the same time, because it’s a greyscale display, even looking at images and photos is limited because of the difficulty in showing the contrast between the different shades of grey that all colours become.
Anything high contrast is wonderful – and it’s why text on a blank page works so well – making the Palma 2 perfect for reading on the go. But anything even slightly graphically rich will not show all that clearly on this display. Maybe it’s time for a colour E Ink display on this small form factor, like some of Onyx’s bigger tablet models and the Kindle Colorsoft.
It does have lighting for those moments where you might need it too – reading at night in bed for example. You can adjust the brightness and adjust the warmth, similar to how Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite 2024 will allow you to brighten and warm the light.
And because it only really uses power when you turn pages, or force it to refresh to display new characters or graphics, it doesn’t drain the battery quickly at all.
It’s not quite as long-lasting as a bigger device like the Kindle, but it’ll still get me through about 5 days on a full charge.
Should you buy it?
You should buy if you want a device free of distractions
I do really appreciate that the Boox Palma 2 offers a small reading device that can easily slip in a pocket – and allows me to read without too many distractions.
You shouldn't buy if you want a true phone replacement
While some calling apps can be installed, the lack of some basics means this isn’t a true viable phone replacement.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the Boox Palma 2 is a bit of a weird product to judge. It doesn’t really have all that much competition, and those similar products that do exist have largely the same limitations.
There is the TCL NxtPaper phone – which uses an LCD panel to mimic an E Ink display at the flick of a switch – but because it is essentially just a normal smartphone with a colour display, it’s not going to keep you away from your addictive TikTok feeds.
So while it could be better, specifically around feeling faster and more responsive and having a more modern version of Android so that it stays secure and up to date for longer, it is still probably the best example of what it’s trying to achieve.
I’d love for it to have a phone capability, to pop my SIM in and use it as a dumb phone, and ditch my iPhone 16 Pro for a bit. But that would require building in those essential phone parts – and probably ramping up the price in the process – and that’d make this affordable, pocketable product a lot less accessible.
Trusted Score
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- Tested for a month
- Battery life compared to similar devices
FAQs
Yes, there’s a microSD card slot for upping the 128GB of internal storage
There is access to the Play Store on this device for downloading apps.
Full Specifications
Full Specs
| Boox Palma 2 Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £279.99 |
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