Onyx Boox Max2 - Review 2022

PCMag writes thousands of reviews each twelvemonth, and so it'southward rare that we come across a product that is truly unique. Simply that'due south the best way to describe the Onyx Boox Max2. It's a gigantic E Ink-based Android tablet, with a touch screen, pen, and full Android application support. It'due south quirky, and it doesn't finish you from trying to practice entirely inappropriate things with E Ink. But as a large (xiii.3-inch!) E Ink tablet, it's wildly functional and easily outpaces the Sony Digital Paper DPT-RP1. But at $799.99, information technology also costs equally much equally a 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Hardware and Features

Kindles but go up to 7 inches, and Kobos merely go up to 8. They're fine for reading best sellers, but for big-format PDF documents, academic journals, textbooks, and sheet music, traditional ebook readers are simply too small. That'due south when you need to turn to a larger tablet.

The Onyx Boox Max2 is a big black slab, at 12.8 by 9.3 by 0.three inches and 19.iv ounces. Heavier than an iPad, it'due south not something you desire to carry around in one hand for long.

Below the 13.3-inch, 2,200-by-ane,650 touch on screen in that location are four physical navigation buttons. There's likewise a headphone jack, micro USB and micro HDMI ports, and a fabric loop to hold the included stylus. (The pen has a prune that hooks onto the loop.) You lot can't see it, but there's a tiny, tinny speaker, besides.

The screen itself looks great. It's E Ink Carta, the same as on the Kindle Paperwhite, at 207 pixels per inch, with a range of fonts and sizes. Information technology's missing a front light, so yous tin't read it in the dark, and like all Due east Ink, it's nevertheless sixteen-flake grayscale. Affect responsiveness is fine. At that place'south some lag in typing on the touch keyboard, but that appears to be more near the refresh rate of the E Ink display than nearly the touch sensor.

The Boox Max2 runs Android 6.0.ane Marshmallow on a 1.6GHz Rockchip processor. It has 2GB of RAM, and 23.6GB of gratis storage. There'south no SD card slot, but 23.6GB is a lot of storage for a reading tablet. With Geekbench scores of 840 single-core and 2087 multi-cadre, information technology benchmarks like a decent, midrange smartphone. But of course benchmarks don't really mean anything for performance here, because every action is slowed by the glacial refresh rates of the East Ink screen. For networking, the Boox Max2 has Wi-Fi on two.4GHz only.

App compatibility is surprisingly expert. The previous Boox Max ran Android 4.0, which has security flaws and which some apps no longer support. With Android half dozen.0, the apps we downloaded from the Google Play store mostly worked. Failures came with games, as you'd expect: Anything that relies on fast-moving screen images is going to struggle, suffer, and perchance crash.

It's difficult to test the battery life of an E Ink tablet, merely the Boox Max2 didn't need a accuse in over a week. Onyx says it gets up to four weeks of utilize on the four,100mAh battery. Flipping through a 453-page book in the PDF reader took well-nigh three percent of battery life, which is very encouraging. That's much better than on the Sony tablet.

Reader's Delight

So why practice you lot desire Android on a big E Ink tablet? For most people, it will be to run multiple document viewing and due east-reading apps, and the Boox Max2 is well-suited for that. We tried Kindle, Kobo, Curiosity Unlimited, Overdrive, and Onyx's own reading app. Onyx's app handles PDF, ePUB, HTML, Medico, MOBI and CHM files.

There are enough of ways to get files onto the tablet. It appears as a drive on Windows PCs, when plugged in with a micro USB cable. Since information technology runs Android, you can besides install your cloud storage app of option and download files, or download files direct using a web browser.

I can't emphasize plenty the difference 3rd-party apps, and a current version of Android, brand to the utility of this tablet. Unlike other E Ink slates, it's brand-agnostic and relatively future-proof, able to use multiple certificate sources and read any kind of file. Information technology is not, in whatever manner, locked down.

In Onyx's reading app, PDFs and ePubs of books, magazines, and canvass music all expect practiced. Unlike on the Sony reader, you lot tin can jump to a specific page in a long document. PDF hyperlinks work, equally does pinch-to-zoom. Shadows can look a bit muddied, especially in color documents, just yous can get around that with the manual contrast command. There's a very tinny, computery text-to-spoken communication function that uses the small-scale congenital-in speaker. You can improve the audio by attaching wired or Bluetooth headphones.

Loading 3rd-party reading apps, Audible, Kindle, and Kobo all worked perfectly (although Kindle needed a firmware update to make its page turns work properly). Marvel Unlimited worked well, although shadows on colour pages shown on the black-and-white E Ink screen, equally I said to a higher place, are a bit dirty. Overdrive has an interesting page-plow beliefs that might annoy some people: The left one-half of the page renders, and then, a noticeable fraction of a second later, the right half. Switching the tablet into "A2," a faster refresh manner, makes the folio turns amend but makes the text noticeably fuzzy and creates significant ghosting.

The Boox Max2 has a Wacom pen-sensitive layer, and comes with a great, responsive stylus. Since this is Wacom, the pen doesn't need charging, unlike the Sony model. You need to employ Onyx's annotation and notation-taking apps to brand it work properly, only in those apps, latency is very low and the pen feels perfectly shine. It's force per unit area-sensitive, but with only 16 degrees of grayscale on the screen, it's hard to take advantage of that much.

You can consign your annotations and note pages as PNGs. Palm rejection worked well in the default annotation-taking app. In OneNote, Evernote, and Inkredible, latency is just too high for the pen to exist usable and the lag is intolerable, and then we can't recommend the tablet for those applications. It works well for reading notes in OneNote and Evernote—only not making notes with the pen.

E Ink for Your PC

Over the years I've heard well-nigh folks who only want an Eastward Ink screen as their principal PC, because they have a problem with LCDs. The Boox Max2 works with web browsing, e-mail, and other standard Android apps, and you can attach a Bluetooth keyboard or headset. But y'all have to exist a real E Ink addict.

In that location'due south a significant delay in scrolling through web pages and typing text, over again because E Ink is a slow medium. In that location are also rendering errors in the spider web browser: white text on a black background displays as all blackness, for instance. Google Maps loads, but you lot need to fiddle with the contrast to see streets well.

The Boox Max2'southward weirdest feature is that it can human action as a secondary monitor for anything with an HDMI out, such as many PCs. That's not a good idea with E Ink, because PC applications merely presume that your screen has a higher refresh rate: moving a mouse and dragging windows around on an E Ink screen has a disturbing amount of lag. It's best used to just let a static image sit for reference. Fifty-fifty without this characteristic, though, the Boox Max2 is pretty great.

I'g a little concerned about service and back up. Onyx is a China-based company, and while it'southward responsive to user queries on Amazon (too as to my own), it's very far away and its English isn't the all-time. With an $800 product, I want a US-based service and support squad, and Onyx doesn't have that on offer.

Comparisons and Conclusions

The Onyx Boox Max2 is a giant ebook reader, a pinnacle-notch note-taking tablet, and a full Android device. While we would prefer better tertiary-political party annotation-taking app support, the Boox Max2 is by far the nigh capable E Ink device we've always seen.

Previously, nosotros preferred the Sony Digital Newspaper DPT-RP1 to the original Boox Max. The Max2 has turned that effectually: It has a bear on screen and a amend pen, information technology's less expensive, and it runs a reasonably current version of Android. Because the Sony DPT-RP1 is lighter, it'due south still a better buy if all y'all want is a container for your PDF documents.

The Boox Max2 is so much more than, though. Its ability to run multiple reading applications means that it works with all of your books, no thing what shop or library you got them from, without conversion. Its power to run unlike cloud and document storage applications lets y'all get at all your files, wherever they are, mark them up and send them dorsum. And all of this takes place on the largest Due east Ink screen possible.

The Boox Max2 costs the same equally a 12.ix-inch iPad Pro or a good Windows tablet. Those tablets are better for creative use, and, of course, they have color screens. Merely they're LCDs, which is a different beast entirely. Nosotros however recommend those tablets more for almost people, but there is a small group out there that will exist very happy with the Max2.