Boox Note Air 3 C E Reader Review | An Outside Perspective

guys I must admit that I do not read as much these days as I once did occasionally I will take one of the devices around me something like the pixel fold I think is actually really good for this and throw a book on there or maybe my Surface Duo back in the day another great choice for reading but again I just can't find myself really getting engrossed in Reading anymore maybe it's just this constant delu of entertainment that is all around us it's Tik Tock brain I don't know I've heard many people people around me say that they read better when they have a dedicated device for reading they put their phone down and they pick up something that's just meant for reading and I thought maybe I need to try something like that so I looked around and I found a product and I sent an email over to the kind Folks at books I love the name by the way BX that's absolutely brilliant and I said would you be interested in collaborating with me for a review of one of your products they said absolutely they would love to and they promptly sent over the note air3 I think it's the air 3C which has a color display this is still e in I presume but apparently there's color e in now which is really really cool so in this video we're going to review my experience with the note air3 and we're going to start that off with an unboxing through this video we're going to span a time frame of probably a week week or so starting now unboxing and then moving forward so this is the packaging here I think that this looks really nice I'm kind of like big on the unboxing experience right like I feel like it needs to be of a certain quality when you're talking about a more expensive device and I think that they're doing a pretty good job here actually like a different finish on the letter in here make a difference it says and I believe this is a sleeve that we're going to sort of Slide the main box out of yep there we go very very tight sleeve as well and now we have an embossed logo there to look at not much else very minimal which I got to say I think I dig taking the Box off foam padding Inside the Box many of you probably won't care about this stuff but I do and here is the device itself we're going to set this aside that is very very thin we're going to set it aside for a second and take a look at what else is in here I'm going to assume paperwork documentation guide so forth in that box and and then over here we're likely to be seeing cables not the guy from X-Men I doubt he's in here looks like a pretty robust a to c cable good to see there is a stylus I don't think I knew that that was a thing what do you do you draw with this thing here's the device itself and it looks like we have a peel to do here I like that orange accent and so one of the like immediate things about devices like these I find just fascinating is that it looks like the screen's on but it's not but it's because these things don't require power to have the screen State stay in the state that the screen is in I guess it only uses power when the screen changes so it'll just look like that even though it's turned off looks like over here that looks like a power fingerprint button and then down here is that a spot for the PIN to attach magnetically and then holy moly guys there's a spot for the PIN to attach magnetically there as well there's like a little couple little icons there might be hard to see but the PIN attaches there does this thing come off easily yeah so there we go so the pin there's a pin guys the pin just stays up there and I reckon that's really about it in terms of buttons couple of speakers USBC I don't see any like volume keys anywhere so that's kind of interesting let's Zoom back in and let's power the thing up I'm going to long press that power button and we have some stuff happening oh man that feels so weird that does not feel like I'm writing on a screen at all that feels like I'm on that feels like I'm on paper that's crazy whoa that is such a different texture I really can't even like explain this to you maybe you can hear it that's really really strange we'll go forward volume up and down left and right on the side of the screen and then back is a swipe from the left or right Edge that is cool so explains why there is no volume thing you're going to do that that's really different and I'll say that if this is a launcher on top of Android they've done a really good job of making it not look like Android I don't know what the operating system is here but this does not look like Android at all one thing I do want to quickly point out to you is that you can very very faintly perhaps see the outline of what we had on the prior screen customize scan path let's go back into the screen and you can see maybe you can maybe you can't but there's a little bit of that there and that is a limitation of an e in screen here's another screen though that really tells me that this is running a skin on top of Android this is really really interesting this is android guys what's this little some sort of like a little Quick Settings that's interesting can can I move this around I can the frame rate is quite low but you can move that around is there is there a control center if you go down yep there sure is is screencast child mode yeah this this is Android what about under apps what do we have here yeah there's the Play Store what on Earth so this thing can just install Android apps oh man I'm going to have so much fun with this what does the Play Store look like on this thing app optimized tutorial refresh mode oh you can change balance let's let's see what Ultra fast looks like you can change the DPI that is really really interesting and I want to take a second and look at how it's presenting these colors I hoped that that's nice and visible I wonder if I give it more light no that's not going to help you can almost see some like banding in those colors but I mean it's definitely color right like this is not going to be the same level of color reproduction you're going to have on a normal like LCD or OLED screen so that's definitely just not going to be the case does this have auto rotation there is a rotate button let's turn on auto rotate because this will allow it to fit there we go on camera even better beautiful I love it so we got signed into the Google Play store and I want to show you this thing over here if you swipe up on this left side that's where you can change these refresh modes so let's see what HD looks like and I guess presumably that refresh rate yes it's much slower but I guess the image quality is meant to be better but you can go to this Ultra fast version and I mean it's a lot slower than a regular screen but that's pretty doable right and that immediately kind of got me thinking what would it be like to run onun YouTube on this thing so that is exactly what we're going to do maybe we are it tried let's try that again so there we are we are in YouTube let's go into my subscriptions and we'll fire up Mr Mobile's review of the Humane AI pin and I'll let you hear the speakers here in just a second but I want you to see what this looks like and it is very very strange indeed oh something has happened oh I think I actually just locked it I think I just hit the the lock button that's just what it looks like when it's locked I thought that was like rebooting or something but it's not that's just what it does that is really really different okay let me show you this again then there's a lot of like banding in the colors if you can see there but I am actually like shocked at how usable this actually is and I kind of want to go outside with it and see it in bright sunlight so that is exactly what we are going to do we are outside it has actually just rained quite heavily and it might be difficult just because of light on this but let me tell you guys that is actually really really quite viewable even doing something stupid I mean look you're not meant to be doing this with this thing at all but look at that you totally can I'm getting ahead of myself let's jump into CP Z I'm curious if this will tell me what kind of Hardware this thing is actually running Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 that is a pretty old processor so Speed Demon this is not going to be but it's not meant to be doing as you can see I installed Minecraft on here because I'm going to do something really stupid in this video but that's not what it's meant for it's meant for reading books and so let's jump over here to library and let's see what we kind of have here so save documents to the books folder in storage so of course you can just put books directly on this thing yourself but there is also going to be a store there you go that's going to let you purchase and download books this way as well the band books complete Shakespeare so that is really cool but I love the fact that I can jump into the Play Store I don't think it's pre-installed but I can install Google Play books and that's going to work fine as well let's see if it'll let us do anything in the notes taking section without actually log in let's create a notepad and this is cool there's lots of different layouts here we're just going to go with blank and create that and I guess you can just sort of type but can I just write as well wow and that's actually really responsive is their Palm rejection that is the most like writing on paper I think I have ever experienced in my life is it anything with no it's just the pen that is awesome I can't really explain to you how satisfying that actually is it really feels like I'm writing on paper I like when you go home you see a little preview of your note there as well this is really really good I want to look at the keyboard here for a moment as well because we have a keyboard but we also have a handwriting thing so let's do YouTube music and that worked just fine I've never had a more satisfying writing experience with a stylist on a screen than this I really can't like I don't know how much more to say about this but it is extremely satisfying let's close this just because I can get this out of the way really really quickly I'm just going to play a little bit of a song so you can hear what this speaker system is actually like I'm still struggling with the volume thing so I'm just going to do [Music] this so it's definitely fairly tinny there's not a whole lot of Base there and I think what I can do here is I'll pull up the same track on my pixel fold and you'll be able to kind of hear a comparison there to like a more normal phone form [Music] factor not a whole lot of depth to it but that's fine they're speakers and they are functional they're going to do just fine this is not like a multimedia machine so for what they're meant to be doing I think that's going to be okay I wanted to look at these navigations here because I'm not really understanding them so if I look at this you can actually customize these e in Center back home and then back and if I click on one of these I can go in and tell it what I want it to be so that's potentially pretty cool I'll let you see what the options are on all of these and I go back I do notice that the multitasking switcher doesn't appear to be mapped to anything so let's go over here to the side oh you know what duh up and down swipe gestures are off so we're going to turn them on okay okay we got something there okay that one worked you know what I bet it's working and I bet I'm just not seeing that it's working I bet that it's just not telling me anything and then we have back gestures on the sides there as well so we're going to turn both of those on can I change this to anything else color temperature volume okay so I think that's probably fine I might see what it's like to use the navigation buttons though because I think that it might make more sense on a device like this because then I can use this multitasking button and that that might actually come in handy I think that's the way we're actually going to go and that's going to tell me we have about 3.8 gigb of ram before I go any further though let's go ahead and download this firmware update and get that installed I just realized something I got so into this I was having so much fun with this I forgot that they also sent this as well the uh books cover this is some sort of cover for this device as well so we should probably unbox this too right looks like we have a magnet that's going to hold it in place wonder if there's enough room there for oh there's nothing on it which tells me that this entire thing is going to be like magnetized guys look at that come on oh that's in there too wow that is really that is really it's really in there and then it seems like when I go to cover when I go to close it that actually does lock it this material is really nice this is really soft touches well I just now locked it again so yes there is definitely something in there that's locking I'm going to stop locking it though and I'm going to let it finish updating so I kind of want to show you this case a little bit I think that this is really solid I love the way that this thing just sort of slaps down the whole thing is magnetic it does not feel like it's going to fall out of this thing at all and I can show you I mean there's nothing holding it in but magnets that is absolutely not going anywhere but I also really like the fact that on the back side you can fold it up into that triangle shape and then sort of let it hold itself up all you got to do then is fold that back around it's magnetic back there too they have thought of everything when it comes to this set this thing up and it's handsfree at that point this is a really solid case oh and if you're wondering about the pin it's going to go on the top side and they've actually left enough room in there for it to seat in and for this flap to still go over the top I say once again they've thought of everything so let's look at the actual store here because I think it actually needs some attention and I was noticing looking through this that I was seeing a lot of maybe like older books and books that I just maybe not like the most popular most current things so I jumped into search and I'm going to search for my favorite author which is Thomas Harris I guess it was already down there and I just touched something and cleared it so we're just going to use my search history there were no results for Thomas Harris that's pretty surprising what about the lord of the Rings surely we'll have something like that in here again there are no results so what I'm beginning to discover here is that their store just doesn't have a great selection of books in it that's a little bit annoying but the good news is you can just Sid load your own books you could go into your web browser maybe there's a website that you use you could download them that way or plug it into your computer and S load them that way or once again let's try try Google Play books and see how that works and this was a book that I was actually trying to read from my wife it's called a court of thorn and roses and I would say that this looks just fine now I do want to see quickly if I'm able to get the two page split thing going on I think if I just tap yes I can pull this up and then I should be able to go to two pages which I do prefer I don't know why it's not really helping anything I just like it so you don't have a great store built in but you're running Android so you can kind of just do whatever you want to do I've been off center this whole time I'm so sorry you can just do whatever you want to do and that's going to be just fine let's see what other kind of controls we have over here in the eink section I forgot that is now I've removed that from the system that gesture is I guess not there anymore so maybe now you get to it from over here E Ink Center okay great and we'll put it on balanced because that should do better on battery life I would imagine what is Regal that's a new one that system update seemed to add a new Option called Regal I'm not sure what's so Regal about it but this is working just fine you can see how that animation played is maybe not the best I personally I may end up just sacrificing some battery life to have Ultra fast just so that the animations are a little bit better I don't think I can handle it any other way I think I'd have to stick with this I did also notice that when I use the stylus I'm highlighting stuff so great job by Google Play books on just natively supporting a pin I guess and here is a comic book and I don't know what it is about this but this looks really cool this almost looks like an old school comic book but of course you can double tap to zoom in and scroll through it I don't know there's just something about this you know how a com comic books almost have this like slightly desaturated sort of look to them I can't really explain it but if you've looked at a comic book in real life you know what I'm talking about this just kind of looks like that I do want to look at some of the other applications that are on here because these are actually kind of cool so books drop disappears to be some sort of like Wireless file sharing thing like maybe to make it easier to send stuff to your device that is kind of interesting dictionary Play Store p read this appears to be like again with your Onyx account an RSS reader recorder let's see how this does okay so I am apparently recording some audio it's interesting that the waveform here is not moving at all but I guess that makes some sense let's see how this sounds okay so I am apparently recording some audio it's interesting that the waveform here is not moving at all but I guess that makes some sense so that does not sound very good at all but I guess it's there if you absolutely need it in a pinch screen saver is this going to be yes so you can actually customize this I'm really happy to see that this is an option and they have some ooh there's a calendar and a clock that's pretty cool you probably going have to use that Onyx account to get that calendar going but it's it's there as an option A short note or clock so we're going to go back to image and you can select an image which means I'm going to need to do something so we've jumped into my Google photos account and I'm curious if I grab this image of rose and I download it let's go back we're going to go back into screen saver and let's do select image and it's downloaded but I'm not seeing it they've got a few options here to work with and they have the PC push content again a way to push stuff to you so it looks like they have to be Cloud download path local scan path screen saver pictures push so it's not in the correct folder so we're going to need to address that as well let's go back into the Play Store let's get that installed and we will make this work and I'll show you how I'm doing it I clicked on the wrong one that's the one I want stupid advertisement all right let's go into my main storage we're going to go to DCIM and then restored and we're going to grab that application or that that photo that I downloaded we're going to hit on move and let's go back into pictures and we'll just paste it there and we'll see if now it is able to see it and again I don't see that program showing up in the multitasking for some reason it just does not seem like it wants to show up there but we'll work around that screen saver select images is it in here now it is so we can now select this and I guess that's all there is to it so let's lock and there we got the picture of rose that's pretty cool it doesn't look amazing right there's more of that color banding like this thing can only display colors at a pretty low bit rate is bit rate the right word like there there's 16bit color there's 32bit color it's a low one of those but that's how you would go about customizing that image just in case you didn't think I would do it I'm going to do it [Laughter] uh I mean I mean you can you can but boy oh look at the ghosting from the from the little controls I'm leaving like a little uh this reminds me that thing when you were a kid it was like a little thing you put your pencil in and then it would like Spin and it' make these little grids like that that's basically what I'm making on the screen I mean it's it's trying look there's a there was a fox running by I mean that's pretty cool probably not what this thing's meant for though so we're sitting at about 5 days since I got this device in now and I think it's time to start drawing some conclusions and giving a verdict at the end of what is I believe going to be a fairly long video and let's start this conclusions section with the battery life now I must say that I've done pretty much everything I can to make the battery life worse on this thing by increasing the refresh rate there is actually a setting that will have the device fully shut off if it's been idle for a set amount of time and I think I have mine set to a full day before that happens and even still I think right now I am sitting at about I think it was 38% battery and it's been about 5 days it got here with I think 89% battery so I would say that is a success yes it's actually 37% battery I wouldn't say this has been in heavy use but I did give it to my wife who is a bigger reader than me and let her read on it a bit as well as she's had it outside in the backyard doing some reading and she has enjoyed it quite a bit and again battery life seems to be pretty solid it's an e in display right devices like this the screen takes up a ton of battery just doesn't have a proper screen so the battery life is going to be pretty darn good you're at least going to be getting something like five days out of a charge even if you're doing what I'm doing using it very very heavily with all of these settings disabled that are meant to extend the battery life you should be in pretty good shape on the battery I want to show you guys what has been my favorite way to use this thing so far Comics manga things like that are absolutely amazing on here it's not a particularly bright day just yet still ear early in the morning but it doesn't matter even if it does get bright it handles this so well and like I said earlier it really does have this look like you're looking at an actual comic page paper I love it it's really really good if we go back to the very beginning of this video I mentioned that I thought it might be good for me to have a device that's only meant for reading that might kind of funnel me towards the reading thing a bit more less distracted by the other capability ities of my device notifications coming in and so forth but you may have noticed this thing runs Android so it can do all of the things that my phone can do technically speaking so if you're wondering did that end up backfiring does that actually make the device more of a distraction from the reading the answer I have found has been no not really and the reason for that is it turns out an eink screen does not make for a great Android tablet in terms of doing Android tablet things you can browse the web you can watch YouTube but you're not going to because it's just not a great experience doing those things with an e in screen I'm glad that all of those things are there because it allows me to go you know fire up Chrome and download a book from whatever Source I want and then read it in whatever reading app I want I can install my own Comics app I can install Kindle whatever I want to do it's right there and once I'm in a reading app where you're looking at one Ste screen for long periods of time it's absolutely fantastic so I think it has this really nice mix between capability but also because of what kind of device this is still far far fewer distractions than I would have on a standard you know Android device I do want to really quickly bounce over to their website and let's take a look at what this thing actually costs to get if we're looking at the non-color version you're looking at $3.99 9 or you can see the pric is here currently $ 4.47 for the bundle that I received with the pin and the case and the tablet and I'm going to say that the case and the pin are really really good I love the note taking experience on this device it's really really solid if you go to the color version the price does go up you're now at $4.99 or currently 547 for that same bundle this is a premium device and I do want to point out to you that the build quality is indeed premium it feels very very solid very well built I think it looks nice it does play the role of a premium device quite well a cheap low-end e-reader this absolutely is not however I got to point out a few things a few places where I do think that it falls short we're talking about a very expensive device so we have to highlight these things the performance is not inspiring opening up things like like YouTube as you saw earlier it's pretty dog on slow this is an old chipset this is not a high powered device now it doesn't need to be but for the price you're paying which we're going to discuss here in just a moment you do wish it was a little bit more powerful because you can buy a low-end Android tablet that runs very similar software that's going to be a lot faster now speaking of that software they've done quite a bit of work to make it look very very different they have their own custom launcher on there and I think that it does a pretty good job again it is a little bit buggy at times there's just a little bit of a lack of polish on that software and performance side sometimes you go to launch an application it acts like it's launching but then it doesn't this is a minor hiccup right you just tap it again and it opens up I don't want to paint the picture that this is like ruining the experience of the device but again if you're talking about a device that is this expensive you might expect it to be a little bit smoother I'm not a big e-reader person and maybe this is part for the course for e-readers maybe people buy them because the screen is great that e in screen is great and that's what they want out of a good build quality a good eink display and the software is secondary me as a you like a normal Android User a tech person maybe I'm seeing it from another perspective that performance the software polish does need to get a little bit better to come in line with how good the hardware actually is one more somewhat minor complaint that you might not care about at all the magnet in the pin needs to be a lot stronger it is very floppy it can fall off relatively easily just moving the thing around or flipping the cover back on top of it you might knock that pin out of place and that could result in you losing it so guys to wrap this thing up I'm quite impressed with this device if you're looking for an e-reader that is sort of a One-Stop shop everything is right there on the device in theory you don't even have to ever plug this thing into a computer you can do everything you want straight from the device and have pretty much whatever book whatever comic you could possibly imagine you may have to Source it yourself but it can do anything you need it to do it's going to look good it's going to have a really really top tier stylist experience I like the case that it comes with with that one bundle a lot this is a complete product and I am quite impressed with it as an Android tablet I would say it's pretty darn bad but for what it's meant to be doing you don't care about the refresh rate all that much you don't care about the pretty weak speakers it's going to do the e-reading stuff really really well albeit at a premium price again it's not cheap this is an expensive reader so you're going to have to decide if it's worth it for you or not guys I do want to quickly say thanks again to books for sending this device over as with all of my reviews they are seeing this review at the exact same time as you are which means they were given no early copy or editorial input and no money was exchanged hands for the production of this review guys thanks for watching subscribe for more content like this and until next time stay nerdy my friends [Music]

Channel: Shane Craig

Views: 30,339

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Id: Kugibuf641U

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2024