Boox Note Air 3: In-Depth Review of the monochromatic, 10.3" E-ink, non-BSR, Android 12 Tablet

hello my name is Voya and welcome to my deep guide and in today's video we are checking out the note air3 the latest monochromatic device from books this is not going to be my traditional in-depth review and the reason for that is that this is basically a blend between the devices that I've already reviewed in sub substantial depth and mainly it's like a blend between the not not 2 plus for which you can find the uh in-depth review here that you can watch afterwards or before I don't know whatever uh and also the blend between the note a3c uh again you can find the uh review video here and um yeah it's it's so many of the things are exactly the same identical device in many many ways so in this video I wanted to kind of focus on primary core differences and what are the most important aspects of this device that people are going to be interested in that are unique to it and specific to it and for everything else that is not covered in this video and is not going to be covered in this video CU I can't continue doing the same thing over and over again when it's already been done please do refer to the not te 2 plus review and the not te 3C review and then you will have a very very complete overview on this one I'm actually just going to focus on General specifications overview price layout and the test results of writing battery and all of that kind of stuff and then I'm just going to wrap it up so let's start all right and here it is this is the note air3 it's the exact same packaging that we had of the note air 3C so just a first quick overview of what it is this is an Android 12 10.3 in e in screen powered uh device it has a full-on Android 12 with a Google enabled Play Store so you can use it like a normal Android tablet however it does have that 10.3 in eink screen which is definitely a different type of a thing um and if you're not familiar with what e in screens are well they are ultimately a paper like type of screens e- paper screens and they um the idea behind an e in screen is to simulate paper like reading and writing experience and not to try an ulate the or compete with the OLED or IPS panels that we have on other devices so there are to completely different things as a consequence it is always a lot slower and it will also have a little bit of ghosting or remnants of uh ghosting images from before that needs to be manually refreshed or the system will refresh it and in this case this is a monochromatic device uh another difference is that it does not have a back light but it does have a front light which works perfectly fine so that's the overall uh check of what the note air3 is the spe specifications remain the same exactly the same like they are on the Note air 3C so that means the octacore 2.4 GHz CPU with 4 GB of RAM 64 GB of storage we have expandable uh micro SD card slot here which supports up to 2 tab of NTFS form uh micro SD cards we got stereo speakers on the star side got stereo uh microphone here we got a USBC for uh charger and uh OTG functionalities we have a power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader as well um this one here is an LED status LED here nothing on one side nothing on the other side and only here you will have a small image that's an indication of where the magnetic pen is supposed to kind of go so that it's held there it's not held really well in place I mean it's just going to stay there but if you you know transporting the device you really want to put that pen somewhere more secure because it's going to get detached from the device for sure unless you keep it in the cover which then has the flap cover which covers it and uh holds it uh holds the pen nicely in place the overall design of the device is really beautiful I'm a fan of the note air tree design and this is um yeah third year of its design and it's a really really nice way how it's actually done the manufacturing and the execution of the design is actually really really beautiful there are no Faults there's nothing sticking out anywhere and it's just absolutely gorgeously manufactured and the build quality is spectacularly good um on the front we have the glass panel on top and all of this is a uh unibody uh aluminium alloy type of Affair which is really really cool and it's strengthened by using their uh resin technology so that it actually strengthens it and it doesn't really Bend or do anything the screen on top is has a um yeah kind of scratchy laminated screen protector that's pre-applied so you can't take it off um and it's and you don't need an screen protector it's there to kind of yeah it's a complete package uh all in all so yeah you just unpack it from the box and you start using it and you have everything that you need as I said I'm not going to get into Super too many details about this one you get the standard books pen here which is fine I mean it doesn't have an eraser it doesn't have a button and uses standard soft felt nibs which is okay build quality is good and it has improved over uh the years it has a magnet to kind of magnet ially snap there um and it's okay but for an extended uh kind of use it can get my fingertips to um get a little bit kind of numb um so that's why it's not really my preference but overall it's a great pen that you get with the package I mean there's nothing terribly wrong with it you can definitely get uh quite a lot of mileage out of it uh before you actually determine like what it is that your preferences are and then you can shop around for a different pen the device itself uh functions as you would expect it to so everything works as I would yeah expect this one to be so this is the slowness that I was talking about and as I said I am not going to go into all of these details because this type of performance is pretty much exactly the same stuff that you're going to see on the Note Air 2 and the note Air 2 plus except the note air 3 is going to be actually a little bit better a little bit faster a little bit cleaner as far as ghosting goes and all of that kind of stuff just as a general quick checkup I'm just going to go and open up a couple of documents so that you can actually see how all of this works and so if I open up a document like this which has a lot of uh graphics and uh text here there's tons of functionalities that you can do and again reference to those videos because I'm not going to be diving into functionalities here all of that has been covered a gazillion times I really don't need to do it again um so yeah if you're interested in those check those videos they show quite a lot of stuff there but as far as the screen quality and performance goes this is the stuff that is different on the Note air3 as opposed to note Air 2 plus and a note Air 2 and um this is how it looks like so for me it's perfectly normal uh excellent ghosting performance we don't really see any ghosting here in a normal refresh mode so if I go to screen refresh settings this and turn it into speed mode then we have a tiny bit of uh image degradation but we also get a huge huge speed up in uh responsiveness and everything like that so this little pause after a while that's a full screen refresh that you can set up that the device doesn't do it so often and actually you don't I don't think that you need it because the ghosting performance is excellent even in the speed mode which is really really nice and for example let's just format this that we fit the width so that we can see it a little bit better there we go so that's all nice and full let's uh no I don't want to pinch to zoom I actually want to fit uh fit screen not fit width there we go that's better yeah there's absolutely nothing wrong with this performance whatsoever and if anything it's performing better than what I actually expected so yeah that's how it handles a regular text file okay so now I'm just going to switch it back into uh normal refresh mode so that we have this and I'm just going to find there we go that's an example to zoom in so that you can see what the image quality is like so there is the zoom level so that you can see the Bold text and we have the normal text with a little bit of numbers here and there and a little bit of an icon here to see how that looks like and thinking it looks all totally fine this is the size reference here and I think I can zoom in a little bit more so as you can see this is the maximum Zoom that I can do so as you can see the quality of the um display here let's show some graphs how it handles them and the italics as well so overall for me I think it has excellent uh display quality very good Clarity and combined with the super awesome uh flexibility of settings that you have for contrast and things like that you really can't go wrong with the Neo reader and uh yeah as as a reader platform it's absolutely fantastic all right and here we are going to try and uh no I'm not going to do OCR but what I am going to do is I am going to go into contrast and turn on image smoothing so that we yes so that we get rid of the the color bending so we have some color string and then you can actually see how this looks like okay so we do have ghosting so in these images you will this is the type of document it will expose ghosting issues right so this and if I go back it should remain actually it's really good this is actually really really good for uh regular type of refreshing here and the performance is really good a very very clear type to read and it's very pleasant to read read and it's actually a very pleasant image quality as well how nicer it is to have a monochromatic screen with that brighter whites and more uh more range basically than what we have on the uh Koo panels with the with a passive Matrix that makes it darker and all that kind of stuff the front light just simply cannot compensate for that and uh yeah this is this is a really good example of that so okay we have this Let's uh let's refresh so we have a clean image here and let's zoom in so that you can see in this complex section how it can handle all that because if we have multi-layering and all that kind of stuff and I can see that it's everything is perfectly readable very legible and easy easy to read even this one white on transparent black background with everything in behind not nothing gets messy nothing gets kind of yucky and it's just really easy to read and uh much more importantly it's really really Pleasant to watch I mean this is just a really Pleasant image to see it's it's one of the benefits of the of an ink screen is that it looks like a picture you right so and not a tree absolutely delivers so really really good image quality would it benefit from a 300 PPI yeah it would it would definitely be a little bit sharper but is 227 PPI bad no absolutely not it's been a standard for years so it's nothing really that bad about it okay so here's the important one the battery life on the note air3 so last year we had uh pretty much almost every single new device that came out from books had the uh BSR technology which is a huge huge power hog and as of today there's no way to bypass it which really boggles the mind that you don't have a dedicated refresh mode that would simply bypass that power hog but as an end result one of the main uh benefits of a ink device uh was completely nullified now that is not the case here with a not Tre tree general just not their tree because it is not equipped with the BSR so that means that we should see excellent battery results and that is exactly what we do have actually because this one is uh equipped with the more modern internals so it's more powerful faster and more battery efficient than its predecessor so not a 2 plus or the not a 2 so the test results and the test that I do is I let the device autof flip uh pages every 20 seconds for 1 hour in three different modes with a front light set at 100% front light set in this case at 30% because it's a monochromatic device and then front light set at 0% and the results of that are that with the front light set at 100% note air 3 was averaging at around 5% per hour which means that even at the front light all the way to the maximum and Wi-Fi is on on all of them it would still get like 20 hours uh of continuous page flipping per charge which is really really good when you actually lower that front light down to 30% then we have 1.5% roughly per hour which is at around 66 hours per charge which is excellent we're talking about now over a week like weeks of usage and then if you turn that front light all the way off uh it spends less than 1% per hour of battery time which means that you get over a 100 hours per charge of continuous reading time without a front light on a not tree now that's what an eink device is supposed to deliver when we get into the writing test it's the similar type of test except that this time I'm writing continuously for 1 hour and then I measure the battery and uh I write in two conditions here with a front light at 30% and a front light off so with the front light at 30% note air 3 was averaging 8% of uh uh spending 80% of battery life per hour which averages out to around 12 and 1 12 hours of continuous writing time per charge and when you turn the front light all the way off then it was averaging uh spending at around 6% of battery life per hour or averaging at around 16.67 hours of continuous writing time per charge and again these are absolutely excellent excellent battery consumption result [Music] [Music] results [Music] [Music] in the terms of uh writing experience first I'm going to be covering the writing latency and there's something to talk about here so normally I run my Desa and uh yeah I get the result here I was actually surprised because when I write on the Note air tree it feels when I'm writing a little bit sluggish um and I believe that in my unboxing I said that it's probably going to be around 40 millisecond uh kind of range which is where the old ones were like the not a 2 and not a 2 plus but that was not the case actually uh when I measured it it actually measures out with a writing latency at 28.78 which is great that's a really really good number so it's not excellent it's very good and it's definitely not sluggish but there's one thing that I noticed which I believe is a software error and that is that it's writing consistently then has a pause and then it continues writing and then it has a pause and this was absolutely 100% consistent in every single test that I did and repeated and um since that is completely invisible to the naked eye that actually leads me to believe that the sluggishness that I perceived was actually that inconsistency that it writes and then stops and then writes and stops and writes and then stops I've never seen a single other device that actually behaves that way and to me this looks like a software issue hopefully that's something that they will fix rather soon so that then uh and if they do then you should have that sluggishness kind of impression uh go go completely away however there's a caveat here um that sluggishness impression comes from me actually using the notter 3C which is the fastest device and the supernote a6x now for well over a month I mean the not 3C I'm using it now for several months and these are the two of the fastest writing latency devices that we currently have on the market so my perception has also changed and then I noticed when I was doing the writing battery tests that it started with my perception oh this is a little sluggish and then as I went through the time and hours of writing I grew accustomed to it and then it no longer felt sluggish I could still see maybe trailing a little bit but it didn't feel sluggish it felt normal so I think that's also something to definitely keep in mind as far as the um surface to screen distance goes I was hoping that they have employed that thin glass on that they have used on the not 3C as well but it appears that that's not the case because we have the surface to screen distance is at 1.1 mm which is the standard that we seen on yeah all of the older boost devices um so it's the same surface to screen distance that you would see on the not 2 plus and a note there too as well and the screen roughness and the structure is exactly the same like it is on the um uh not trec so there's no real surprise to see that the surface resistance on the notter tree is pretty much virtually identical as the one that I measured on the not trec as well overall writing experience I think combined is very very good to excellent I would rate it as B+ uh the only reason why it's not an a is U well two reasons that screen to distance uh screen surface to screen distance and that the writing latency is inconsistent so if they fin fix that writing in consistency thing I think that it's going to feel even faster as fast as it is the 28 millisecond thing and um there's nothing really you can do about the surface to screen distance that's how it is so that's something that's present so that's why I would rate it as a B+ but everything else is really really exceptionally good and comfortable to use especially that surface is really really nice to write on so yeah really really good uh writing experience on the Note air tree now as far as the core performance like of the device itself goes I thought that it was also important to do those measurements and so I did all the benchmarks that I do for other books devices and to see where the note air Tre STS uh because it does have completely new internals new Ram new type of ram new type of storage new new CPU and all that kind of stuff so it is internally completely new device compared to the not a 2 and the not a 2 plus so I also wanted to see where it stands in comparison to them and in comparison to the not a 3C and not that surprising it performs pretty much exactly the same more or less like the note air 3C with some exceptions where actually in CPU multis score it was performing better than the not a 3C and actually this is a 2.4 GHz CPU the one that it's supposed to have it was performing a little bit better than the 2.8 GHz CPU that I have in my not a3c but the thing that's really most important of all is that it performs better and it scores better than the older ones the ones that it's replacing the not TI 2 plus and the note TI 2 this is especially notable in uh work real work World related scenarios so you will definitely see a noticeable performance Improvement if you're jumping from note Air 2 or 2 plus onto the note air3 and I'm talking about um General device uh responsiveness install speed uninstall speed and just operations pure processing power of this one is simply higher than it is of its predecessor and it's also really important to note that the uh storage speed has also improved on the Note air tree so your writing and reading speeds and document opening and saving and all of these things are also going to be improved when compared to the previous generation of devices so all around wherever you actually look at the note air tree uh performance is better than the not Air 2 plus and the not a 2 all right so unlike the regular videos that I do end with a conclusion with cons and Pros I'm not going to be going through all of that I'm just going going to be giving you my honest summary about the note air 3 as a device and then you can you know extrapolate what you want from it uh from from my summary here so I think that overall this was a confusing launch for me definitely was a confusing launch and on paper uh this device can be confusing and can be considered like what's up with that right but the thing is if we are looking look at it as an e in reader no taking device and let's for a second exclude the BSR out of the equation that it doesn't exist what's actually wrong with a noer tree nothing really the only thing that I can think of that's wrong is that it doesn't have a 300 PPI screen that's it um everything else this is actually a really really good device because let's not forget it's not air 3 it's a successor to the not a 2 and not a 2 plus and that's what it is comparing to and the only job that it has is actually to be better and to offer new things than its predecessor had and I honestly think that not 3 measurably checks all of those boxers battery life better than the not 2 or the not a 2 plus writing latency better than the notter 2 than the not a 2 plus performance overall performance all over place better than either of those two devices price better than either of those two devices uh flexibility because of the new magnetic cover and everything better than either of those two devices it has an SD card slot now which is a really really significant Improvement so all in all I mean yeah I have to pose a question for a lot of people who are saying like oh this is just a dumb device and everything like that is like oh it's a I don't know it's this and that what exactly is wrong with this one one from everything that I've measured and tested this one just does what it's supposed to which is offer better performance in every regard a little bit more Creature Comforts and at a lower price point despite the inflation that we've had in the past 2 years so yeah I don't see the problem yes it would be nicer if it had a 300 PPI screen but that's really not a deal breaker of any kind I mean yes it's a nice to have but this one works perfectly fine as well so yeah that's my honest take on the Note air tree I didn't expect that I have to say that I was also because of the way how it was launched and because of the environment it's in it's Brethren and sisters it's siblings and all that it seemed out of place but when I honestly started to use it it didn't at all it just was actually refreshing I liked the monochromatic thing I like the battery that lasts forever that you don't really think about the battery at all and the ghosting is not that bad at all it just works really well I think it's actually better than what I had on my not a 1 and the not a 2 so if you're looking for an excellent allrounder uh e in tablet ordinary e in tablet not blisteringly flash BSR thing there's really very very very little that's wrong that you can find to be wrong with a not Tree in my honest opinion all right that's it for me I hope that you found the video interesting informative and or useful if you did please like And subscribe and ding the notification Bell in the description below to get notified when new videos come out on my deep guide and if you do like the independence of the video oh yeah the notification yeah um this unit has been sent to me by books but it's a review loan unit so now that I'm done with it it goes back into the box and it goes shipped somewhere elsewhere to somebody else to actually check it out so I don't get to keep it I get to keep my own independence and my own opinion opinion opinion even so if you do like the work that I do and you would like to uh support the independence then head on over to the mydeep guy.com shop where you can find the mdo and MMP which are both hyperlink organizational type of files mdo helps you organize your yearly quarterly monthly NE weekly daily uh organizing or journaling needs and the MMP which is the myb guide meeting planner helps you simplify centralize and um yeah organize all of your meeting planning needs if any of those sound interesting to you check out the links in the description down below for the dedicated playlist where you'll find ton of info and I'm confident that you will be able to then reach after viewing those videos reach a decision if either of the two is the right product for you or not either way thank you so much for watching stay safe stay healthy and see you in the next video bye

Channel: My Deep Guide

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Length: 28min 58sec (1738 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024