BOOX Note Air 3C Review: does anyone really need a color e-ink tablet?

hello welcome back I'm calian I make videos about games development and creativity and I'm going to review a piece of tech today that isn't directly connected to games or development but it does give me a place to sort of sort out my thoughts problem solve and do things to kind of support development work and to support creative work and that is this this was actually an impulse purchase which I'll talk about later but basically the reason I'm telling you that is that I didn't explore a ton of other options and I'll talk about what I like about this and what I don't but this is the Onyx books note air 3C did I get that right yes books note air 3C is the sort of model of this Onyx is the brand but this is an eink tablet which you can kind of see uh it doesn't have the like LED screen that tablets typically have uh but the cool thing is that it does have a stylus and you can kind of use it as a notepad so that's kind of the the purpose of tablets like this and it is also the reason that I got it so before we get into the review properly I'm going to talk about a few specs about this bad boy um it is technically an Android tablet so it runs Android 12 I believe it has 64 GB of storage which so far has been plenty the screen is 10 in 10.3 in on the diagonal charging like data transfer stuff can be done through the USBC here on the side uh like I and it comes with a pen this pen does have pressure sensitivity and it doesn't really have much else um the simple pen that they give you with does not also have an eraser there is one you can get that has an automatic eraser so when you flip it around it will erase um I haven't really needed that and I didn't feel like paying for another pen and uh this pen magnetically attaches to the side of the tablet which is pretty handy and the big thing about this one with the c in the name is that it supports color do I have have anything in color on here okay I haven't signed in to Google Play but you can kind of see the Google Play logo is in color um but the color that eink tablets are capable of at this point is a very muted color so you can see this is this is barely a color at all and that's kind of how it goes with with this tablet but it does support color it has a backlight and then also you can flip the screen so I've flipped it typically it's like this um where the the long strip is on your like writing hand side um but I'm left-handed I liked it better with the long strip on this side the only downside is that the pen does not attach to this side so when I write I have to take this off and sort of pass it over to the correct hand you know whatever you can have everything usually as a left-hander but uh there are some settings on here that can get you where you need to go and that's kind of the whole thing it's a tablet uh it can like I like I showed here it does support Google play it can download normal Android apps they don't look exactly like they would look on your phone which I plan to show later in the video uh but that's kind of the overview now we're going to talk about setting it up we're going to talk about what it can do and uh kind of what I use it for and then at the end we're going to talk about sort of the pros cons what I would recommend this tablet for and whether I regret purchasing it so here we go the first step after you get the tablet is to set it up and honestly this is a very smooth process I don't have a lot to add here uh like setting up a new phone it will walk you through everything you need Once you turn it on uh things like setting your time zone some basic settings like when the screen should go to sleep how the navigation should look there's also a lot more customization options once you get into the app you can go into the settings and play with all of those you will also probably want to connect it to Wi-Fi so you can use all the features that it has uh once Wi-Fi is connected your tablet might do an update mine did and then you can just kind of go there's not a lot of setup for this thing uh and then I started with the thing I wanted to use this for most which was simply taking notes so now we'll get into the features of the tab and how I've been using it I had mentioned that I bought this on impulse and the main reason I did that back in October when I got this was because I wanted to have it before November uh which is when I wrote a novel for nanoro and I didn't want to write the novel on the tablet which you certainly could do if you want to do that uh I wanted to use it for writing down ideas working through plot issues brainstorming uh and then as a bonus I also plan to use it for Game Dev notet taking kind of the same thing problem solving and brainstorming uh because sometimes a lot of the time I find that it really helps to physically write things out when I'm working through a problem uh something about the the physicality of it I'm moving and the movement sort of helps me generate ideas I don't know I know people have talked about about this before writing by hand uh but I personally find it really useful and so that's one of the things that I wanted it for so I bought this for note taking that's pretty much all I've used it for but I'm going to show you some of the other things you can do with it as well and the short version is that this can basically do anything a normal Android tablet can do uh it's just going to look a little bit different because of the e- in screen and it's not going to really work as well for things like video for things like full color images uh because the colors as you can see are pretty limited on the the e in Color tablet first let's talk about the simplest of tasks taking notes there is a Notes app built in and that's what I use you could use the Google Play Store to install a different Notes app if there's something else that you like better uh but I like the built-in Notes app so much that I've actually set it as my homepage so every time I go to the homepage on my tablet I see all my notebooks and in order to start taking notes you'll need to create a notebook or or notepad I guess they call it and they have a lot of templates you can use to start your notebook uh they have some grids some lines a calendar there's a lot of different options here and I didn't even notice while recording I figured this out later but there's a tab called text um that has some templates for text based notes like to-do lists and stuff that you could use as well you can also import your own templates in either a ping or a PDF format uh if you have a pre-made plan planner PDF for example or a worksheet that you want to fill out you can add those in here there's a folder in the storage called note template and uh you can just drop them in there and I'll go over how to transfer files to and from the tablet a little bit later once you open up your notebook you can just start writing uh at the top you'll have your different pen Styles I forget what is in here by default I have some that I've kind of fine-tuned for myself uh you can click the little Plus button up there to create a new pen or if you tap on an existing one you can either change the settings or delete it if you want to replace it with something else each pen has a different way it responds to pressure sensitivity a different color a line thickness I like to use the brush pen for things like headers I like to use a highlighter just to add a bit of color really and then the normal thin pen for everyday writing and apologies for some of this footage I had a hard time time getting my camera to focus on the tablet cuz the screen is a bit weird and I even filmed this bit twice because I thought I accidentally deleted the first one U so I filmed it twice and both times I had trouble with the focus uh but we'll move on one thing I am very pleased with is how Snappy the writing is it's a nice writing experience it feels good there's no delay to the pen it shows up right underneath the tip of the pen uh just as if you were writing with an actual pen and in addition to just drawing things out with different pen types there's also a bunch of different ways to add things to the notes I pretty much never use any of these tools I just draw things out but there are a lot of potentially useful tools in here that you could use the notes have layers uh like like in Photoshop or where if you select a different layer you can write an erase on that layer only I would recommend using layers specific specifically for the text recognition because as far as I can tell it just sort of plops the text down anywhere sometimes it's like in the top left and sometimes it's in the middle um and when you select it with the lasso tool if it's not on its own layer you just select everything maybe there's another way to deal with this but um I haven't figured it out cuz I don't use these very often uh but the text recognition is Handy if you want to handw write a lot of notes but then convert it into text format uh you know for search ability or or what have you and it's in the AI tool and uh once you click that in text recognition you can actually go in and edit it for errors and then you can either copy the text to the clipboard to paste it somewhere else or you can just paste it directly into the note there's a tool for drawing out shapes you can use these for straight lines circles triangles they even have a pentagon shape and for most most of these tools if you long press on the tool it will open a little menu where you can change options like colors line width uh the the shape options and things like that there's also a text tool and you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to this tablet in the settings and you can use that to type into the text notes if you'd like to I tried that out for a bit and it did have a slight lag to it I've noticed uh I didn't do a lot of testing on that it might have just been like the screen refresh creating something that looked like a delay uh but I definitely prefer the handwriting it's it's much more streamlined than typing with a keyboard the AI tool also has a way to recognize shapes that are handdrawn so if you turn that on and you draw a shape and then you pause for a second before lifting the pen it will detect the lines and make them straighter and cleaner um so you can turn that on if that's something you want there's even a way to embed recordings into the note I tried this out and it worked fine uh I wasn't sure at first how to play the recording back but I found a menu option called recordings and in there I was able to see the different recordings and then use them to play them back I'm not really sure how this works if you export a note with recordings maybe it gets embedded in the PDF somehow I'm not sure uh but that's all the basic stuff that you can do with taking notes it's a lot of different things that you can use to sort of create the note-taking experience that you like uh like I said I typically take very simple notes I just draw things out and write things down um I like that that Mind Body Connection that is very tangible um so I I don't even use all of this but it's here if you would like to use it now say that you have taken some notes and now you want to put them somewhere else you want to back them up how do you get them off the tab tablet there is a feature or an app I guess called books drop b o x drop where you can go to a computer you can use the local IP address to access your tablet all you need for this is to be on the same Wii the same network and you can access the the books Drop app on the tablet from the apps menu and it will tell it will give you instructions right there for how to access it on your computer and this is a local IP address so it shouldn't be like a security risk but in an abundance of caution I'm not going to show it on the screen uh once you open it up on your computer it's it just looks like a file browser and I noticed that my notes were not anywhere in the storage and this is because you have to export them from the notes app first they're not just like they're not made into PDF files or text files automatically you have to actually export them to do that in the notes app you just long press on the notebook there's a share and Export option and there's a few different options here for how you want to export it one is a proprietary like books format uh I assume if you want to send it to a different tablet or if you just want to save it back it up and then maybe bring it back to the tablet later and then the other two options are PDFs which are going to be a lot more universal one is a vector-based PDF and one is an image based PDF I'm not totally sure what the different use cases are for these the image PDF is much smaller file size um so if you don't need the vector based for whatever reason I I would probably use the image one just to save file space and once I've exported the notes I can go into book drop and find it in the note folder and I can just download it from there an interesting little Quirk here is that the colors in the PDF are like full saturation so in the tablet if you were using something that looked like a pale pink highlighter uh in the PDF it is hot fuchsia it's extremely bright um it doesn't seem like there's any way to adjust for that so that's just something you have to keep in mind uh as far as the different PDF types visually they are almost identical I noticed the vector based one does appear slightly smoother uh and then the image one is a little bit more pixelated which uh makes sense because that's how vectors work um but otherwise uh they are basically the same so if you if you don't need the vector PDF I would just use the the image one to keep file sizes down now what else can you use this tablet for like I said at the start this is just an Android tablet you have the whole Google Play Store at your fingertips if you notice that some of the images are kind of janky looking by the way way you can uh kind of fix this by adjusting how often the screen refreshes which is under settings system display uh sometimes you'll see the previous image kind of overlaid on top of a new image and that's just how eink works it kind of um it updates the whole screen at once uh but it doesn't uh it doesn't refresh constantly the way that a normal display would uh and that's also why it's so much more performant in in terms of power it uses a lot less power than like an LED screen and from the Google Play Store you can install any apps that are supported on tablets and on this version of Android which I believe is Android 12 I would really recommend sticking with apps that are mainly text based I think anything with a lot of video or moving images a lot of quick interaction is going to be a bad experience but you know you do what you want I'm not your supervisor I did grab the Kindle app because another thing this tablet is actually kind of designed for is reading ebooks I personally do most of my reading on my phone on the Kindle app even though I do have an actual Kindle uh I just don't use it because it's another thing to carry with me when I always have my phone like right there uh but if I did want to read on this tablet it would be a larger Reading area than on my phone it's very light it's easy to hold and I can even do color highlights since this tablet supports color if you want to use this for reading books reading articles uh you know whatever else reading anything honestly I think it will be really well suited for uh annotating PDFs I could see it being very useful for that as well maybe you want to use it to answer emails add things into a to-do list app or a calendar app draw out diagrams uh I think there's a lot of different ways you could use this tablet that would be really useful I haven't really explored a lot of this yet but I think there's a lot of potential here and because there's so much potential it's hard to kind of cover all of this in a review because a lot of it depends on what you're going to get value out of and that's not necessarily what I'm going to get value out of so uh just consider the screen limitations the fact that the colors are very desaturated um you know things that are changing frequently are not going to really show up very well on the tablets and I think you can narrow down the kinds of things that you can use it for that are going to be a good a good user experience so time for the verdict if I went back to October and I could make this purchase de decision again would I do it I think I would I use this tablet almost every day because the thing I found that it works really well for is morning Pages morning pages are are a concept from the book the artist's way where you write just three pages of stream of Consciousness writing every morning and it's it's meant to sort of help you work through your thoughts get things written down prime your brain for Creative work and I do morning Pages most days and I really like them in the past I've done them by hand in a notebook but I like the e in tablet because I don't feel like I'm wasting paper um I don't have to keep buying notebooks that I'm going to fill with text that I'm never going to read again uh cuz the whole idea behind morning pages is both that you do it by hand for that that Mind Body Connection uh but the other point behind it is that it is trash you don't read it later it's not for reference uh it's just to get the thoughts out and and get that those thoughts processed it always felt kind of weird to just fill notebooks with something that is ultimately useless you know I'm physically using the paper so now with the with the eink tablet I feel like I can write as much as I want as much as I need to It's All Digital so I can save it but I'm not using resources to save it if that makes sense it also means that the notebook lies completely flat the the most recent morning Pages notebook I got I hated it because the The Notebook I got I tried to new one it doesn't lay flat and having to sort of press the notebook down as I'm writing into it was just really grading on my nerves so it's just a nice writing experience it's easy it's it's uh digital so it's not as wasteful but you still get the feeling of writing by hand I've also used it to sketch out some 3D model ideas for my procedural generation written out some novel ideas made to-do list drawn out some budgeting notes I used this tablet for a lot and I think it's earned its keep however a big however here I do not use the color features I could have and probably should have gotten a plain black and white e in tablet and it would have been just fine and it would have been cheaper there are other books uh tablets that are black and white there are other eating Tablets by other brands that are black and white there's the supernote that I looked at uh the Kindle scribe which still doesn't seem great for writing it seems more like it's it's designed for ebooks still but um there's there's a lot of different brands that you could get uh that are cheaper in black and white and I probably should have gotten one of those instead so if you're like me and you primarily intend to use the tablet for taking pretty plain notes I would recommend getting a cheaper tablet that's pretty plain it it would have been good for me to know in October but uh since I have it and since I use it a lot and since the you know everything sort of works smoothly it has a lot of features that I could make use of in the future I still feel pretty good about this purchase I do find myself missing physical paper uh when that happens usually I will just do some writing on physical paper like I still have I didn't throw away all my pens and notebooks when I bought it uh but using the tablet for morning Pages means that I miss out on a lot of that time that I used to have using my fountain pens and trying out different inks and I do miss that sometimes so that's another thing to think about if you're considering of of switching over from like analog note taking to digital note taking is is this going to bring you as much joy is what you're using now uh is there any benefit you know like I mentioned the the ability to sort of Waste Paper uh is has been fairly freeing um so that's another thing to consider for yourself if you're thinking about buying one uh so to summarize I really like the tablet I find it quite useful it's Pleasant to write on it's a nice bridge between analog and digital however it is definitely a luxury purchase for me I didn't need it I got it as a fun little toy to play with and there are cheap tablets that do the same thing just as well and that's kind of the tldr of the books note air3 C it's got kind of a long name uh but I hope this helped that's all I've got for today please subscribe and like this video If You Did In fact like it uh because I'll be back soon with another video and I hope to see you there okay [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Savallion

Views: 6,342

Keywords: onyx boox, boox note air 3, boox note air 3c, color eink tablet, eink tablet review 2024, best eink tablet, eink in color

Id: AwW2hRGMtig

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024