The Boox Palma 2 is still a Boox Palma. That's the best and the worst. Just over a year after Onyx launched its first $279.99 smartphone-sized e-reader (a device I love and use almost every day), the company launched its successor. And it is, in every meaningful sense, exactly the same.
On some level, this is fine. Well, even! The Palma's entire appeal is based on its simplicity. By shipping a device roughly the size of a smartphone, with access to all the apps in the Play Store and an easy-to-view e-ink screen that takes days to drain the battery, Onyx found a winning combination. For anyone looking for a way to easily read books, documents and material on the web, there is nothing like it. For me, it became not only a reader, but also a way to play music and podcasts and even take quick notes, without having to immerse myself in the chaotic swamp of my phone.
My biggest concern with the original Palma was simply how long it would last. It ran on an old chip and Android 11, both of which were woefully outdated even when it launched. The Palma 2 has a newer chip and Android 13, which means you can probably expect it to work and receive security updates for at least a couple of years. I wouldn't count on anything beyond that, though: Onyx is much better at spitting out new devices than it is at updating existing ones.
About that new processor: Onyx calls it a “faster octa-core CPU” and I can't tell the difference in a positive way. It outperforms the previous model, particularly in graphical tasks, but in use, I didn't notice the improvement anywhere. Apps still open a little slower than I would like; page changes work fine, but occasionally touches don't register; God help you if you ever try to play a game or watch a video. I'm not particularly bothered by the lack of performance improvement, since “fast” is not the point of this. But just to put it in perspective: the original Palma benchmarks as a solid mid-range phone from 2017, and the Palma 2 tests as a solid mid-range phone from 2019. Google's latest Pixel phones roughly triple the scores of Palma 2. Boox improved Palma, but only from one point of view really, In fact old phone to a really old one.
Everything else in Palma is the same, for better or worse. The 6.3-inch E Ink Carta screen still looks good and the plastic body still feels pretty flimsy. It still has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, both of which are sufficient for the purposes of this device. The 16-megapixel camera works well for scanning documents and QR codes and still takes poor quality photos otherwise. The power button is a little bigger than before and it now has a fingerprint reader for easier security, which is nice, but it's a little slow and a bit finicky, and do you even need a passcode on a Palm? (I don't have one. Maybe I should.) The battery on my Palma 2 lasts four to five days on a charge, the same as the previous one.
I'm torn between Palma 2 being exactly what I wanted and a missed opportunity. There's a lot more Onyx could do with this. I could have added a SIM slot and turned the Palma into a true minimalist smartphone. It could have fixed the huge gap between the glass and the screen, improved the materials, and created an object worthy of that $280 price tag. It could have refined the Palma version of Android, cleaning up settings and removing unnecessary built-in apps to make it even simpler. Or skip all that, get rid of the camera, reduce storage, and find a way to sell this for half the price.
On the other hand, La Palma is La Palma. If you have the latter, you definitely don't need this one. If you don't have any, get this one to make it last a little longer. Maybe this device will end up like the Kindle: Year after year, there's usually not much reason to upgrade, but when you break yours or leave it in your seatback pocket, there's a solidly better device waiting to replace it. And like the Kindle, it seems that Palma users will always have greater ambitions for the product than its manufacturers.
My real hope is that Palma has some competition. This combination (smartphone size, E Ink display, Android apps) isn't particularly sophisticated or proprietary, and there are plenty of ways other companies could do it better. There are a few other options available (here's a good reddit thread discussing some of them), but no one, including Onyx, has done this type of product justice yet. I'd love to see someone do it well.
Until then, the Palma 2 will do just fine. It lets me read my books and articles, stores my podcasts and music, and makes it nearly impossible to get distracted by TikTok. Still a winning combination in my opinion.
Photography by David Pierce/The Verge
