Why did I buy the Boox Note Air 2 Plus? eInk Tablet Review

Let's discuss the reading and writing journey that has led me to purchasing a Boox Note Air 2 Plus and what I like and don't like about the device.

Discussed in this Video:

📶 Next Steps

Current Stylus:

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🎵 Artist Attribution
"Remember"
Music by KaizanBlu

#productivity #eink #boox #remarkable

[BrandonKBoswell]

Please share your thoughts on the video and help me grow the channel by liking and subscribing. Thank you for your help and support!

[Marniex]

Brandon - It took almost a year, but I finally decided on the Onyx Boox Note Air 2 Plus, and I am absolutely loving it. Your review and response were major factors. Thanks!

[vladhmch]

Great review! I've been researching all 3 devices you mentioned and although the feel of the Remarkable is the most polished, not having back-light, ebooks, easy annotations to PDFs, and synching to One Note or Google without paying the Remarkable cloud subscription were all factor that made the Remarkable a terrible option for me. It's really amazing that back-light and free Wi-Fi synchronization is not included.

[geoffroper]

Nice video Brandon! I received my NA2P around the same day as you, and my experience has been similar. Same delights & frustrations. For me, it's a great device, a joy for note-taking and recording ideas.

[aaronr]

I feel like you are a YouTuber version of myself...from a lefty, to wanting a kindle reader and note taking device in one, to using Obsidian and Todoist. Great review :D Just picked up the Air2 Plus and really excited to reduce the clutter around my desk with all the notebooks and such.

[PoeLemic]

Thanks for covering this. Very helpful. We are planning to buy some type of higher-end e-ink device, because they're finally really becoming more useful and not just an expensive toy device.

[EricSmith]

Just bought it, too, and now I want you to make me feel good about it.

[markwilson]

Re: Pen Magnet. The magnet holds quite a bit better when the tip is pointed to the bottom when oriented for a right hander (wide border on the left). For the orientation you prefer, try pointing the pen up. I probably has something to do with polarity.

[Alice_Walker]

I recently lost my very beloved Onyx Poke 3 reader and want to replace it with something I can also use for journalling. This was a very helpful review. Thank you.

[vijaynadkarni]

Great review of the Boox Note Air 2 Plus! I was trying to decide between the Remarkable 2, Kindle Scribe and Boox Note Air 2, and your review was a major factor in my ordering the Boox Note Air 2.

[muhmud]

Hey Brandon, I also have similar requirements, but I went with the reMarkable 2. I had a Boox device before that; I would always end up pressing the eraser button on the Boox pen, and much prefer the reMarkable's eraser at the top of the pen.

Seeing some of the issues you had reminds of that device, though it wasn't as Air. The reMarkable is a much more polished experience. For my Kindle books, I have some software which converts them to epub format and then I just load them up through the reMarkable app. It's not as seamless as having native Kindle support, but it works well enough for me.

[toteZitrone]

Thank you for this very helpful video! I come from a similar standpoint and was tending to a boox device. I really hate reading on screen and I do not read any e-books for leisure, but I find that at University we get more and more provided with PDFs instead of prints and that a lot of literature is available in a digital format. I do have a convertible laptop, but beside the "getting shone at all the time" issue, it is also really tedious to pull that laptop out e.g. on a shorter (like 20 -30 minutes or so) traintrip. I thought a cheap e-book reader would be a good solution, but didn't like the lack of being able to take notes and also found that even the newer models with a pen function tend to not really have an option to export the annoted pdfs back, to have them available when I'm working on the PC and even worse, when the device might break down. I'm still a bit torn, sicce I could print a lot of pages instead of buying such a device and also still use my laptop beside that, but It was really great to see someone having this a little bit different approach to an e-reader. Most other reviews didn't really provide me with the insights I needed. (:

[Gojoe]

Love my boox, it's much more open than anything else and works for me!

[T-Bone]

Nice review. I appreciate the comparisons you made. Especially to the iPad which I have and never liked writing on. I wondered about adding a screen protector and you addressed that topic well. Thanks again.

[Tesserae]

I was surprised that one of your strikes against the iPad was the “blue light at night”; iOS and iPadOS have Night Shift (Settings > Display & Brightness) that, when enabled, automatically shift the colours to warm tones at night.

[AgeOfPixels]

Just got the Air 2 plus. superb. excellent review that made my direction clear between this and remarkable 2. To have apps like Pocket and Deezer and note capability is awesome. Thank you for the review

[keanusalimi]

Just received my Supernote A6x and man...im in love. But I do agree with t being a problem having no backlight - makes it impossible to see anything on the screen in the dark which isn't that big of a problem for me.

[heidis]

For an eink device the note is good for writing and drawing. Lots of menu options for drawing and adding layers. Many templates compared to Scribe and Elipsa 2E. Also nice to read all my nook, kindle and kobo books in one place in eink. I love the thousands of free ebooks in the store. I use it to journal my thoughts and keep track of my bank account transactions. Also the Note and scribe stylus are interchangeable and work on both devices. I am not too happy with the reading experience. Page turning is a bit sluggish no matter which refresh mode you choose. I like how you can handwrite on all ebooks even nook BUT it converts writing to text unless its a free book from the Boox store ( Project Gutenberg I assume) then you can write on book. Word of warning, its hard to set up and figure out at first.

[kbhasi]

I have the regular Note Air2, and would like to share some of my thoughts about your experience. I chose BOOX because I miss the old Kindle 'Active Content' feature, and didn't want to be limited to a single e-book platform.

(4:18) In my case, I often have to turn off all the contrast stuff, switch the refresh mode to normal or Regal waveform, then tweak the refresh rate, and drop the DPI to 220, but I adjust it for certain apps, like a higher refresh delay for reading apps where page turn animations can't be disabled, and in some apps that have graphical issues running at 220 DPI (like the official Twitter mobile client for Android), I have to set them to run at 240 DPI instead. I wish BOOX would allow users to change the default app optimisation settings applied to newly installed apps.
If you want, I can share my optimisation settings for if we both have apps in common, as I plan to list my optimisation settings and set-up guides on a new website I haven't launched yet, and I could also send you photos of how some of the books I read look on the display (sometimes compared to the print editions), as I read a lot of illustrated fiction and comics.

(5:12) For this, I use the official BOOX Pen2 Pro, though if I recall correctly, they don't have a colourway for that which matches the Note Air2 Plus.

(7:47) Yep! In my case, I enabled Android 'do not disturb' mode, but tweaked the settings in a way that would allow me to see notifications if I go into the notification centre, but not see the actual Android notification icons, so the status bar looks less distracting.

(6:26) You can actually reposition that toolbar, which is something I do a lot when sketching. Just tap and hold on any button, and drag.

(6:49) It took me around 15 minutes of searching to realise that's Readwise Reader, which seems to be in an early beta testing phase, and in my case, I use Pocket, but a free account, and mainly because of its integration with dedicated Kobo e-readers, which I sometimes work with in my research.
I do plan to eventually try Readwise, however my experience with it would be weird as I primarily read fiction books written with children in mind, and a lot of illustrated stuff at that, while I think Readwise is designed primarily for non-fiction, at least from what I can tell watching other YT users show how they use it in their videos.

(7:08) Evernote used to offer a similar feature, but that went away when they completely rewrote all of their clients from scratch. However, I can get similar functionality using an Automate script that serves a custom notification toggle that, when pressed, calls the 'Evernote action' home screen shortcut that then leads to creating a 'simple note' or 'simple task' (simple versions so that I can create them without leaving the app I'm in). While it works, Automate won't let me set a custom icon for the notification icon, instead requiring me to use one of the icons the app provides, which I believe are from Android 4.x.

Edit: I checked your other content and noticed that you do some stuff in Figma, which reminds me: I do sketch up UI designs on my BOOX before creating higher fidelity mock-ups in Figma, and as part of that, I also do thumbnailing of my UI design sketches, similar to what picture book (children's book) illustrators do.

[조바이든-rr]

thanks for the quick video. I cant stand my eye fatigue more. staring monitor all day long for studying or shopping, working like 24/7. and furthermore I recently started. IELTS study. bunch of letter in small space drive me crazy. thank u for your review!.