This Phone-Shaped E-Reader Helped Me Kick My Doomscrolling Habit

On balance, 2024 has not been a great year for me, for reasons both personal and global, and my smartphone addiction hasn’t been doing my perpetually simmering anxiety any favors. Even though I’ve stepped away from one toxic social media platform in favor of another, friendlier one, I still have a tendency to fall into doomscrolling—which is why the Boox Palma has been such a godsend for me since I first reviewed it back in February.

The Palma is a rather unique e-reader from Onyx International, a Chinese company that has slowly built up a cult following among e-ink aficionados over the past decade and a half—e-ink being the name for the paper-like black-and-white displays on devices like the Kindle Paperwhite. Two key things set the Palma apart from any e-ink device sold by Amazon (or Barnes & Noble, for that matter): The shape and its unrestricted operating system. Both are key reasons why it’s the best e-reader I’ve ever used, and why I’ve spent the past eight months reading more and spiraling on social media less.

It’s good enough that I’d easily recommend picking one up, even though Onyx has recently released an upgraded Boox Palma 2, which I’ll be reviewing soon—the differences aren’t super significant (the newer version has a fingerprint scanner, a faster processor, and a more recent version of Android, but costs $35 more as of this writing) and either one will serve you well.

An e-reader that looks (and almost works) like a phone

Credit: Joel Cunningham

Before I got the Palma, I did most of my reading on my iPhone. I’ve owned several e-ink tablets over the years, dating all the way back to the third-generation Kindle (the one with the keyboard) my parents gifted me way back in 2010. I’ve always found the proportions of the standard 6-inch e-reader screen a little awkward—too squarish to feel like an actual book, and too big to easily fit into a pocket. For a while I used a larger 7.8-inch Nook Glowlight Plus, and while the extra screen real estate was nice, it was hampered by slow software and difficulties loading library books.

But whether Kindle or Nook, I never stuck with one device for long, as I’ve always found it annoying to carry around a second device too big to easily fit into my pocket, and all that device-hopping means my book collection is spread across multiple incompatible ecosystems (Nook, Kindle, and Kobo, not to mention Libby, my library’s e-reading app of choice).

Meanwhile, I always have my phone with me, and I have five different reading apps loaded on it. Unfortunately, my phone also gives me ready access to the rest of the internet, which meant more often than not, I would pull out my phone intending to read and end up checking my notifications and getting sucked into the latest horrors on the news, or maybe just mindlessly scrolling dog Reels.

The Palma solves for all of these issues. It is basically the same size as an iPhone 15 Plus, so it’s easy to slip into my pocket, and at 6.13 inches measured diagonally, it mirrors the screen size I’ve gotten used to from my years of reading on a phone. But it still has the benefits of a black-and-white e-ink display—which, for me, means more immersion into whatever I’m reading, and less risk of distraction.

More than that, it runs on a fairly standard version of the Android 11 operating system, with access to the full Google Play store, which means I can download all of the different reading apps I want, and I don’t have to worry about being tied to a particular retailer.

Basically, the Palma offers everything I’ve ever wanted from an e-ink reader, which is probably why I’m still using it after nearly a year.

Android gives you freedom

My biggest beef with my various Kindles and Nooks was the fact that I don’t particularly love the user experience for either device—generally, I think the Kindle and Nook iPhone apps work a lot better than the stodgier e-reader versions.

The beauty of the Palma is that on the operating system level, it basically is a phone—as noted, its fairly unrestricted Android 11 OS offers flexibility you won’t find in any proprietary on-device software. Instead of resigning yourself to sorting and displaying your books however your Kindle wants you to, you can choose whichever app(s) you like best, as long as they’re available for download in the Google Play store (sorry, Apple Books readers), no jailbreaking or side-loading required (though you can certainly do the latter if you like).

Credit: Joel Cunningham

I currently have installed the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo apps, as well as the Libby app (for accessing library books from the Brooklyn Public Library), plus a format-agnostic app called Moon+ Reader Pro ($6.99 for an ad-free version) that I highly recommend if you want more customizability in your reading app, from font choice to kerning to file sorting and more.

The point is, any and all of these apps are open to you—though Onyx has its own default reading app, you are in no way railroaded into using it.

Listen to your audiobooks and podcasts (but bring your wireless earbuds)

Android support means you can also use the Palma to listen to your audiobooks—there’s no headphone jack, but it will pair with your Bluetooth headphones easily enough. It does have an external speaker—only one; one of the speaker grilles on the bottom of the device is ornamental—but the sound quality is mediocre at best.

I tested out syncing audiobooks via Audible and the Kindle app, and it worked as expected, as did playing audiobooks downloaded from Libby. There’s enough onboard storage—128GB, with a SIM tray for up to 1TB of extra storage—to hold an awful lot of audio material. (I’m not a heavy audiobook listener, but I did download Pocket Casts to try out the Palma as a podcast machine, too. In short: It works well, but I still prefer my iPhone for that, as it syncs with my Apple Watch and automatically connects to my Beats earbuds, no pairing required.)

Add fonts, screensavers, and more with ease

My favorite thing about the Palma is I can plug it into my laptop and easily sideload books, upload new fonts, and do anything else you can accomplish via drag and drop. The Android OS isn’t shy about letting me see the file structure and put things exactly where they need to go. The end result is, if you’re willing to put in a little effort, you can create a truly custom experience. Set your own lock screen, choose your own wallpaper, read in Wingdings: The possibilities are endless.

Snappy performance

With 6GB of onboard RAM, the Palma is certainly fast enough to deliver your e-books at a clip, and turning pages or skipping through chapters rapidly is no problem. Navigating around a PDF is pretty smooth, too: Provided the app allows it (as does the native PDF reader, Neo Reader), you can pinch to zoom in and out and enjoy near-instantaneous performance, which is much more than I can say for trying to magnify a PDF on my old Nook.

The device also lets you browse the internet with minimal lag, and apps load quickly enough that I never felt like I was using a lesser device.

Good (but not exceptional) battery life

One of the benefits of e-readers is that their basic displays sip power instead of gulping it. And while the Palma will go a lot longer between charges that your smartphone, in my anecdotal experience (I didn’t run a dedicated battery test) it doesn’t last quite as long as a Kindle, especially if you’re using a lot of different apps.

Reading for an hour or two a day with the frontlight on throughout will drain the battery by half in less than a week. Once plugged in (via USB-C), it charges pretty fast. You can stretch out this timeline by dimming the light or reading with it turned off, but my eyes are old and tired, so I usually leave it on. I appreciate that I don’t need to charge it every day, but I would prefer not to have to charge it quite so often.

More than an e-reader (but still not a true phone)

Android support means you can download more than reading apps. You can also download Goodreads, Gmail, Chrome, Bluesky, Reddit, or anything else you want.

A super-responsive screen (for an e-reader)

Unlike the extremely clunky screens on most e-readers, which suffer from severe lag that makes even scrolling a webpage unpleasant, the Palma offers four different refresh modes, from HD (best for reading super-crisp text on a static screen, as when reading a novel), to Balanced (for scrolling through PDFs), to Fast or Ultrafast, which can handle scrolling through your social media feeds with responsiveness close to what you’d get with an LCD screen. Weirdly, however, the onscreen keyboard still feels slightly laggy, with characters appearing onscreen a noticeable fraction of a second after you press them.

YouTube in e-ink

On a Kindle, doing anything but reading feels like a chore, but it actually is feasible to browse the web and even watch videos on the Palma. Play a YouTube video and you’ll certainly be able to tell what you’re looking at, though the ghosting will get worse the longer it goes on, forcing you to tap the action button to trigger a manual refresh. Everything will still look a bit grainy, and of course it’s all in grayscale, but considering I could barely read my email on my first Kindle’s “experimental” web browser, I’m still pretty impressed.

Play your games (as long as they don’t need color)

If you’re wondering if the Palma can serve as a gaming device, it’s another qualified yes. I downloaded a Tetris app, which functioned surprisingly well in Ultrafast mode. The NYT crosswords are a pretty good fit for it, but don’t plan on playing Wordle, as you won’t be able to tell the colored squares apart in grayscale. Though I didn’t try it myself, there are videos online of people trying to play more ambitious fare (like a first-person shooter), and it certainly…is possible, I guess.

Look, I would never suggest that using any non-reading app on the Palma is a great experience, but they will work, and in a way, their comparable ugliness to how they’d look on a full-color LCD is a boon—as I noted at the start of this review, I’m using the Palma because I want to read more books. If I want to be distracted by an immersive screen experience, my iPhone has me covered.

No SIM support

Though it looks and functions like an Android phone, the Palma can’t replace yours, as it lacks SIM support (as noted though it has a side-loading card tray, it accepts only memory cards up to 1TB). You can use it for phone calls over wifi via a supported app (like Google Voice)—the device has both speakers and a microphone in addition to supporting Bluetooth headphones. It will also run most messaging apps via wifi, though you may need a SIM-less phone number to get them up and running.

The lack of SIM support is hardly a dealbreaker for me, as I wasn’t looking to replace my phone with an e-ink device. (If that’s your goal, look to Hisense, another Chinese company that makes a number of e-ink mobile devices.)

No significant waterproofing

Also very un-phonelike, at least when it comes to modern flagship devices: the Palma isn’t significantly waterproof. Yes, technically even iPhones are only “water resistant,” but that translates to “they can survive being immersed in water for half an hour.” The Palma is “water resistant” in that a few raindrops on the display won’t hurt it, but if you drop this thing in the tub or the pool, there’s a good chance it won’t survive.

Waterproofing is hardly a universal e-reader feature—the entry-level Kindle doesn’t have it—but it would be a welcome addition to such a pricey device.

A great one-handed reading experience

My mixed reactions to the Palma as an Android device aside, it excels as an e-reader. The form factor is what it is—I personally find the 6.13-inch screen very pleasant, and the 1648 x 824 screen resolution at 300 ppi means the text is always super crisp and readable, especially at HD resolution. The build quality feels good: the screen is “micro-etched glass” that mostly avoids issues with glare, the physical buttons are responsive and easy to click, and the back cover is lightly textured and easy to grip.

You have the choice of turning pages by either tapping the touch screen or using the physical buttons on the right hand side of the device, making it easy to read one-handed (especially considering how light it is—around 170 grams). Though support varies from app to app, most of the reading apps I’ve tried will turn pages forward and backward using the volume up/down button. You can also change your settings to read via infinite scroll using either your fingertip or the volume button.

An additional button on the left side can be mapped to a number of different functions based on a quick press, a long press, or a double tap. By default, a single press will refresh the screen, which is handy if you frequently find yourself annoyed by the faint ghosting that can plague any e-ink screen, but you can also use it to turn pages, skip to the next chapter, and more.

A comfortable frontlight

The ghosting you see here can be solved for with a quick tap of the refresh button on the side of the Palma.
Credit: Joel Cunningham

The frontlight on the screen is comparable to what I’ve experienced with other modern e-readers—you can adjust the brightness and the warmth to suit your comfort level—with perhaps a bit more of a visible “ring” around the edge of the screen than you’d see on, say, a Kindle Paperwhite.

I wasn’t super impressed by the auto-brightness option, which purports to set the best brightness level based on your current lighting conditions. I found it tended to waffle back and forth between too bright and too dark, even as I sat unmoving in a dark room. It’s easy enough to adjust the lighting manually that I wasn’t much bothered by this, but it’s worth noting (and turning off).

What else can the Palma do?

After eight months of use, I feel fairly safe in saying the Palma does everything I want it to very well, and a bunch of stuff I don’t really need it to do surprisingly well. It also can do a lot more that I’ve only tried for purposes of running it through its paces, including scanning documents with the default scanner-to-PDF app and taking photos and shooting video via the 16 megapixel rear camera (provided you download a camera app; there’s no native default, which is odd).

The pictures will look like crap on the device itself, but if you hook it up to your laptop to access them, they seem comparable to anything you’d take with a basic smartphone camera—not iPhone quality by any stretch, but why does an e-reader need to have a camera at all?

Risks to consider (Who is Onyx International, anyway?)

The nice thing about a Kindle is if yours breaks, you can just call up Amazon customer service to get it fixed or replaced. With a Boox Palma, you won’t have that luxury: Parent company Onyx is based in China, and Reddit’s e-reading communities are riddled with reports of less-than-ideal customer service. Even keeping in mind that mind most people don’t post their good customer service experiences to Reddit, it’s troubling: Some users have reported displays failing seemingly spontaneously, and if that happens to you, you’ll be on the hook to get it replaced (unless Onyx determines the limited one-year warranty covers whatever has gone wrong, which seems unlikely, at least based on comments from grumpy Redditors).

As noted, the operating system is based on Android 11, and it’s not updatable. This isn’t a huge deal in terms of functionality right now, but its conceivable that in the future, your reading apps’ updates will no longer be compatible with an OS that’s already more than four years old and has, in fact, already reached its “end of life” when it comes to security updates. That probably isn’t a huge deal for a device you’ll mostly be reading on, but it’s something to consider if you want to download other apps that might contain sensitive personal data that bad actors could somehow get ahold of via an unpatched security issue.

There’s also the fact that, as a Chinese company, Onyx isn’t subject to the same privacy restrictions and laws as Apple or Amazon, but that’s a well of paranoia I’d rather not dip into. That’s more than I can say for some folks on the r/Onyx_Boox Reddit group, though. (As it is, the only thing anyone would learn from looking at my Palma is that I read a lot of science fiction.)

All of this being said, if you’re in the United States, I would definitely recommend buying the device from Onyx’s Amazon store, as you’ll get the usual benefits of Amazon, including Prime shipping and the option to reach out to their customer service if you have an issue with your device.

The bottom line

All of this functionality does come at a price—the device retails for $279, though you can currently pick one up for $245 on Amazon. That’s obviously much more than entry level Kindles, and in the same ballpark as the high-end (and now discontinued) Kindle Oasis.

But all of its features, along with the form factor, also means the Boox Palma is the best e-reader for me, and certainly the best e-reader I’ve ever used. I’ve stuck with it all these months, and it has helped me read more and use my phone less, which is my number one priority when it comes anything I’m using to read (including an old-fashioned paper book). I think there’s a good chance you’ll love it, too.

Boox Palma specs

• Display: 6.13-inch, 824 x 1648 (300 ppi)

• CPU: Qualcomm Octacore processor

• RAM: 6GB

• Storage: 128GB

• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 5 (2.4/5GHz), Bluetooth 5.0

• Lighting: Frontlight with temperature adjustment

• Camera: 16MP rear camera

• Operating system: Android 11

• Battery/charging: 3,950mAh via USB-C

• Size: 159 x 80 x 8mm

• Weight: 170g

• MicroSD card support