Should’ve Been More of An E-Reader

Order the book “Palma” on Amazon

Bokspalma Design

Easy to store.

The most important thing to know about the Palma’s design is that it feels just like holding an iPhone in your hand. At 6 x 3 inches, it’s roughly the same form factor as my old iPhone 12 Pro Max. Its 2:1 aspect ratio is very different from the Kindle’s 8:6 ratio.

I love the portability of the Palma. It weighs just 170g, so it’s light and comfortable in a tote bag. I carried it around to and from work and several places for a week, and it never weighed down my office tote bag. It’s slim at 8mm thick, has an unobtrusive plastic body, and a sturdy exterior. The Palma came with a protective cover, but I didn’t use it. I tried it for a few minutes, but it added weight, was less ergonomic, and I didn’t feel it was necessary, so I quickly threw it away. The Palma is small, but it feels pretty sturdy, and doesn’t need any additional protection. The back of the device has a faux paper look, which I like.

While I liked that the Palma wasn’t so fragile that it needed a case, the lack of a waterproof rating left me a bit worried that a spill could be disastrous. The company claims the e-reader is “water repellent,” but it’s not waterproof. Compare this to the Kindle’s high IPX8 waterproof rating and you’ll see this is a major flaw.

The right side of Palma houses the power button and volume rocker, while the left side houses the SD card slot and customizable function buttons. I like how the buttons have a clicky feel and add a touch of glamour to an otherwise bland device. The function button is cleverly designed and offers three actions: 1) short press, 2) double click, and 3) long press. These actions include taking a screenshot, putting Palma into sleep mode, and navigating to the next or previous page.

The bottom of the e-reader features a Type-C charging port and two speaker grilles. To my delight, the speakers are great. They’re cheap and sharp like most phone speakers, but the volume is impressive enough to fill a medium-sized room. I loved putting the Palma on a shelf in my kitchen and listening to podcasts while I cooked. The cooking sounds and roaring kitchen exhaust were overpowered by the Palma’s speakers.

The speaker would be great too, as the Palma doesn’t have a 3.5mm port for wired audio connection. So you only have two options, Bluetooth or speaker, and I choose speaker most of the time. If you drive, you might listen to audiobooks on the car’s speakers. If you watch audio-heavy content, you’ll probably switch to a good pair of earphones.

Boox Palma Features

The OS is old, but the storage is huge.

Android 11 powers Palmawhich is quite outdated for an OS, considering that it’s currently running Android 15. Thankfully, the OS doesn’t have a huge impact on the day-to-day functionality of the reader. Still, if you want to get more out of your Boox, For tablets, an outdated OS may limit app compatibility.

Order the book “Palma” on Amazon

The processor on board is a Qualcomm octa-core 2GHz, with integrated graphics, 6GB of memory, an impressive 128GB of storage, and an SD card slot. Amazon’s Kindle has 64GB, so 128GB is immediately impressive. It’s even better when you consider that it can be expanded via the memory card slot, although the maximum number of GB the slot can provide hasn’t been revealed.

The light that powers Palma’s E-Ink Carta 1200 display is called Moon Light 2, and it bathes the device in a soft light that’s easy on the eyes. The 6.13-inch screen has a resolution of 824×1648 pixels at 300 ppi. At 6 inches, it’s a bit on the tall side for an e-reader, and a bit too phone-like.

It also has a 16MP rear camera with LED flash. The flash doubles as a fairly bright and useful flashlight if you swipe down on the Palma and tap the control center icon. However, the camera won’t satisfy your photography needs. It’s only for scanning documents.

Boux Palma Experience

I’m not good at browsing

To access my books, I had to download the Kindle app from the Google Play store and sign up for (and pay for) Kindle Unlimited. It cost about $12 a month, but it was easy to set up. During my week of reading my current book, Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen, the device felt confused between its function as an e-reader and a mobile phone. Personally, the 2:1 aspect ratio didn’t work for me – too little fit on each page, forcing a lot of scrolling and page turning that could easily be avoided with a more book-like form factor. I tried shrinking the book a bit to fit more text on each page, but this was also difficult to read, so I resorted to larger fonts that didn’t strain my eyes.

Touch sensitivity isn’t as good as on a smartphone or tablet, but it’s not bad either — I had to tap again a few times because I habitually tapped too lightly, but for the most part it was fine. To turn a page, I lightly tapped or swiped on the right side of the screen.

It was odd not to find a dark mode setting, as one of the features I looked for as soon as I got my hands on any device was dark mode. Throughout my testing, I felt like I was missing something important, as if I hadn’t yet fully grown accustomed to this new device. I reached out to Palma to ask if I’d missed it, and they confirmed that the mode still doesn’t exist.

Apart from the Palma’s e-reading capabilities, I think I need more processing power to perform other tasks efficiently. The browser and Play Store are at your disposal, which means you can download games, YouTube, Netflix, or any other app you don’t mind interacting with on a black-and-white e-ink display. But there was enough stuttering and lag for everyday browsing that I can’t imagine using it for light gaming. There was occasional pixel distortion while scrolling down, the display was constantly glitchy and messy with typing, and it just didn’t seem fast enough to keep up with my workflow.

One of the Palma’s biggest issues is pixel retention. I experienced awful image retention, where the image from the previous page remained clearly visible on the next page. This is a very common issue with OLED displays. When typing on the Palma and switching between websites, it was clear that the device was not fast enough to keep up. Switching to “ultra-fast” of the four refresh modes offered (HD, balanced, fast, ultra-fast) improved navigation, but it still wasn’t enough to provide a smooth, uninterrupted browsing experience.

While the camera was good for capturing images, the OCR was poor and I ended up using my phone to scan and read documents instead – if I were to use the Palma for this task I would have to make some significant corrections to the OCR results.

Order the book “Palma” on Amazon

As for gestures, Palma was very easy to get used to. Many iOS gestures work exactly like Assistive Touch, such as swiping from left to right on the screen to go back, or enabling Navigation Ball in Settings, and of course it retains many of the Android features too. For example, the bottom navigation bar with icons like Home, Back, Recent, etc.

The Palma’s battery life is great. It took just under two hours to fully charge and didn’t drain at all after that. I checked the percentage at the end of each day’s use and it was down just a little. The 3950mAh battery will easily last a week and a half with daily use for reading and browsing.

Boucks-Palma verdict

Trying to take on too many roles.

Palma tried to overachieve in many areas, but ended up failing in some ways. It would have been a much more impressive device, and ideally cheaper, if it had stuck to its role as an e-reader. In terms of form factor, it seems to be trying too hard to be a phone. In terms of features, it’s trying too hard to be a tablet. I would have accepted the effort if it was cheaper. But at a hefty $280 price tag, I don’t want to pay for features I don’t want or that don’t perform as well as I’d like. Plus, some obvious flaws, like no waterproofing, no dark mode, no 3.5mm port, are just not acceptable for a roughly $300 dollar outlay.

Order the book “Palma” on Amazon