Onyx Boox Page

I love ereaders tbh. As someone with little space they work very well for me. Hundreds of books stuffed into a 7 inch screen - kid mint lugging around a suitcase of Redwalls on vacation would have loved them back in the day.

I hate Kindles for obvious, Bezos-related reasons, but I quite liked my Kobo for the run that I had of it. That said, I've been itching for something even more open-ended than that, to expand beyond epubs and make it easier to export notes to Obsidian. Soooo after a bit of research I picked up the Onyx Boox Page. Here's my thoughts on it after a week or so.

What makes the Page so cool is that it's built on top of Android. Like literally. It has access to the Play Store and .APKs. It's wild seeing something like Readwise running on an E-Ink screen, but it's awesome as a way to go through my RSS feed free of any distractions. It can even connect to bluetooth and play music! Now you're not gonna be watching a YouTube video on here or anything - the refresh rate is simply unusable for that sort of thing. But like. You could, technically, so that's neat!

This also brings me to my first big enjoyment of the Page - manga. I slapped the Shonen Jump and Tachiyomi apps onto the Page on my first day using it and they work incredibly for manga. I breezed through a couple chapters of Chainsaw Man and the picture quality was crystal clear. There was a bit of ghosting on pages, but I stopped noticing it after a bit of time. Plus you can adjust the settings on each app you put on the Page so that it fully refreshes the screen more frequently.

The e-reading experience is solid. Neoreader is the default choice and works for me with zero issues, but you can download other book reading apps through the Play Store or otherwise too! The Page took every file type I threw at it, excluding Amazon files - but that's nothing a little Calibre magic didn't fix. Again, because it's on Android, you can use all sorts of methods to move files to the Page or vice versa. There's stuff like Google Drive and Dropbox, but I personally just used SnapDrop to shoot my epubs from my phone.

Like I mentioned, I was looking for something that made it easier to move my notes and highlights from my reader into Obsidian, and the Page is great for that as well. There's a plugin that does most of the work for you. The coolest part is that you can just add Obsidian as an app on the Page and sync your notes right onto it. It's not great for writing notes, but I've taken to reading through some of mine on it. The Minimal theme even includes an e-ink optimized variation for that sort of thing.

But now that I mention it, that's one of my biggest cons about the Boox Page - the keyboard is kinda trash. I got used to it after some time, but even then it's still rough. Luckily it has auto-correct and a predicter to help you along, but I'm not writing a novel on it any time soon. The other issue is battery life. It's to be expected, but between running Android under the hood, getting notifications, connecting to the internet, and so on drain the battery quicker than you'd expect. It's still really good, but compared to my weeks-long-lasting Kobo, it doesn't compare. Luckily, you can get pretty close to that godlike battery if you go into airplane mode when you know you're not gonna access the internet any time soon.

All in all the Onyx Boox Page has already been a solid investment for me. It's a great form factor, taking notes on the stuff I'm reading and having it show up in Obsidian is cool, and having a device to read manga on like this is more than I could have asked for. Check it out if you want to expand beyond the Kindle/Kobo/Nook ecosystems.