Onyx Boox Palma 2 review: a slight upgrade on a great e-reader

The Boox Palma 2 remains a Boox Palma. That is the best and worst thing about it. A little over a year after Onyx shipped its first $279.99 smartphone-sized e-reader — a device I love and use just about every day — the company has released its successor. And it is, in every meaningful way, the same exact thing.

On one level, this is fine. Good, even! The Palma’s whole 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 E Ink screen that’s easy to look at and takes days to drain the battery, Onyx found a winning combo. For anyone seeking a way to easily read books, documents, and stuff from the web, there’s really nothing quite like it. For me, it became not just a reader but also a way to play music and podcasts and even take quick notes, without having to wade into the chaotic morass of my phone.

My biggest worry 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 It ran on an old chip and Android 11, both of which were woefully outdated even when it launched.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 get security updates for at least a couple of years. I wouldn’t count on anything past that, though — Onyx is much better at spitting out new devices than updating its existing ones.

About that new processor: Onyx calls it a “faster octa-core CPU,” and I absolutely positively cannot tell the difference. It out-benchmarks the previous model, particularly in graphics tasks, but in use, I didn’t notice the improvement anywhere. Apps still open a little slower than I’d like; page turns work fine but occasionally taps don’t register; God help you if you ever try to play a game or watch a video. I’m not especially bothered by the lack of performance upgrade, since “fast” is not the point of this thing. But just to put it in perspective: the original Palma benchmarks like a solid midrange phone from 2017, and the Palma 2 tests like a solid midrange phone from 2019. The latest Pixel phones from Google roughly triple the Palma 2’s scores. Boox upgraded the Palma, but only from a really, really old phone to just a really old phone. 

Everything else about the Palma is the same, for better and for worse. The 6.3-inch E Ink Carta display 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 plenty for this gadget’s purposes. The 16-megapixel camera works okay for scanning documents and QR codes and still takes crappy pictures otherwise. The power button is a little bigger than before and now has a fingerprint reader for simpler security, which is nice, but it’s a little slow and a little finicky, and do you even need a passcode on a Palma? (I don’t have one. Maybe I should.) My Palma 2’s battery lasts four to five days on a charge, just like the old one.

I’m torn between the Palma 2 being exactly what I wanted and a bit of a missed opportunity. There’s so much more Onyx could do with this thing. It could have added a SIM slot and turned the Palma into a proper minimalist smartphone. It could have fixed the huge gap between the glass and the screen, upgraded the materials, and made an object worthy of that $280 price tag. It could have refined the Palma’s take on Android, cleaning up settings and removing unnecessary built-in apps to make it even simpler. Or skip all that, ditch the camera, downgrade the storage, and find a way to sell this thing for half the price.

Instead, the Palma is the Palma. If you have the last one, you definitely don’t need this one. If you don’t have either, get this one so it’ll last a little longer. Maybe this device will end up like the Kindle: year to year, there’s usually not much reason to upgrade, but when you break yours or leave it in a seat-back pocket somewhere, there’s a solidly better device waiting to replace it. And much like the Kindle, it seems the Palma’s users will always have bigger ambitions for the product than its makers.

My real hope is that the Palma will get some competition. This combination — smartphone size, E Ink screen, Android apps — isn’t particularly sophisticated or proprietary, and there are plenty of ways other companies could do it better. There are some other options out there (here’s a good Reddit thread discussing some of them), but nobody, including Onyx, has done this type of product justice yet. I’d love to see someone get it right.

Until then, the Palma 2 will do just fine. It lets me read my books and articles, stores my podcasts and my music, and makes it damn near impossible to get distracted by TikTok. Still a winning combo in my book.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge