The Boox Palma Is Redundant

After a couple weeks, I realized I don’t need a phone-sized e-reader.

The Boox Palma is beloved by many, and I get why. The device is very approachable and provides exactly what you expect; a great e-ink display in a phone size package. The hardware is not super premium, but perfect for what you need providing a lightweight and great experience overall.

So why do I find it redundant? Because even though it is a great device I, and many others, don’t need it. If you want an e-ink device to read on, there are tons of devices available. Though the Palma seems like the perfect form factor for reading, it is too similar to a smartphone for me to find it very useful.

Yes, the e-ink display is better to read on then my OLED iPhone display, but for reading long books I just don’t find it as useful as a Kindle or other larger e-readers. You can take this opinion as my own but I do feel personally that if you have a smartphone and you want to read something on that size, give a try on that before spreading close to $300 on an alternative.

My original experiment with the Palma 2 was to see if I could turn it into a device that I would spend more time on versus my iPhone. So I put all my ebooks onto the device including some specific apps. I wanted to try and only use Bluesky, Mastodon, Inoreader, and Instapaper on the Palma and remove them from my iPhone. I have also been using Kagi News that I was also able to install.

For a few days it was pretty cool using all of these apps on the Palma. But it didn’t stop me from wanting to use my phone, since watching videos on the Palma isn’t great. This wasn’t the biggest deal breaker, but did find the inconvenience of carrying both devices around kind of annoying. Instead of carrying a single-use device with my iPhone, like my Kindle Voyage, I was not carrying two devices that could mostly do the same thing.

To be honest, scrolling social media or reading long articles is nice on the iPhone. The OLED display with super high resolution makes reading text fantastic on my 15 Pro Max. Again, I get the appeal of reading on e-ink and the ability to help with not using so much blue light, especially in the evening, but I found doing some of the same things on the Palma worse then just using my iPhone.

Some could argue this is a feature not a bug, and I somewhat agree with that. If wanting to not use your phone so much is your goal, and making something’s not as great on a different device to help with reducing your need to scroll social media could be something that some might want.

For me though it just felt like I had a second device that does the same things my phone does but worse. So, before I dismissed the Palma entirely, I tried using it as just a reading device for my ebooks. This is also not a bad use for the Palma and in some instances it was much more comfortable to use then even my Kindle Voyage but not in all cases.

First off the fingerprint reader is not great. Having to make sure my thumb or finger is in the exact place that the scanner wants is not easy and leads me to just enter in the PIN most of the time. The other thing that is not that great was using the volume buttons as page turners. It isn’t bad but you have to hold the device in certain ways to reach it comfortably, and accidentally turning two pages instead of one happened more often than you would expect.

The Kindle Voyage on the other hand is super intuitive. It has larger bezels on each side but this is great for never needing to readjust my hand to click the page turn button, and I never accidentally hit it twice. So if I already have a single use e-reader, and I don’t like the Palma as a second phone to avoid using my iPhone so much, I realized that not only did I find that the Palma isn’t for me but feels redundant with the other devices I already have.

I do enjoy Boox products and will continue to test and try them out when I feel like it might provide something useful to me, but unfortunately the Palma 2 just wasn’t it. It is a great device, and if all the reasons why I don’t like it might actually be a benefit to you I would give it a try. For now I will stick with my iPhone for most things, and the Kindle Voyage is where I will read my books.