Recommended Boox Tab Ultra C Pro review: My favourite digital notepad just got a game-changing upgrade By Gareth Butterfield Published 29th Aug 2024, 08:27 BST The Boox Tab Ultra C Pro now adds colours to its epaper display This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement. Consumer technology writer Gareth Butterfield has loved living with the Boox Note Air 2 Plus - but its successor is better than ever I've been using digital notepads for quite a few years now, and I've reviewed most of the devices from the main brands.
But I keep going back to Onyx for its Boox range of epaper tablets. The tablet that first drew me in was the Note Air 2 Plus . It's a 10.
3-inch "paperlike" display with a very sensitive stylus pen, a battery that lasts for weeks and, crucially, an Android operating system lying within. In many ways, it was that Android capability that was the icing on the cake for me, because it meant not only was it a more versatile device for work - with access to Gmail, Google Drive and other Android software , but it opened up plenty of new avenues for downloading documents, including eBooks. Sign up to our daily The Scarborough News Today newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with an ad-lite subscription to The Scarborough News, you get 70% fewer ads while viewing the news that matters to you.
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For a long time now, it's gone everywhere with me, because I can even use it as a Chrome internet browser - but there has always been a limitation. The display is black and white. Read More I used a free magazine subscription to make the perfect meal and saved a fortune Bob and Brad Q2 Pro review: A compact massage gun with a big feature Amazon has slashed the prices of its smart tech for a limited time only Could installing a heat pump be the answer to rising energy bills? This has never been a disaster.
It's good for battery life, most websites can be read perfectly well in black and white, and the documents I use for work are generally not colour-dependent. Physically, the Ultra C Pro isn't that different to the Note Air2 Plus, but the improvements are significant | Boox But then the Boox Tab Ultra C Pro came out, and moved the game on. That "C" in its name stands for "colour".
So all the bits I love about the Note Air 2 Plus are present and correct, but now it has a colour screen. Well, I say colour..
. This is still an epaper screen, so it has a limited range of colours. Certainly don't go expecting an IPS display.
If you expect the epaper screen of the Air 2 Plus just with a limited, pastelly colour pallete tacked on, you won't be disappointed. Physically, there aren't a lot of differences between the two devices. It's a little slimmer, and there's now a magnetic keyboard cover available, which even has a trackpad - so you can use it like a basic laptop .
It has a more powerful processor, reduced latency, a better battery, and bigger storage. In just about every way, then, it's a better tablet. And it ought to be, because it costs £649 , whereas the Note Air 2 Plus, if you can still find a new one, costs less than £400.
A keyboard case turns the tablet into a laptop | Boox There are other issues, too. The camera isn't great with just 16 megapixels, the speakers are a bit poor, and the browser can be a bit "glitchy" at times. It feels like I'm judging the Tab Ultra C Pro a bit unfairly now, though, because it's just not designed to run YouTube videos, or to run Angry Birds, or anything like that.
The Boox range has always been billed predominantly as a really, really clever e-reader with a note-taking capability. And that capability is better than it really should be. The new BSR system that reduces latency is marvellous.
The responsiveness from the magnetic stylus is superb, less so for the erasing function but it works, and the ability to add coloured highlights to documents - yes, you can annotate on PDFs - is such a useful tool. The operating system, with its newer version of Android, makes organisation and productivity a doddle. Storing things away in folders and finding them again couldn't really be any easier, I love the split screen functionality, you can set up work and personal profiles, and access to the Google Play store opens up limitless possibilities.
Read More Eufy S1 Pro Omni review: The best robot vacuum I've tested - but it comes at a price Miofive S1 Ultra review: A dash cam with some clever tricks up its sleeve Review: We test a smart door lock you can fit in 10 minutes The keyboard and trackpad is good, rather than brilliant, I don't really like the camera bump, but the camera does act as a scanner, which is neat, and it seems like the handwriting recognition is improved, because it fared better with my untidy scrawl - although it still wasn't flawless. It could be argued that adding colour to a Boox tablet doesn't do enough to justify the price increase, especially with those colours being quite subdued. But that would be missing the bigger picture.
In just about every other measurable way - and some of the other non-measurable ways - it's just a fabulous bit of kit. If you were to just use it as an e-reader, it might be expensive, but it's about as good as it gets. As a workhorse, it's significantly better than my beloved Air 2 Plus.
And I really can't praise it any more highly than that. Continue Reading Related topics: Boost.
