ONYX BOOX Tab Ultra ePaper tablet launches with Qualcomm Snapdragon 662

The e-paper market has grown steadily over the past decade, beginning with the launch of the Amazon Kindle in 2007. While many vendors are trying to make their mark in the technology required in this space, E -Ink enforced the roost.

The most popular category of products using e-ink technology has undoubtedly been e-book readers. More recently, digital notebooks and notepads have also emerged as significant drivers of e-ink expansion. These products take the regular e-reader and add support for an electronic pen/stylus. These products were initially quite expensive and were aimed at business people who dealt with huge amounts of paperwork and needed help with taking notes (e.g. lawyers). The Sony DPT series (review) has become one of the leading products in this category. As the market expanded, vendors like reMarkable and ONYX also began bringing compelling products to market and expanding the target market to include creative professionals and students. This category really became a mass market a few months ago with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Scribe (and is set to start shipping in time for the holiday season).

ONYX has been serving the e-reader market since 2006. They have an extensive range of e-readers (both greyscale and colour), e-paper tablets with note-taking support and even e-ink monitors. Today the company introduces a new category – ePaper Tablet PCs. The first product in this series is the ONYX BOOX Tab Ultra – a 10.3-inch device with a 16-megapixel rear camera. A first for e-ink devices, ONYX envisages that the camera can be used for OCR documents in the field without the need for an external device to act as an intermediary. The device is aimed at professional use cases. It must be noted that ONYX already carries the BOOX Note Air 2 Plus which offers most of the same features but is aimed at the home/casual consumer.

The ONYX BOOX Tab Ultra is ONYX’s first e-reader model to use the company’s proprietary fast refresh algorithm, implemented with a separate on-board hardware module. The company has used this on its Mira range of e-ink monitors, and using it in the e-reader is said to improve user experience with web content. Scrolling in particular has been a weak point of e-ink tablets due to the low refresh rate. The actual improvements that ONYX “BSR” (BOOX Super Refresh) algorithm provides in this aspect need to be done for further analysis through practical evaluation. The system supports four different modes for different tasks – reading books doesn’t require a quick refresh and can use “HD mode”, while typing requires a “balance mode”. A “Fast Mode” is available for surfing the Internet and an “Ultrafast Mode” for generic Android applications.

The BOOX Tab Ultra uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 SoC (4x Kyro Gold (A73 class) at 2GHz + 4x Kyro Silver (A53 class) at 1.8GHz, along with an Adreon 610 GPU) and comes with a special version delivered by Android 11 (including Play Store support). The device is equipped with a 6300mAh battery, 4GB LPDDR4x DRAM and 128GB eMMC flash memory. The USB-C port in the system also supports OTG functionality and a micro SDXC card slot. A magnetic keyboard case for the Tab Ultra is also available.

ONYX is known for long support cycles and offers regular firmware updates to expand the functionality of its ePaper tablets. Recent firmware updates have brought a more tablet-like user interface – a home screen with apps along with a favorites dock at the bottom. ONYX claims that using Android in its tablets (compared to custom operating systems in other products like Kindle Scribe and reMarkable tablets) allows its customers to take advantage of the multitude of personal knowledge management apps available for note-taking and data collection Are available. Another recently added functionality relates to mapping different pages in different documents using easy to create tags.

The ONYX BOOX Tab Ultra is available for pre-order today and is priced at $600. At the same time, the company also publishes the Nova Air 2 7.8-inch e-paper tablet with stylus support for $400 and that page 2 7-inch e-reader for $200. ONYX has generally not hesitated to try innovative ideas on the e-paper front (they were one of the first vendors to release color e-readers) and equipping an e-reader/digital notebook with a rear camera provides another interesting piece of the company. The new products broaden ONYX’s target market and solidify its position as one of the leading suppliers of e-ink products in the market in the face of increasing competition.