Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color

With a diagonal of 7.8 inches, this Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color offers a display that differs from conventional reading lights. Its digital ink lists 16 levels of gray and not less than 4096 colors. A notable difference which is combined with the possibilities offered by the use of an Android 10 operating system adapted to its needs.

The Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color uses a typical tablet hardware architecture: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 SoC associated with 3 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage. The device offers wifi5 and Bluetooth 5.0 and has a USB Type-C OTG port. It runs a special version of Android 10 that will allow the best use of the reader.

Its digital ink screen offers a definition of 624 x 468 pixels in color, or 100 dots per inch. Or 1872 x 1404 pixels in grayscale and 300 dots per inch. A front light illuminates the tablet for reading in low-light environments. A display that is both capacitive, with a glass covered panel as on a tablet, but also compatible with Wacom EMR technology that will recognize pens with 4096 pressure levels.

However, you should not expect to handle the reader in the same way as a tablet. If the digital inks have evolved, if the color is now partly present, the machine is still limited in terms of display. In addition to colors rather pale and different from a traditional LCD screen of tablet, the refresh offered by these technologies is very different. This excludes many uses and in particular all games requiring a very good reactivity. Video playback is also not recommended on this type of screen …

To tell the truth, if the Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color does indeed propose a support of Wacom active styli, a copy is moreover delivered with, I doubt the use of the object as a real drawing tablet. One will be able to take notes, take advantage of the character recognition functions of dedicated applications and obviously highlight or annotate documents…. but drawing blindly between each refresh of the device always seems to me a complicated scenario.