Boox Note Air 3 review 2025: specs, performance, cost | Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
I’ve only reviewed a handful of e-ink tablets. This Boox Note Air 3 caught my eye because it has a color screen and can install Android apps. So let’s check it out.
I’ll look at tech from the point of view of an illustrator and UI designer. So, I may not talk about your favorite features, but I’m going to go pretty in-depth about the pen drawing experience, what it’s like to take notes on the?Boox?Tablet, and generally the app ecosystem.
Now, if you have been around for a while, this is a really different tablet. It’s cool in its own way, but it’s probably not a good fit for most of you.
Table Of Contents
What is the best Android tablet to buy? Why?
What is The Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C?
The Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C is an e-ink tablet, it’s very different from all the other Android tablets that I have tested around here.
Think of this as like a sketchbook with benefits. A good sketchbook. It’s light, it’s portable; the Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C is only 10.3 inches. It’s great for capturing ideas and practicing, but it’s not really a great place to create finished, polished digital art.
The Note Air 3C is for pencil, maybe ink drawing — a digital version of that.
You draw a line, you can erase a line, and you get some benefits like being able to fill in enclosed spaces or being able to pinch in zoom, which is something I always forget I can’t do in a sketchbook.
The Note Air 3 C fits that bill perfectly because it’s crazy thin, the battery can last for days and days, and it comes with a pen to draw on. It’s a fantastic little digital sketchbook.
Price of The Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
Is it worth the $500 price tag? It really kind of depends on who you are and what you’re looking for.
I’ve also reviewed the reMarkable 2 and the Kindle Scribe; both of those are pretty good digital sketch and note taking books. They compare favorably to this.
But what puts this heads and shoulders above those for me is the Android App Store.
Don’t get too excited though, there are some good and bad news points there.
Related: Kindle Scribe
Related: reMarkable 2
Cons of The Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
To understand all that, you have to understand what the Boox, reMarkable?, and kindle Scribe is: an e-ink tablet. And they aren’t for everyone, but they do have some great benefits.
Most tablets display are constantly refreshing their pixels on their screen. That leads to some really smooth animation when you launch an app or when you’re scrolling down a page. But that also takes power.
When your screen is on, the battery is draining.
On an e-ink display, it’s set: that picture, the image, is on the screen, and it’s not going to refresh; the pixels are just off. And the effect of that on the battery is ginormous — or the opposite of ginormous, I mean, it’s less, it’s far, far less.
My mom has a Kindle, and she swears by it because she can load a whole bunch of books on it and then go on vacation for two weeks, and the battery just lasts and lasts. Also, because of how easy it is to read in sunlight, something that’s really hard to do on an iPad.
But this also means when the screen refreshes, you don’t get any kind of animation or effects. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see this screen blink once or twice, like cleaning off all the pixels, all Etch-A-Sketch style, before displaying any new ones.
It’s also not the clearest screen; there is some ghosting on here. You will see the previous image faded behind some of the icons when you load a new screen. It’s like a ghosting effect. It often feels slower than the tablet really is because we tend to equate smooth animation with good performance.
So, even though this display is color, it’s not black and white like the Kindle Scribe or Remarkable 2. The colors don’t pop; they aren’t vibrant. It’s just not what this tech can do. In fact, you’re limited to some 4,000 some-odd colors on this thing.
And many times, what it’s doing is combining one color to another color in order to create the colors that you’re looking for in many apps. So, color accuracy is not really what it’s doing here.
If you want a great outdoor sketchbook that will almost always never be charged, boom, here you go. This is a really good one, probably the best one I’ve ever used.
Writing And Drawing With The Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
Alrighty, let’s talk about drawing on the Note Air 3C. One of the reasons this is my favorite e-ink display that I have tested is that the note-taking app is light years better than what is on the Remarkable or the Kindle Scribe.
Although, I will say, I don’t have either of those devices anymore, so they may have updated.
However, those note apps, those drawing apps that they had pre-installed, were really not feature-rich.
Here?on?the?Boox?Tablet, it’s a different story; there’s a lot going on.
Now, while using an e-ink display, it doesn’t feel as responsive as an Android tablet or an iPad does. But here, when you’re in this Notes app, there is virtually no lag to this pen at all.
If I draw really fast and recording, and then slow down my camera, I can find lag, but who does that? I mean, other than me. Real-time, it’s surprisingly responsive.
Stylus Pen For Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
Now, this is a Wacom EMR stylus. This is the same tech that Wacom uses in their Wacom 1 tablets. This is the same tech that Samsung’s using for their SP pens. So, the lines are super smooth, there’s no wobble here, the pressure is really good, and generally, it’s just a great pen that doesn’t have a battery, so you never need to worry about charging it.
The stylus comes with a cute little sock that goes on top of it. I just recently learned that these pens can break if you store them standing up on their tips, so don’t do that, or if you just apply too much pressure to the tips. So, this is really protecting that. I learned this all the hard way a few weeks ago. Rest in peace, S Pen Creator Edition.
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Now, out of the box, the accuracy of this pen was spot on for me. But if you do need to jump in and calibrate this thing and make it more accurate, there are some calibration tools in the settings. If it ever feels off, the Notes app itself has a handful of brushes or tools to draw with.
There’s a fountain pen, there’s a paintbrush, there’s a ballpoint pen, there’s the pencil, there’s the highlighter. I’m going to be focusing on the pencil.
On the software side, it’s not doing anything that a pencil tool has not done like a million times in a million different other apps. Because this display doesn’t have to be super color accurate, they can put this super thick, rough matte coating on it and draw on that. Just feels so good.
This pencil feels rough and responsive, and it’s just great. This is something that I loved about the Remarkable 2 as well, and they nail that pencil drawing feeling here too.
It is the closest thing you’re going to find to drawing on pencil and paper without having real pencil and real paper. Just listen to this sound.
Note Taking With The Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
If you want to take notes digitally, this is the way to do it.
There’s no extra looping, there’s not too much smoothing, and it just feels so natural and organic when I’m just writing something down. I feel like I can move faster when I have more control, and that’s why this just feels so good.
This Notes app also has layers, something the Kindle lacks. It also has undo buttons, it has an eraser.
The eraser is probably the only negative part about this whole thing.
While the pencil is fast and responsive, the eraser is slow and it’s really hard to be accurate.
There’s a line erase mode; this is really nice for note-taking because you could just like scrub over part of a word or a letter and it’s going to just take out that entire letter.
For drawing, not so much, especially if you have like a really rough sketch. It’s not sure what part of the line it should remove or what area of the line it should remove. So when I say this is good for rough sketches as opposed to finished artwork, that eraser really plays into that pretty heavily.
It’s just not quite as responsive, not nearly as responsive as what you might find in other drawing apps.
Now, the layers that are here are pretty basic; you can turn them on and off. There’s no real transparency or anything like that. So if I was going to go about creating a sketch and then putting some finished line work on a separate layer above it, probably what I would do is I’d change the color of the pencil I’m using first.
That’s because if you use a black pencil and then put like black line art over that, it’s kind of hard to see what is pencil, what is line art; it would look kind of weird. So it takes a little bit of thoughtfulness and planning ahead on my part.
Other Tools and Features of The Onyx Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
Now, there’s a lot more to cover in the native Notes app. There’s like a basic bucket tool, there are some basic gestures you can pick, attention zoom — hallelujah! You can attach files to this like images and audio clips, and there’s like all sorts of templates and grids.
There’s a lasso tool, there’s a shape tool. For a Notes app, it seems pretty feature-complete to me, although I will say I am not a notes nerd; I just kind of scribble down what I’m thinking. For a drawing app, it’s not quite as feature-complete; however, it is far beyond what I found on the reMarkable and the Kindle Scribe.
Even the image exports are pretty good; you can’t save layered files here, but it kind of flattens everything out. You can export a PDF, a bitmap, a PNG.
Onyx Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C Android
There’s more. Remember how I told you with the top of this that it can run Android apps? That’s the thing that makes this like super powered.
But with great power comes great responsibility and, not so small amount of lag.
I loaded up some of my favorite Android drawing apps here — we’re talking about Clip Studio Art, IbisPaintX — and they work surprisingly well. The pen lag though here is just killer.
Where the Notes app is designed to be like super responsive with this pen and ink e-display, these apps were not designed to ever be used on anything like this and it shows.
It is hard to make lines line up or really know how accurate that you’re being. There tends to be okay for like quick sketches but far less suited for more finished line art because it’s just too slow.
So I would say these apps are okay for sketching, like quick rough sketches, but then again if that’s all you’re going to be doing, just do it in the Notes app, it’s better.
Color Display
This is also an area where color might really hold you back too, even though this is a color display. Exporting these images to another device shows how crazy inaccurate and how off the color representation you thought you were getting is to what it’s actually showing up on the screen.
I mean, even the color pickers are kind of wonky. So that’s a dead giveaway for drawing apps.
Google Playstore
The Google Play Store might not be all it’s cracked up to be. I do love that they’re not afraid to open this device up to it. Let’s face it, the reason the Kindle is popular isn’t for its features but for its ties to the Amazon ecosystem.
It is really easy to buy a book and just have it show up there, and the Remarkable is a much weaker device for closing itself off to all that.
Here, you can go to the Google Play Store, just load up the Kindle app and it works great.
Audible? Yep, there are speakers for that. Not good speakers, but it’s fine for listening to a book or a podcast.
Again, not the poppiest colors, but if you want to read digital comics in the beach or in the sun, it’s pretty much the only way to do it.
You can even load up the YouTube app on this thing; again, not ideal, but it does work alright.
Power Settings
Some lightning round stuff, just random stuff that I noticed about this. I wanted to throw in this?post. At first, when I woke this thing up every single time, it was so slow.
So it turns out it was completely shutting itself down after 15 minutes, and then you have to hold the power button for a few seconds, and then it takes like 15, 20, 25 seconds to like boot up so you could do anything with it.
Those were the default settings.
So what I did is I went in and I disabled power hour and I was able to get this thing to go to sleep every 5 minutes and then with a quick tap of the button, it will wake up instantly and it’ll only turn off when I say, “Hey, you should turn off now.”
Battery Life of The Onyx Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C
Now, earlier in this?post, I said that the battery can last for days, but the word “can” is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence.
The display also has a backlight. Now, this is great for like indoor reading or drawing or that sort of thing, also nighttime reading.
It’s almost impossible to read in a no-light situation on like a device without a backlight. It is worth pointing out that that backlight is a pretty large drain on the battery, a significant drain. You’re going to lose a lot more battery power with that on than you will if you keep it off.
Is The Boox Tablet Note Air 3 C For Illustrators?
So, is this worth getting for illustrators? Probably not. And while I love how that pencil feels, it feels so good on that screen, this device itself is pretty niche, at least for the illustration market.
While there are benefits, being able to draw outside, that battery life, the nice pen, the pencil feel, for most of you, you’re going to want to use those great Android apps, and the performance just isn’t here. The color accuracy isn’t either. And this isn’t really a replacement for an iPad or a Galaxy tablet.
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Senior Lecturer, Open University Israel
8 个月What about annotating PDF and syncing with Dropbox. That's the main thing I want