BOOX Tablet Go Color 7 Gen II E Ink Tablet 4G 64G Support Active Stylus InkSense (Black)

Great if you love tinkering
First, let me preface that I’m a power user. I only really had 2 options when upgrading my Kindle: 1) purchase the most current Kindle and figure out how to jailbreak it to run Alpine Linux (and hope it doesn’t get bricked at some point down the line), 2) get an Android based e-reader. The latter being a more turnkey solution, I looked at the offerings from Boox. As luck would have it, the v2 of the Color Go happened to be launching the same week that I started seriously considering making a purchase, so the timing was impeccable.With regards to the device itself, it feels pretty robust. The weight and feel of it is premium to my hands. The large bezel on the side makes it very easy to hold and I do like the texture on the back of the device for even better grip and feel. While the weight makes it feel more substantial than my outgoing Kindle, it’s still nowhere near heavy enough for me to feel uncomfortable during 4-5 hour reading sessions. I think my own gripe with the device is that the volume buttons feel slightly loose in the housing, but this is being nitpicky. Battery life so far has been acceptable to me. With stock settings the device completely shuts down after 10-15 mins. At these power settings, the device easily lasts weeks between charges. Since the startup time of the device is quite long (~1 min), I only shut the device down after 8 hours of idling, since I don’t always have long reading sessions. Oftentimes, I’ll read a few chapters in between other activities, and doing this setting allows me to hop straight back in within 1-2 secs. Even at this setting I’m getting about a week of life.When it comes to actually using it, the glass of the screen has a nice finish and the touchscreen is plenty responsive for an e-reader. The resolution seems more than adequate for the content I consume. There are lots of refresh modes and a few toggles with regards to contrast and vividness, and I’ve found that each type of content has its own optimized setting.Manga: There’s enough resolution and contrast to where this reads almost like an actual tankoban. Only downside is when using Viz or ShonenJump app, there’s no way to map the volume buttons to page turn. I believe this is an app limitation, not a device limitation. My manga through the Kindle store works just fine.Comics: I was hoping to use this to catch up on back issues from series that I’ve fallen behind on. This is probably where the device is the weakest. The colors are muted and cause the screen to be very dark. I’ll either have to turn up the brightness really high (which causes even more washing out of the color), or use an external light source. However, for my use case, this is still completely passable as the only other alternatives are to use a bulkier Android tablet, or reading from the actual raw books instead. This is mainly where I’m taking off a star, since this was my primary reason for going with color instead of black and white.Ebooks: Being that the device runs on Android, I have access to literally everything. Over the last decade, I’ve amassed a collection of DRM ebooks from different marketplaces, as well as random epubs and pdfs. I can read my Kindle books through the Kindle app, Google books through Google Books, etc.. I also have a Calibre server at home which I can easily access using this device. I’m able to open all of my books using its respective native app.Compared to other devices, there’s a fair amount of customizability that you’re able to do. The device is great once you figure everything out, and it’s somewhat required to get the most out of it. That said, I suspect that people looking for a turnkey ereader for all of their content might get frustrated. As an Android and Linux user, I’m no stranger to any of this, and it’s right up my alley.Last note, I had no desire to get the pen for this device since I have other devices for that. I have no idea if this feature is any good.

Poor hardware esp as a 2nd Gen device an does not have the Onyx Notes app
I hate to give something a 1 star rating. I have a bigger boox device (4C) that I is an outstanding device. I bought this device so that was not so big to use in travel or short infomal meetings. I use the Onyx Note app heavily – it is an excellent app. This device came factory wrapped with no indication of mistreatment. The screen suffers as described in most of the one star reviews here. Random input, no input and seems as if the device is frozen at times. It was unusable. I didn’t get a chance to test with a stylus, as I seemed to get something that had been returned to Amazon with a stylus that was not the original. Worse is that the Onyx Note app is not part of the software installed. I wanted to have my notes on both of my Boox devices. I knew size would be an issue, but I was willing to deal with that. I suppose if the device worked, I could load another app. But I use handwriting for Notes which can be searched and you can setup tags. Assuming you sync stuff with the onyx cloud, you can have this in multiple devices. I had to return the device as unusable because of the hardware. But it also is just a reader with a stylus support that has no real purpose. Bummer.

I switched from Kindle to Boox a couple of years ago due to the open Android system. There are heaps of reading apps there.I upgraded to the Go 7 color Gen 2 from the Boox Poke 5. You can clearly see the difference. The Poke 5 is a pure black and white e-ink reader. Light, clear, and eye-comfortable, I am very happy with that and would like to try something new, like a color ebook, to read some comics, but I have noticed that compared to the Poke 5, it is clearly not as bright. Even with maximum lights on, the color is very weird. Yeah, no one might use it with maximum lights on, but just for reference. It is more like a grayscale reading experience. I am not sure if it is due to Kaleido 3; it is my first color ebook, so I cannot compare it with others, but for sure, if reading a pure ebook, I will still stick with my old Poke 5, and the color Go 7 Gen 2 may be more like a toy for some casual comic reading. Btw, the back of the Go 7 color Gen 2 is much easier to hold than the Poke 5.

This is my 1st e-ink device. I thought my expectations regarding the washed out look of the color versions was tempered well enough going but the reality was much starker than expected. Think old newspaper print instead of glossy magazine and you should be ok. Getting used to though I find it an overall great device that much easier to read on than my cell. The android environment is also a major plus giving me complete freedom on sources I can get my reading kicks from.