Onyx Boox Nova Air C review

While the Nova Air proved a capable device, bolstered by the versatility that comes from running Android with Google Play support, the Nova Air C doubles down by offering a very similar experience but with added flexibility through the provision of a color LCD layer over the top of the E Ink display.There are really only two trade-offs. Should you buy the Onyx Boox Nova Air C?However, the tablet more than makes up for this with the extra information it's able to provide with the move to color. The Nova Air C delivers enough flexibility to work as an ereader or digital note-taking device, while also moonlighting as a basic Android tablet.You won’t want to make this your default entertainment device, since even its fast E Ink refresh rates come with considerable smearing, unable to keep up with even the most basic tablets. You can load up a YouTube video, pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard, and type up documents or notes in Google Docs.While the limited color range of the display may be a limitation in some arenas, the display tech of the Nova Air C gives it a huge edge in terms of battery life. On the sunniest day of the year, you can use the Nova Air C outdoors for hours on end while barely making a dent in the battery.Do the same thing with any LCD or OLED tablet, and it will likely survive only a couple of hours before requiring a recharge, because you’d have to max out the backlight to be able to see anything on-screen. While Onyx has done a commendable job getting grayscale to work in the black-and-white iterations of its tablets, the data that color can help convey on the Nova Air C makes it far more useful. Your experience with these apps will vary, since not all are built to support such a color-limited device; but even in apps that it isn’t perfectly suited for, it can often make do.The Nova Air C is a great device for document-focused tasks, and can even help with more visual-studying situations, such as exploring Memrise or Khan Academy. The flexibility to shift from handwritten notes to typed ones, or even document-editing in Google Docs or other note-taking apps, is powerful for an ereader.Performance may not be the star of the show on the Nova Air C, but battery life certainly is. Even though the tablet comes housing just a 2,000mAh battery, charged via USB-C, its E Ink display and LCD layer don’t burn through a ton of power.While a standard tablet displaying a static image will constantly use power for the backlight, the Nova Air C uses next to none.