There’s a new wave of minimalist screen gadgets on the horizon. Some are on a crusade to save our eyes, while others are all about taking the concept of readers into the limitless world of Android. In this field, nobody does it better than Onyx and its Boox tablets.
Onyx has been churning out one-of-a-kind monochrome and color e-ink devices for a while now. No other brand comes even close to the form factors that are available from Boox, from tablets in various sizes to phone-like gizmos. The latest oddity from Boox is the Go Color 7.
It matches the asking price of the Kindle Oasis and pursues the same off-balance design with two physical buttons. But the boxy Boox slate fares better than the Kindle at almost everything you can imagine. It’s got a color ePaper screen, fast silicon, a lovely build, and fulfilling software that leaves little to complain about.
Once again, Onyx delivers gorgeous hardware
In the face of segment juggernauts like the Kindle — and to some extent, Remarkable — Onyx doesn’t get enough credit for its design ingenuity. From sleek metallic slates to the fantastic palm-friendly Boox Palma, the recent portfolio stands out courtesy of its thoughtful aesthetic choices and fantastic build quality.
The Boox Go Color 7 is no different. It’s a device that chases the reading experience of reading a magazine or newspaper, so you get exactly that on all sides. The display has a matte ePaper look, while the rear panel tries to emulate the leather-clad looks of a hard-cover medieval-era book.
Oh, it’s water-repellant, too. It also helps that the device weighs just 196 grams, and the thick right bezels offer a secure grip. Don’t balk just yet if you’re a lefty or a digital southpaw. That’s because Onyx has fitted its “Kindle Killer” with a gyro sensor that effortlessly changes the screen orientation, while the centrally positioned two-button assembly offers an identical convenience.
It’s worth pointing out that not all apps support rotation adjustments. Microsoft Teams, for example, will neither respond to automatic rotation nor work with the four manual rotation presets available. The app also makes the keyboard go awry and stutters way too frequently. Fix the app, Microsoft, please!
Powerful and capable specs
The Boox Go Color 7 offers 64GB of onboard storage, of which you get about three-fourths for storing all kinds of files. With over 45GB of storage space available, you will have a hard time filling it with digital reading material.
But if you have installed communication apps like Telegram and Slack, which eat up a ton of space over time, that door is still open. The ePaper reader comes with a dedicated microSD slot to expand the storage. I only wish there was a headphone jack on this one. The USB-C port for charging can also relay audio — you just have to find earphones with a USB Type-C cable.
But hey, you can always pair your wireless listening gear and enjoy all the podcasts, audiobooks, and music that the internet has to offer. The onboard speakers aren’t too bad and do an acceptable job of narrating books. Just don’t go looking for crystal clear percussion tools and delicate bass beats in an ASAP Rocky track.
While the hardware is excellent, it’s the software that puts the Boox Go Color 7 miles ahead of rivals like the Kindle. That advantage is full Android support. More than anything, it rescues you from file incompatibility hell. This tablet can technically run any app that your average phone or tablet can.
Inside this dinky slate is an octa-core chipset, which the CPU-Z app identifies as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 665. This chip has appeared in a healthy bunch of entry-level Android phones in recent years, and it can handle most day-to-day apps with ease. The tablet also has 4GB RAM and a 2,300mAh battery.
The hardware is worthy of a serviceable Android device, but it’s the ePaper display tech that holds it back from the kind of fluidity you would expect from a phone. On the Boox Go Color 7, you get a 7-inch Kaleido 3 (1680 x 1264 pixels) display that can produce 4,096 colors. The pixel density is a cool 300 pixels per inch (ppi), but in color mode, it drops to half that number.
The key hurdle here is the ePaper tech, which still hasn’t cracked the code for a normal refresh rate, let alone something like 60Hz or 90Hz. That’s also why the Daylight DC1 tablet went with a new monochrome display tech that refreshes at 60Hz, but can technically go all the way up to 120Hz — rendering fluid frame motions and animations.
So, how does the ePaper translate on the Boox Go Color 7? Well, as I mentioned above, it can technically run any Android app, but the refresh rate will be slow, and as a result, there will be artifacts of the previous frame and ghosting. A lot of it, actually, but only in apps that go overboard with transitions.
The experience was not too different on the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C. You can play chess and card games, but don’t try to look at anything above Angry Birds. In retrospect, that would also amount to overstretching way past what the device is all about.
A truly impressive display
The Boox Go Color 7’s ePaper display is intended for reading. But as a sweet bonus, it can produce a few thousand colors, too. Think of it like a colorful take on a Kindle but with the added flexibility of Android, which in turn opens the floodgates and convenience to an extent that e-ink devices typically don’t offer.
Functionally, it’s a reader at heart, with the added perk of a colorful paper-like screen. But instead of burdening you with extremely limited software and the hassle of companion apps, this one can do it all natively, thanks to the glorious world of Android apps.
That opens up the entire internet tailored to fit on a 3:4 screen. I went overboard, all in the name of overzealous gonzo tech journalism. After installing a few reading and news feed apps, I used it as a reference screen for my communications across Teams, Slack, Gmail, X, and Telegram. I loved every moment of it.
Another aspect of the Boox Go Color 7 that often gets overlooked is the built-in Boox Neo Reader. The app is loaded with some terrific features. You can specify the page-scrolling behavior, pick between three formatting and zoom behaviors each, adjust granular navigation options (such as cropping, column collage formats, and direction), and tweak image characteristics such as sharpness and picture smoothness.
The app even offers dedicated comic and article modes, both of which break the page into segments and present magnified versions that you can scroll past without squinting your eyes to make sense of the on-screen contents. There’s also a text-to-speech feature with its own set of voice customization tools.
Really rewarding software
The app offers an almost overwhelming number of conveniences, but given the nature of the reading material you load on the Boox Go Color 7, these features come in handy from time to time. Take, for example, books available on the open internet that are scanned pictures of each page instead of formats like PDF or ePUB.
These books often have a jarring, tilted scan. For such scenarios, there is a Reflow system that not only lets you adjust the alignment, spacing, and font size, but there’s also a neat tilt calibration tool that fixes poor angles for optimum comfort.
One of my favorites is the OCR system, which even works on comics and not just books that are a wall of text. You get a total of 1o free OCR scans each day, five each in horizontal and portrait formats. Once the scan is finished, you can go ahead and find or annotate selected portions of text. You can save all your data and sync it with the complementary 10GB cloud storage.
The reader app explores the screen refresh settings further. It lets you specify the break for a full refresh, choose between normal and depth-based cleanup, and choose whether you would prefer an automatic refresh or a manual refresh based on drag gestures. Once you have selected the text, the app opens a whole world of document editor options. The tools include a built-in dictionary, notebook, web search, hyperlinks, and more. Of course, you can adjust all the core color and refresh speed settings on a per-app basis, too.
For reading comics and web content, the “speed” refresh preset and “optimal” color profile offer the best combination of color fidelity and fluidity with minimal ghosting.
There are a few novel additions that I see on the Boox Go Color 7 that you would usually find buried deep in the developer settings section of an Android tablet or phone. Among them is DPI (dots per inch) adjustment. In a nutshell, DPI measures how sharp the content appears on the screen in the context of the output resolution and screen size.
Now, you won’t usually find yourself adjusting the DPI settings on your phone because app developers usually adhere to the design guidelines laid out by OS overloads and screen formats preferred by smartphone brands. But in some cases, a bit of scaling up or down helps. On the Boox Go Color 7, this setting comes in handy when you are browsing websites in mobile view, owing to its squarish display. It won’t create much of a problem while reading, but when you’re browsing a website or entering desktop mode, a bit of DPI adjustment can make a whole world of difference.
Display and battery conveniences
Another thoughtful setting is the ability to change the screen temperature right from the quick control panels. It’s the ideal spot, right underneath the brightness slider, allowing you to find the visual sweet spot without going back and forth between settings pages.
There’s another crucial difference here, especially if you are comparing it to a regular LCD or OLED panel. Unlike a phone or tablet, which shifts toward a reddish tone for night mode or eye comfort profiles, the Boox Go Color 7 goes with a pale yellow hue, which is strikingly similar to the light tone you get from an incandescent bulb.
It looks beautiful, especially for reading (which might be the novelty factor here), but I found it easier on my eyes than applying night or reading mode on a tablet. There are also a healthy few power-saving features thrown into the mix.
Talking about power, it’s hard to quantify how many days it will last you, but I’ll give you a rough idea. I used the Boox Go Color 7 for three days, installing two dozen Android apps, and had around six communication apps active at all times. Throw in generous hours of scrolling past Gmail jargon, DC comics, and a curated newsfeed, plus the occasional Threads indulgence.
With the aforementioned stress and color profiles always on the higher side, the Boox Go Color 7’s battery has dropped to 46% at the time of writing this article. I’d say that’s terrific. If you intend to do reading and occasional web searches, this slim tablet will last you over a week with ease.
Should you buy the Boox Go Color 7?
So, is this a safer choice over a Kindle Oasis? Absolutely, especially at its $249 asking price. If you know what an electronic paper screen can — and can’t — do, the Boox Go Color 7 will prove to be the most fulfilling gizmo you’ve ever owned — or reach the closest to that benchmark. That’s how jolly good this cute little reader is.
Over the past couple of years, Onyx has made commendable progress at increasing the refresh pace and smoothing the screen interactions. The Boox Go Color 7 is a testament to this. The only downside is that you need to approach this tablet through the same lens as a Kindle to really revel in its excellence.
But if you do that, it’s a magical piece of tech. In fact, it’s right at the top of my gadget of the year list! It really is that good.
