Tablet Go 10.3 ePaper E Ink Tablet No Front Light 4G 64G 300 PPI B/W

I was looking at the Remarkable 2 but the Go 10.3 is cheaper and has a faster processor. So I got the Boox device. This is a wonderful device for note taking! I really enjoy the built-in note taking app. It has a bunch of features. It's easy to keep notes organized. And I like the writing feel. You can sync/back up the notes with Google Drive or Dropbox. You can export notes as PDFs and then manually move the files over to a computer to back up your notes as well. I really like that you can make things simple (just taking notes) or more complicated (access to the Play Store). I initially used it for taking notes, reading books with the built in reading app, NeoReader, as well as logging into the Play Store to get Libby and Pocket. After reading about some potential privacy issues (older version of Android and a Chinese company designs and makes these) I ended up removing Libby, Pocket and removing my Play Store account info. I am now treating this device like a Remarkable 2. I am just taking notes and reading epub files on NeoReader. I rarely connect the Go 10.3 to the internet and I save my notes to my MacBook using a USB cable. So you have the option to make this a "dumb"/"simple" device. Here is my short list of pros and cons: PROS: - You can keep it simple with the device and just take notes and read epub books. - This has Android 12 so you have access to the Play Store - Access to the Play Store means you can download any app (like Kindle, Pocket, Libby, etc). - This can sync up with Google Drive or Dropbox to back up notes or add epub books. - Built-in note taking and reader apps are fantastic. - The writing experience is great. CONS: - Magnet on the side of the device is not very strong. So the stylus doesn't stay on very well. I ended up getting a sleeve case so the device is really protected and I keep the stylus in the front pocket of the sleeve case. - Speaking of the stylus, it is just ok. My biggest issue is that it doesn't have an eraser function. I ended up getting the Noris Jumbo stylus. It looks like a pencil and has an eraser function on the bottom of it that works very well. - Privacy Issues: This uses Android 12, so it isn't the current version of Android. Also, Boox doesn't usually update the Android software. So it will probably always have 12 on it. And again, Boox is a Chinese company. So there can be some privacy issues when it comes to your personal information. Overall I am giving the Go 10.3 five stars because you have the option to do whatever you want with it. Whereas the Remarkable 2 is just a note taking device with no other options. And the main pro for me is that the writing experience is fantastic on this. It's been wonderful using it for work and as a journal! -

I've had an iPad mini and a two-in-one laptop that came with a stylus, and neither provided a desirable handwriting experience for me, even with a "paper-like" screen protector. Then a few weeks ago, I found some videos reviewing e-ink tablets/digital notebooks and the rest is history. I did a bunch of research but after realizing that what I wanted was a simple writing experience but with some possible app availability. I originally ordered the Boox Note Air 4C but I wouldn't receive it for over a week and I wondered if I was spending too much on my first e-ink tablet. What if I hated it? What if it was as frustrating to use as my Kindle Paperwhite (reading on it is great but I hate using the clunky interface)? I ended up canceling my order and got the less expensive Go 10.3. I have zero regrets. This device is quicker and more responsive than my kindle (not to mention a superior clarity/screen resolution) and the writing experience is top-notch, it is exactly what I was looking for, in fact. There is something about pen-in-hand writing that makes me feel more connected to the words themselves, and keeps my ideas flowing. Having that in digital form is awesome. I will say that while the pen it comes with is okay, I have already bought a couple of other pens, my favorite being the Staedtler Noris Digital Jumbo, because it has an eraser on it and feels good in the hand. I haven yet utilized all of the cool features this tablet has, but I've been checking out YouTube videos on it, which I would recommend if you want to know everything this baby can do. It easily backs up to cloud storage like google drive or one drive. I do recommend getting a book light for dimmer writing situations, since there is no front light. I find this solution very doable, and keep a small booklight in my carrying case. The interface is smooth and not clunky. Writing is comfortable, with only milliseconds of latency. Don't use this for games or watching videos, it's not meant for that, and you'll find those kinds of apps are not optimised for this device. But for handwriting and note taking it's great, especially at this price point.

Terrible product. I’m 45 and I was really looking forward to this device. I researched this for two weeks. I want a ereader and I want monochrome text. Unfortunately this device failed. Text is too small for me to read. It’s clear text, but what’s the use if I need a magnifying glass. I thought I could use this device to read and notate code from my tech books, as well as read pdf. Good news is you can. It worked with pdf files through kindle and packt publishing code books excellently. But the text was so small I couldn’t read them. The amount of glare surprised me. I thought that ereaders were meant to be read in any light with no glare. This was simply not true. I tried reading at my dining room light which has light positioned directly above the device. When laying flat on the table the glare was so poor that I could not see the text. I had to angle the tablet around to read the text. I found this annoying and the glare hurt my eyes. Half the time the text is too faded in the pdfs or books anyways. I assumed this was the device rendering lighter colored text but it actually worked against it because it faded out text that should have been clearly visible. The ghosting is always present. It’s sort of like looking through a sheet of paper that has text printed on both sides. In some case you can read text from two pages at once or still see the image from the last page. Very distracting. Overall the device was very slow to respond to user commands and interaction. This made it painful to use for reading and note taking. I actually couldn’t test note taking because I had to open up onyx accounts for that feature. I didn’t want onyx accounts. I was excited about Android/Google play but the fact is Google Play is worthless because it mostly unusable. I downloaded packt and kindle. They both worked fine, you can’t utilize google play here like on a tablet. It just doesn’t work. The product build is very cheap for a $400 tablet. The screen feels very cheap for being glass. I didn’t like the build at all. It was also too thin for holding and reading. I was surprised to find that after trying a pen on the tablet, I realized I would not like note taking on an ereader. It was too slow and clunky. I don’t see this replacing pen and paper. It’s just dumb. Typing was entirely too slow to use. Th is device would be useless for work, college, or leisure for note taking. Overall, I outright dislike this product. I don’t anything about it. It’s a complete waste of money. It fails at being an ereader or a tablet. It fails at providing a good reading experience, user experience, or note taking experience.

I was worried that I would need a backlight, but honestly the removal of it is the single biggest reason to buy this thing. This thing is LIGHT. It is THIN. It is literally half as thick as my Kindle Scribe and weighs half too, with the same size of screen. The pen's responsiveness is the same. And the software is SO much more flexible and just as easy to use. You can get manga reading apps like Mihon on it, you can add KO Reader, everything just works. The display is gorgeous and wonderful to use. And battery life is great. No complaints about this thing so far. Seriously, the light weight and thinness are two of the biggest reasons to buy this. And if you think about it, you're not going to need a backlight if you're writing. You don't write on paper in the dark (at least you shouldn't), so you shouldn't need that for this. And if you do, just buy a book light. It's not worth the added bulk for something you'll use less than half the time. The advantage is that you get something that's incredibly easy to hold one-handed, something you can take EVERYWHERE with you as easily as a Kindle Paperwhite. The same is absolutely not true for the Kindle Scribe. LOVE this thing!

This tablet has a responsive notes-taking app, with a decent number of features. You can lasso text and move it around. It recognizes your handwriting (pretty well IMO) and you can search through pages by text. If you want to add a voice annotation you can talk to it and stick a little voice widget on a page. You can export a notebook as a PDF, but you can't load a PDF back in as a notebook (which is frustrating). But if you want any features the note taking app lacks, switching to something else means you lose everything it does have. A very basic desire is just having a daily planner, where the bare minimum of features would be that you can tap on a day and go to a page of notes for that day, with the ability to tap back and get to the calendar. The device ships with something that does a basic incarnation of this ("Memo Calendar") but it's pathetic. No more lassoing text and moving it, no more handwriting recognition, no ability to export as PDF so your data is trapped in the device (or on Onyx'x "cloud", which I would not use). What seemingly everyone winds up having to do for a good calendaring "app" is to find a PDF which has been formatted how they like, which has hyperlinks in it to let you navigate from a calendar page to the day pages (look up kudrykv on GitHub for a good free one). Then you annotate that PDF in the supplied e-reader. Once again you give up handwriting recognition, etc. And as I said, you can't import the PDF to the notes taking app (the hacky ways of doing it wouldn't preserve the hyperlinks). If you're coming from paper, you might see nothing wrong with giving up the features of the notes app if you want an experience that's more like writing on a book. You might see note taking on a blank page vs. on a hyperlinked printed template to be two different things, and so you accept a feature loss. But I write software, and I think it's ridiculous to have to give up the notes app's features when I want to write on a hyperlinked document. Really I'd like to find good apps, but they're seemingly not available at any price. It's very pleasingly light, and writing shows up super crisp. Beyond that, I'd just say the rest is acceptable. I don't think writing on it is "just like paper", but I can certainly say that if it were any *less* like writing on paper I'd return it...this is the bare minimum of where I'd say I notice a difference from writing on an LCD screen. Also if it were any dimmer I'd return it, it's very gray even with the lights on, you kind of have to take it outside to say it has good brightness. While the text is good, images in the web browser all look like dark smudges; but at least it has a web browser (I wouldn't want one of these readers that didn't have one). Altogether I think it's a good device, but e-Ink is definitely still niche and so be prepared to deal with compromises.

I really love the Boox Go. Writing is just a pleasure and it really does give one the sense of paper. I'm definitely more focused since I got the device and my "screen time" on my other devices has drastically dropped. I have one place for all my notes and what is great is that it syncs with my OneDrive and stores the notes in pdf there, plus it will update the pdf when I make changes to my note on my Boox Go. Unfortunately there is no sync the other way around, but I can live with that. Some cons are: - The pen tip wears out fast, especially if you're someone who presses hard with your pen on paper. I had to replace these after a few weeks. I have since learned to be more gentle on the pressure. - The battery life is not as great as I was expecting, though it does last for almost a week. I have a Samsung tablet and I get more or less the same battery life on both devices. I've also seen a few people complain about the absence of a backlight. I guess you have to weigh up the paperlike feeling you get without the light, compared to a device with a light. For me, this is really not too much of an issue. For me the pros outweigh the coins by far. I use it mostly for Bible study, drawing plans for my DIY projects (this is awesome 👌), taking general notes, and for my daily "Todos", which stays on that screen even in screen saving mode - just like having your notebook open next you! Because it's Android, I could easily download a few critical apps ( I want to keep it simple). With a few tweaks OneNote is working seamlessly now. By the way, reading on the Boox Go is like reading on a real book. And with Kindle, you can even turn it sideways (colum view) and get 2 pages displayed next to each other. I'm also using Obsidian on the Boox Go, although not with handwriting, but normal text (using the handwriting keyboard). All in all, I'm extremely satisfied and would highly recommend the Boox Go if you want a device for focus, notes and reading.

Was torn between this or a Kindle Scribe. Ended up going with this since it ran android and the ability to run lots of apps like newspapers, and its cloud services. The note taking and cloud connection are great. Any hand written notes I took in a PDF reflected almost immediately in the same document on my Google Drive. Lots of note taking options and ways to customize/organize your experience. Pen felt good, but not incredible. Wasn’t anything I’d call a negative though. In the end, the software is a bit too slow for me. Turning pages, maneuvering around in the menu, and overall interaction with the device is a beat too slow for me. Overall it feels a bit clumsy, or it makes me feel clumsy as the user. Lots of missed palm rejection causing pages to turn when I didn’t want it to. Gestures would stop working, and I found myself more than once unable to exit an app I was in without a hard restart. Highlighting with my thumb would work 50% of the time, other times it would detect my thumb a few lines higher than I had it, while the pen worked great. A big concern for me was privacy as well. I won’t delve into it here, but just look up Onyx’s privacy concerns with their devices. You should accept anything connected to this device could be exploited by China. In the end, I ran to Best Buy to test the response time and user interface of the scribe and it was miles faster and more user friendly. Yes, I’m not getting all the tools or options this device offers, and it does offer some really great tools, but I’d rather sacrifice those for a backlight and software that just works, along with some privacy piece of mind. Consider what you value more when you make your decision.

I'm not a new to digitizer tablets, but this is my first E-Ink notepad (I've used multiple Samsung Galaxy tablets, the Surface Pro 2 back in the day, even the Palm C waaay back). I went down a deep rabbit hole before I finally decided on the Boox Go. My criteria were (1) really good writing experience, (2) Microsoft productivity apps OneNote, OneDrive, and Loop (don't judge, they're what we have at work), and (3) a lightweight e-reader with crisp text for my aging eyes. I went back and forth about the absence of lighting, but it was finally the writing experience that sold me. That's the killer feature...the notes app. It is really low latency, and the E-ink Carta is so close to the nib that it really does get closer to a pen and paper feel than anything else I've seen. I have been using it as a work tablet for 3 weeks now as a primary note taker, and it has been a very good experience. Previously, on LED screen devices, I found that my handwriting (not good to begin with) degraded to the point of useless illegibility... Not so here. This thing actually improves my note taking. It's almost as good as carrying a large hardcover journal., but without the bulk of a...large hardcover journal. It's amazingly thin and light, while remaining very stiff (I, as some other users I saw online, could not bend it). I also just finished a two day seminar wherein I used the native Neo Reader to view and annotate PDFs. The same accuracy and responsiveness as the Notes app is found here, though I found the toggle between full screen and pinch to zoom a bit clunky. Like a lot of other functions, the BOOX design goes more 'power user' by favoring a lot of low level functionality tweaks over a short learning curve. I mention that because it does get a little hard on my older eyes to read letter sized PDFs full page format. I have also used OneNote and OneDrive's built in PDF annotator. There is a significant tradeoff here, in that pen responsiveness is much poorer, though functionality is all there. As this wasn't the greatest writing experience, I ended up using the native Notes app and enabling a clever feature which automatically saves a PDF version of the entire notebook to a location of your choice. Good enough for my needs. Another nice feature of the app manager is that you can easily set up work and personal configurations of most apps. This enables a separate app icon for, say, two OneDrive accounts. It makes for a basic but usable work profile. Libby (download from Play Store) works just fine. Text is very clear, though I couldn't disable the swipe animations (which trigger a full screen refresh every time). There is a simple workaround, though, and that's navigating by tapping the left or right margin, just like the old Barnes and Noble Nook. I don't use the Onyx account at all. This is a hybrid work device, and I'm as careful as I can be as to where my work data is stored. I would rather lose my notes than have them fall into the wrong hands, and frankly, I wasn't able to get the level of trust I needed to store anything in the Onyx cloud. One last thing, and this isn't really the Go's issue, but some of the third party cases have magnets in them which tended to distort the digitizer response, especially in the corners. It looks like a defect in the screen, with the pen line not tracking the nib location, but it disappears when you remove the cover. Just something to be aware of. All in all, I am very happy with this device!