Onyx Boox Palma review – Palm tablet with e-ink display and camera

The somewhat older Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 is used as the SoC. It is usually sufficient for smooth system operation, but cannot achieve high scores overall in our benchmarks. You should therefore avoid very complex apps on the e-ink tablet, but if you just want to read your documents and e-books, the octa-core processor with up to 2 GHz provides enough power for a smooth experience.

The UFS 2.1 memory is fast enough to avoid excessively long waiting times and to process data transfers reasonably quickly. The difference will be particularly noticeable when compared to cheaper e-readers.

The Onyx Boox Palma only heats up to over 40 °C very occasionally under prolonged load. You can feel it at this one point, but it never feels uncomfortable. We also didn’t notice any performance throttling in the 3DMark stress tests.

The speaker is located at the bottom edge, although there is also a cut-out above the screen like for earphones – no sound can be heard there. Nevertheless, the earpiece can also be used, for example for calls via Internet services such as Skype.

It is therefore a mono speaker for media sound, which can be reasonably loud at over 81 dB(A) at its peak. However, you shouldn’t expect too many low mids or even bass frequencies, so the sound is somewhat treble-heavy, which is not so bad for the intelligibility of speech and vocals.

Nevertheless, if you want really good sound output, you should connect headphones or speakers via the USB-C port or Bluetooth. This works without any problems and brings significantly more fullness to the sound.

A 3,950 mAh battery is installed in the Onyx Boox Palma. This is a very good capacity for an e-ink tablet in this price range, and the compact device also achieves good values: with minimal backlighting, you can browse through documents and books for almost 21 hours before the tablet has to be plugged in. With 150 cd/m² brightness, it is still just under 15 hours.

The small e-ink tablet can be charged with a maximum of 10 watts, so it takes over 3 hours for the battery to be fully charged again.