Work Profile is a new feature that comes with the Tab Ultra C's V3.3.2 BOOX firmware. It is also offered in some of our models. Speaking of color, like its larger counterpart, the Tab Mini C can’t compare with tablets equipped with active screens in terms of vividness. Though its 4,096 different colors are far more than monochrome E Ink, it’s barely a fraction of a percent of the millions of colors LCDs and OLEDs create. Displaying color also cuts the total number of pixels available down significantly, so photos and videos don't look nearly as sharp as they do on other devices. In addition, notebooks only (not documents) can be synchronised with Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, and Youdao Cloud Note.

This isn’t a camera you’d use to take regular photos. While it can, what you see is a pixelated, fuzzy rendering of the scene that’s saved in PDF format, not JPG. So you can’t even edit in post-production like you would a regular photo. During this time, I used the Tab Ultra C as my primary ereader, to make notes – particularly for this review – using both the on-screen keyboard and the case, and creating hand-written todo lists and other notes.

High-end e-ink devices are still a fairly new concept but the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra makes a compelling case for their existence. This doesn’t mean the Tab Mini C’s color is useless or not worth the premium over a similar monochrome ebook reader. It’s still colorful and sharp enough to comfortably read color content like comic books. Photos don’t look quite as good as shaded art due to the loss of detail, but even this is a step up from reading comics on a monochrome E Ink screen. However, the onboard GPU, coupled with Boox’s proprietary Super Refresh technology on the Boox Tab product line does mitigate this to some extent BOOX is committed to providing free firmware updates for all models for more than 3 years since the product launch date. So every BOOX user can get improved experiences through consistent updates. Browsing the web and general app performance are both a bit stilted. Even with the stylus, the Tab Mini C’s touch screen is less responsive than LCD or OLED, and loading web links can occasionally take a few seconds. Scrolling is relatively smooth compared with browsing on other ebook readers, and while ghosting is visible it isn’t overwhelming.

There is also an option to manually share notebooks on Boox’s cloud server which can be viewed on other devices using a QR code (link expires after 24 hours). The Tab Mini C employs a 50% thinner touch layer to bring content closer to the screen, allowing users to sense less gap under the glass screen on top and have a clearer vision and more responsive touching experience. The Tab Ultra C is a good-looking, solid-feeling tablet. It measures 8.8 by 7.3 by 0.26 inches (HWD) and weighs 16.9 ounces, about 3 ounces more than the ReMarkable 2 (14.2 ounces) and Kobo Elipsa 2E (13.8 ounces). It's not significantly heavier, but the Onyx does seem denser than the other two. While the corners are rounded, the top and side edges of the ereader are at sharp right angles, giving it a no-nonsense appearance.More importantly, though, Onyx has done a marvelous job of adapting the OS to suit the device. The company’s tablets arguably have the most number of settings parameters for you to tweak of any ereader out there and it’s the same here again. In fact, there are times when I feel the adjustments are overkill, but they all work well and once you’ve used them, you wonder why other such devices don’t have something similar. And this goes for the multiple refresh rate options accessible via the E Ink Center (swipe down from the top right corner to bring up the Control Center)… but strangely enough they don’t seem to work as well here. With this in mind, the Tab Mini C has four different display modes. HD is at one end, which renders the sharpest and most vivid picture but isn’t fast enough to play video. Ultrafast is at the other end, which pushes the E Ink to its fastest possible refresh rate, but it loses detail along the way and exhibits heavy ghosting. The Balanced and Fast options sit between HD and Ultrafast, with Balanced leaning more toward HD and Fast leaning more toward Ultrafast in terms of performance. The scanning camera is just that: a 16MP camera for scanning. It can produce sharp captures of documents at a close distance, but anything you shoot from more than a foot away will likely be blurry. The scanning app can save scans only as PDFs, rather than JPGs or other file types, though it has an optical character recognition (OCR) feature that can identify and transcribe any text it detects. The Ereader Designed Like a Tablet The lasso-select tool supports moving, copying, resizing, rotating, and flipping (180 degrees) handwriting. You can also add ‘tags’ and links to handwriting and change the colour. Just when you thought the feature set was sufficient enough, flip the Tab Ulta over and you’ll spot a 16MP camera – yes, a camera. Don’t get too carried away, it’s not the type of sensor you’d use for taking holiday snaps, but rather for scanning documents that you can then convert into a PDF and scribble all over with the stylus.

I recently reviewed the Remarkable 2 which is an excellent digital notebook that beautifully recreates the feeling of pen and paper, and now Onyx is looking to move the ceiling for what’s possible on an e-ink device. While the price point might seem fine given it’s a large, color E Ink screen, it is an expensive tablet. And the value diminishes further as its performance is subpar.While it’s smaller than the Tab Ultra C, I still found the Tab Mini C to be comfortable for reading both books and comics in testing. The lower resolution means color comic art isn’t as sharp as manga is, but it’s still quite readable. The nearly eight-inch screen offers much more real estate than the 6-inch Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Clara 2E, where (monochrome) comics can look too cramped. The adjustable front light makes it easy on the eyes, but be aware that setting the light to a warmer hue will skew the already limited colors. The Kaleido 3 screen is E Ink's most recent ePaper color screen. It offers a relatively high refresh rate, relaxing hues, and is ready for mass production with consistent quality. And with E Ink ComfortGaze™ on the Kaleido 3, a new front light technology, the Tab Mini C with adjustable front lights can offer a comfortable viewing experience day and night. Apps are hit-or-miss. Android means you can load Overdrive to access ebooks through library systems, or any of the various comic and manga apps that bring reading content to mobile devices. Not all apps run well, however, and it takes some trial and error to figure out which. The bad news is that the color variety and saturation are poor. The E Ink Kaleido 3 screen supports 4,096 different colors in addition to 16 levels of gray. That's magnitudes fewer than the 16.8 million hues available in basic 8-bit color found on other screen technologies. Greens, reds, and blues are all there and, unlike in grayscale, you can tell them apart, but they don’t come close to recreating the brightness or vibrancy of LCD or OLED screens. Thus, reading any comic on the E Ink screen is like reading it on faded newsprint. Having a color screen also means you can choose to highlight text in different colors if you are in the habit of adding annotations and notes.And you can draw in color too.

The Google Play Store is available on the Tab Mini C so you can install other Android apps. However, whether or not those apps will run reader depends on how much processing power they need and how heavily they depend on animation. The biggest selling point of the Tab Ultra C—and the main reason it’s so expensive—is its color E Ink screen. As a comic book lover, I’ve been excited about the idea of color E Ink for as long as ereaders have been around. Though many comics are readable in grayscale on conventional ereaders like the Elipsa 2E, they lose much of their effect without color. So, to test the Tab Ultra C’s color screen, I loaded up collections of Saga. With access to the Google Play Store, other e-reading software can be installed, such as Kindle and Kobo, however these apps do not support annotation Boox is a Chinese company whose support team are not native English speakers, so some patience may be required. The tablet’s Android platform permits direct access to the Google Play Store for third-party apps. As with many devices that run a specialized version of Android, however, whether or not a given app will work well on the Tab Ultra C differs on an app-by-app basis.Brushes include fountain pen, ballpoint pen, pencil, paintbrush and marker. There are 16 colours to choose from and line width can be set between 1 and 20. The Tab Ultra C Pro also sees several upgrades, including the same new color E Ink display. We'll have to go hands on to determine if this updated display can produce better colors than its predecessor, the Tab Ultra C tablet we reviewed earlier this year. The tablet has additional hardware, like a more powerful processor, a 16MP camera with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality, and an optional keyboard. With the camera, you can use OCR to recognize and scan text around you. The user interface has been redesigned to make the Boox Tab product line ( Boox Tab Ultra, Boox Tab X, Boox Tab Mini C etc.) more customizable than previous generations of Boox tablets What I can say is that I’ve been able to use the Tab Ultra sporadically, using it to edit Google Docs one day, take some handwritten notes on another and even pop on a YouTube video, and in roughly a week and a half I’ve only managed to whittle the battery down to 30%, which is impressive in comparison to a traditional Android tablet. There is native support for synchronising notebooks and files with Boox Cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Baidu Cloud, Nutstore, and other WebDAV-compatible cloud services.