Screen: Color, 10.3 inches | Weight: 14 oz | Stylus has eraser: No | Converts handwriting to text: Yes
One of the iPad's strengths is its ability to run a huge assortment of apps; it's not locked into a tiny, self-contained ecosystem. The Boox Note Air 4 C brings a similar versatility courtesy of Android 13, its core OS. That means you can install Kindle, Kobo, Libby, Hoopla and other apps for reading books, to say nothing of Dropbox, OneDrive and more for easy access to PDFs and other documents.
In other words, this is effectively an Android tablet with an e-paper screen and a stylus. Specifically, it's a 10.3-inch color Kaleido 3 screen offering a crisp 300 ppi (pixels per inch) in monochrome mode and 150 ppi in color. Just be prepared for the rather muted colors that are also common to these kinds of displays. But there's almost zero glare, and your eyes don't have to suffer from harsh backlighting.
The rest of the hardware is solid — 64GB of storage, microSD slot (making this the only expandable writing tablet in the group), dual speakers and even a fingerprint reader for unlocking — but the software may prove frustrating to some.
Indeed, despite my general familiarity with Android, I had some difficulty learning to navigate the user interface, which is heavy with options and settings spread out across different menus. There's definitely a learning curve here, a steeper one than on other writing tablets.
The native notes app, for example, has lots of useful tools, but vexed me with its cryptic toolbar. Many of its icons' text descriptors are inexplicably cut off. The top item, template, reads "Temp...". Shapes is abbreviated as "Sha...", Share as "Shar..." and so on. (That last one has room for an ellipses, so why not just include the "e" instead?) You can collapse the toolbar or relocate it, but you can't expand it to see all the icon labels.
I tried a popular third-party app, Notewise, and found that although it had no trouble recognizing the stylus, there was considerable lag in my pen-strokes. (In the native app, input was butter-smooth.)
I missed having an eraser on the stylus, but at least the Air 4 C lets you "scratch out" anything you want to delete. Just scribble over a letter or word or whatever and in a moment it magically disappears. (You can't just draw a line or x through it, though — you really have to scribble.)
As an e-reader, this tablet is arguably your best possible option, seeing as it's platform-agnostic. (To be fair, the iPad is as well.) Read Kindle books, Kobo books and so on. However, as with other Boox devices I've tested, the Hoopla app — a favorite of mine for checking out library e-books — proved problematic. Owing to some obscure battery-permission setting, I couldn't actually download any books to the device. Surprisingly, Boox has instructions for working around this issue, but they were out of date; the screenshots didn't match up with what I found in the settings. Eventually I got it working, but only with a lot of fiddling.
What's more, although the Air 4 C's FreeMark tool lets you add notes just about anywhere — including in, say, a Kindle or Hoopla book — those notes don't stay embedded. Instead, you can save individual pages. That's not without value, just not the same thing as marking up an entire e-book and revisiting those notes later within that book.
The Boox Note Air 4 C is a robust Android-based writing tablet that is, in some ways, hobbled by its Android trappings. Tech-challenged users are likely to get frustrated by various aspects of the UI. But if you're willing to learn your way, you'll find this a powerful reading and writing companion.
