Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C Pro review – High-end tablet with color e-ink display and camera

[Redaktion]

Of course, you can read books in color on the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C Pro, but you can also do so much more than that: Thanks to pen input, you can draw or take notes, thanks to the Android system, you can run apps, and you can even take pictures. But there are also some limitations ...

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Onyx-Boox-Tab-Ultra-C-Pro-review-High-end-tablet-with-color-e-ink-display-and-camera.781402.0.html

[archAdrian]

Hello,
I was wondering if you also tested the maximum SD card capacity that the tablet can operate with. I was planning to buy a 1 TB SD card at 100 MBps, I don't need a faster one for books and documents and I could not find precise references. Thank you for otherwise your fantastic review here!! It's more than documented and useful!

[JB Thompson]

It will run a 1 TB microSD card - way more than i'd ever use. Remember it's primarily a reading device. I'm currently running a 512GB card in it: still overkill.

I like the Boox Tab Ultra C Pro. Colour works but is admittedly pretty washed out and almost pastel. Still, colour is necessary for reading technical documents. This thing is often depicted with comic book content. You'd be better off with an Android tablet for comic books & graphic novels: their intense colour doesn't arrive on this screen.

Biggest drawback is the operating system. It may be Android 12 under the hood and all Android apps I've tried work fine, which is impressive, but the developers at Boox have heavily skinned the OS. They appear determined to re-write the UI,and have made even the simple process of porting in content a wretched task. A task that varies depending on which of several readers you're using for given  content. That's insane!

So importing or porting in content is a stupid, inconsistent process with a ridiculous learning curve.

Until the developers at Boox are re-educated (or taken out & shot - metaphorically, of course) this will be my 1st & only Boox device.

Screen & battery are nice though.

[JB Thompson]

A good review with one glaring blind spot. It should be noted that Boox doesn't pitch the camera on the Tab Ultra Pro C as... a camera. I know, you're all used to comparing the cameras on smartphones and tablets. But there's no attempt to pitch this device as possessing a camera!

It's intended to be used as a scanner, to snap text from paper documents for inclusion in user-generated content. You have a handy 'camera' optimized not for taking pictures, landscapes, movies or selphies, but for capturing images on paper or text to OCR in your Boox. Very cool.

As a page scanner it's great! Yes, you can hold it up & snap a picture with it, but then you'd be a dork. You already have a smartphone for that. Which, BTW, connects pretty seamlessly to your Boox if you want to copy over a picture from your smartphone.

So do that. But don't bitch that the optical text scanner doesn't take great low-light pictures or movies. You didn't buy it for that reason.

[RobertJasiek]

Thanks for you input! Two additional reasons prevent me from buying a Boox:

There is no or very insufficient information about replacement batteries (price, availability at all in Germany, duration of availability, any user-replaceability).

I never see reviews showing the pen writing thin, small text like that of a ballpen. Is this even possible or has all text to be thick and large so that only two or three words fill the width of the display?