e-ink display tablets i must admit i have not reviewed that many of them just a handful
but this model here i think is really decent now it is the books note air 2 plus it has stylus
support and probably one of the best styluses that i have tested out recently in a tablet
the screen on this is 10.3 inches inc display means that it's going to last for a very long time
the battery life on this is absolutely fantastic it does not disappoint it will go for days on end
in fact weeks if you're not using the backlight on it so yes it does have a backlight so you can
use it at nighttime it's very light it's only 445 grams really thin too just under six millimeters
and the screen being nice and sharp and that paper design of it as well is very good of course for
ebooks and pdf files which this is really designed for but because it does have a microphone and a
speaker and also runs android 11 with google play store you can use it for even a little bit more
than your standard e-ink tablet now what do we get with it so there is a quick start guide we have a
warranty card a stylus you can get some optional tips as well so these are some extra stylus tips
with the removal tool right there and then a type c to type a cable so what's not included
is a charger but you just use one of your own charges you have about now it will take a maximum
of 15 watts so that's 5 volts 3 amps and it takes around about an hour and a half to fully charge
the 3 700 milliamp hour battery included too it's this standard case they call it there's
another one that's the magnetic case so it opens up like so you've got the tablet that you lock
into place inside the plastic support here that it does have for that case
and then to stand it right up you just simply need to do that so i'll just demonstrate how it fits
in there you just slot in each corner press that into place and there we go you do have then your
note air 2 plus well protected within that case so nothing's going to be able to scratch that screen
this model is the note a2 plus so the plus spec does have a larger battery in it so it's going to
be a little bit heavier than the other model from them but still weight wise it is excellent it's
really good because it is only 455 grams so that is nice and slim and then you can see the antennas
along the side right here this back here is metal and it's a dark green color which i really do
quite like the look of now when you flip it around you see that we do have on one side right here
where you can hold it quite comfortably with the books branding right there and then our
screen so this screen here is 10.3 inches and it has a resolution of 1404 by 1872
with their carter screen so of course it's just the black and white but these screens have
crazy good battery life and it does still give us a dpi this one the pixel density of 227 which
isn't too bad now it does have a backlight on it which i'll go over it so we've got adjustments for
warm and cold with that backlight so really good build quality and it is crazy thin so this is just
5.8 millimeters the thickness of it we've got here our power button with a status led within it
type c port here that's to charge it that's for data a microphone and a loudspeaker so just a
single mic just a single loudspeaker there but that's all i'd kind of expect on tech like this
what is missing for me is a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack that would have been good if
it did have it on board but we do have bluetooth 5 at least so you can pair up with a music player
play your mp files mp3 files through that and there is an adapter too that you could use
of course to use then a headset with a type c to 3.5 millimeter right now i've got it actually
locked and the screen is off even though yes it is displaying an image so you get this
different images that will show would sometimes say that it's powered off and just say that it's
a tablet and like no other tablet which is uh that's their slogan that's their motto there
for this particular model and when you unlock it then it will take a few seconds you see
it'll open right up there now if you've never used these ink displays before you might be in
for a bit of a surprise with the latency of them the refresh rate is another thing too that you
really do notice so when you go through them you see that it takes a couple of seconds to react now
we can adjust that through the menu that they do have which i'll quickly go over just after this
so this is the library with the ebooks that i've downloaded so it does support ebook formats of
course they do have their own store here where you're able to get a lot of different ebooks
and you'll see that when i touch that okay is it going to respond to me of you or ebooks
that sometimes you need to do that that's one of my minor complaints with it the screen
response at times can just be a little laggy and you have to go back and press so scrolling
if you do scroll here oh it's not going to give me an option to scroll when i can scroll is the
same thing that there is that delay and that's again typical ink displays it's one of the things
that you have to put up with them but the benefits are that of course they just hardly use any power
so we've got notes right in here i'll get onto that later on too with the stylus our storage
so this is a typical setup that you would see with android so it does have android 11 it's got four
gigabytes of ram and it's running a octa-core from qualcomm with this and the storage is actually
ufs 2.1 spec so it should not slow things down and then our apps now it does come with this of course
you can see google play store and i can happily report that play store is working just fine so
you can download and get a lot of additional apps and some of them just are not going to be
ideal of course for this style of tablets you wouldn't be installing games something like
youtube as well watching video on this type of screen is it really a pleasant experience because
well you're not going to get any colors it's going to look all pixelated and funny to with it
so that's play store obviously and if i just want to go back now to the main menu i can swipe from
the middle sorry with the gestures to get there and that's just bringing me back to where it was
before so whether applications you can install things like kindle okay you can run it on this
not a problem music players like power amp that's good we've got bluetooth on board so yes you can
hook up a uh headset bluetooth today's earbuds for example and then other various apps that they
already do include there's not a lot on there which is good there's no bloatware and what's
really installed a couple of these apps are ones that i put on there myself like play books too
and under settings there's a few options in there so there was a firmware update that came through
and that's good that they're putting those through and we've got power options you can put a password
on this so there's no fingerprint reader there's of course no face unlocking there is no camera on
this whatsoever not that you'd probably want it anyway in this style it just wouldn't work either
and let's get into now a little bit of information too so system display okay that's other things
that you can see there but i wanted to focus now on just what we can do to with that display
so swiping down from the top here we've got our options now this is the backlight like right now
i don't need to use a backlight if you've got bright enough ambient lighting you turn it off
backlight is really only needed at nighttime so if you're sitting in bed reading ebooks
on it that is when you'll be using it the great thing about these screens is the brighter the
light the better the screen actually does look so right now in direct sunlight you can see that you
can make it out perfectly it's got a matte anti-clear coating over the top of it it is
fully optically bonded to that e-ink the carter display with it with the flat glass lens that's
over the top of it which is really good and with that 227 ppi at normal viewing distances you
don't really see pixels but if you do look closely you can see jagged edges on the fonts and things
which is kind of normal so just demonstrate to you now the backlight so i can turn it on
you've got your white light and your warm light there so blue and your warm light here so blue
and well orange really can set that and adjust how bright that you want that actually to be
with the adjustments right here so i normally set the orange light on the warm light
which is better for night better for your eyesight so what i do is just flick my lights off right now
and you'll be able to see uh that in action a little bit better so when you don't have that
much light on you're able to then tweak that up to make it really quite bright and i find it's
perfectly acceptable for using this at night time and i'll go over then to the blue light
turn that one on and just put that right up to its maximum setting there so it looks good i think
for this e type ian type screens cutter screen that they call this one it's really nice it's an
excellent screen now we do have this here e-ink you can adjust the darks here light color filter
and the refresh modes so i normally keep it on the normal mode the faster the better for example
if you want better scaling or you're trying to watch a movie or something on this not that you
ever really would or you're in for example like a google chrome and you want faster scrolling and
you need that high refresh rate so you allowed you can go through there into the x mode to change it
um and you see other different modes here so x mode we've got speed mode and just your normal
which i'm going to keep it on with the starter of display i don't think it really needs to
be on faster but you can adjust that if you're irritated by the delays in the screen and a bit
of the ghosting that can sometimes show up then looking at ebooks on this of course this is what
the screen this style of tablet is designed for now you can hold it quite happily with the space
we've got on the left of it or the right uh if you want to flip it around you can do that you can
auto rotate the screen as well so you can have it on the other side and it's fine it is comfortable
now looking at that text i've been using this now and reading quite a few ebooks on it just going
through them slowly of course at normal reading paces and i've had zero irritation from my eyes
i have to say that this screen is almost oh well it really is it's as good as looking at paper i
think i'm not having any irritation at all with it and of course at nighttime you can turn on a
blue filter or you can change the color filter and use the different tones there too with the
backlight so what about the page turning speed so when you go to flick to the next page you'll see
that yes there is a noticeable bit bit of delayed lag there and will it irritate people for this
style of tablet i don't think it is going to now if i was doing a review here of a samsung galaxy
tab 8 then i would say that that's got incredible lag and there's no way i could use it but for this
style no it's perfectly acceptable so you can go through of course all those pages there so that is
an ebook file here and i'm actually using google play books that i do have and own this particular
novel on here but i'll take a look at now at a pdf file would they actually be still usable
everything's readable there but of course you're not going to get color images and when i scroll
there it's a little slow so i can swipe up here to bring up the different refresh modes here so if
i select now on the fastest possible refresh mode let's take a look at that will it be a little bit
better now as soon as you put it onto the faster refresh modes you will notice that the display
now doesn't seem to look quite as sharp but look at how much quicker that really is now so if you
needed it to be fast you're flicking through for example like right now some pdf files some large
ones this is actually over well over 150 megabytes this and it's handling it fine so those speeds are
actually they're decent and i'll just bring that back up again the e-ink center here and put it
back on the standard mode and you'll notice now or at least i can pick up on it that it does seem to
look a little bit sharper so that's another reason why i just keep it on the standard refresh when it
comes to this e-ink screens for me this is one of the best features of the note air 2 plus that
if you're a note taker the stylus is brilliant i have to rate it as one of the best here it's
super accurate now it does clip onto the side here magnetically you can see that it's not too bad the
power that the magnet has here is enough to hold it in there and have a bit of a bit of a shake
it's not going to just instantly drop off but a couple of times i have accidentally knocked
off that status when i've used it but look at this palm rejection hundred percent because i've got it
set to just touch mode only now this is their own note app which i do find seems to work the best
with it so just quickly give you a sample here so look at the latency it's not bad at all but
it is accurate and that is my messy writing now it feels great the nib of this on top of this matte
coating here with the the actual nibs that they're using in it it gives an almost identical feel to
writing on paper it also makes the sound of like a felt tip pen on paper too have a listen to this
it is i think an excellent stylus one of the best that i've used for quite some time
now you can write right up to the very edges the corner of it right here if you were to draw say
from one end to the other it's not going to suddenly just pull over to one way no the stylus
performance is i think really good the accuracy where the nib touches is pretty much exactly
where i want to write so that is great it is a fantastic stylus experience here with the note air
2 plus let me show you one of the best things about these ian style tablets and that is the
battery life out of them is just absolutely bonkers battery status take a look at this i
accidentally plugged it in and charged it before otherwise i would have shown you here last time
i charged it would have been about four days ago and i had a crazy screen on time usage but
this gives you a good example here so 82 percent i've had the screen on now for 12 hours and for
half of those 12 hours i was using the backlight which consumes the most battery the screen itself
just it sips it the battery it hardly uses at all so that's really crazy 12 hours and i should be
able to get weeks out of this depending on your use when you charge it even though it's only a
3700 milliamp hour battery it just lasts and lasts and lasts for days on end which is the
best part about these tablets okay so what's the final verdict then i think if you're after an ink
display tablet that gives you a few more options like stylus support microphone speaker then this
really is ideal the one to go for the battery life like all ink display tablets and readers
is of course the big strength of it it just goes and goes and goes so you can get crazy amounts of
screen on time out of this especially if you don't use the backlight when you don't need it like in
daylight or bright ambient conditions you don't need to have that backlight on which is probably
one of the biggest consumers there of battery the screen yes the refresh rate is a little bit slow
and sometimes can be a little bit irritating the only real con i've found with this tablet now my
week or so of using it is that occasionally when i tap on the screen it doesn't respond
and i need to go and repeat that same action tap again that's the only minor annoying thing there
with the touch response it's not amazing as you'd expect out of this style of screen of course
so all up i think for an e-ink style tablet this one that runs android 11 is
very good plenty of options for those that want a little bit more of course than just a standard
pdf file or ebook reader because you can install your own maps music players and things as well on
this which is is quite good we've got that option there but of course it's not a tablet that you
would decide to oh i want to watch youtube on this or netflix because the display of course
is not designed for that but if your thing is ebooks pdf files maybe a few websites that aren't
too demanding there then it's absolutely perfect for that and the best part for me
that has really surprised me is that stylus performance fantastic for taking notes really
good accuracy and it gives you that pin on paper kind of feel we even get that same exact noise and
the resistance from the screen is really good so i'm liking what i'm seeing here with these
ink displays and this one this model from books the note air to plus definitely gets a thumbs up
from me thank you so much for watching this review hope to see you back in the next one bye for now