The Boox Palma is an excellent e-reader in the body of an Android smartphone

In fact, there are only three things you need to know Boox Palma. One: It’s about the size of a smartphone. Two: it runs Android, with Play Store. Three: it has an E Ink screen. There are other specs and features that I’ll cover, but that combination – smartphone, Android, E Ink – is the entire reason the Palma exists.

In a few months of using the Palma, a $280 device which has been on sale since last fall, this combination turned out to be exactly what I needed. Because it’s the size of a smartphone, with a 6.1-inch screen and an overall size that’s a little larger than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus, I can hold it in one hand and fit it in my pocket. Since it runs Android, I can download any app I need. And because it’s E Ink, the battery lasts between four days and a week, the screen is easy to see even in the dark and – and this is the most important part – most of the apps are simply horrible to use.

Of course, the Palma can technically download TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. It can even play videos from these apps intermittently. But because of E Ink’s low resolution, slow refresh rate, and overall black and white, it’s a bad enough experience that I’m never tempted to do it. Instead, I find myself doing the things the Palma screen was built for. This thing is first and foremost an e-reader. Except, unlike all other e-readers, this one lets you read in any app you want.

The first application I downloaded on Palma was Amazon Kindle, where all my digital books are. And before you’re like, Dude, why didn’t you buy a Kindle, The second app I downloaded was Readwise Reader, an app for reading and organizing long articles, PDFs, and just about anything else. I’ve already achieved something that no other e-reader offers. Next, I downloaded a couple of news apps, Flipboard and the note-taking app Obsidian.

Two months later, these are still the apps I use most on the Palma. Boox preinstalls a few others, like a voice recorder and a music app, but I’ve barely touched them. Who needs them when I have Android! Instead, I downloaded Pocket Casts and Spotify, and now my Palma is my iPod, as well as being my Kindle. When I go out to have coffee in the morning or walk the dog in the afternoon, only Palma comes with me.

I was surprised by how much activity on my phone disappeared when I put all my listening and reading on another device. I never realized how many times I would reach for my phone to change songs, only to be drawn in by a Slack message or a Gmail notification. (Come to think of it, thanks to the “Notification Mute” feature in the Android version of the Boox, I don’t think I got a single notification in the entire time I’ve had this thing.) Now that I’m bringing the Palma and not my phone with me to the coffee shop , I’m reading further because TikTok isn’t even remotely tempting on this device. In fact, I’m offline most of the time – I’ll just take it out of Airplane mode to sync the various apps, turn off the connection, and go back to reading. A device that’s easy to have with me, that can technically do everything, but just makes it easier to do the things I want, has been everything I wanted.

“It’s the absolutely perfect amount of friction,” Craig Mod told me when I recounted my experience with the Palma. Mod – a blogger, author and bookmaker who has written about digital reading for years – also loves his Palma. He wrote a blog post about it in May, it got a lot of people excited about the device – he estimates he convinced at least a few hundred people to buy one. “You wouldn’t want to browse YouTube and think, ‘Okay, let me watch MKBHD,’” he says. “But if I needed to… I could get into it for a second.”

This friction is a function of the device itself: E Ink screens simply don’t refresh quickly enough to play video well. Can it be repaired in a pinch? Clear. But it’s not good enough to really suck you in.

Like me, Mod said that the Palma’s combination of size and screen sold him on the device. “It’s perfect with one hand, it’s not heavy, it’s not going to fall on your face in a weird way,” he said. “You have it in your hand, with your thumb on the volume controls, and you can easily read an article until you fall asleep.” Did I mention that you can set the Palma to turn pages when you press the volume buttons? Love it. Mod called Palma “a reader’s gentle lullaby.”

Matt Martin, CEO of calendar startup Clockwise and another new Palma owner, echoed the sentiment. “I hope to read more,” he said. “I plan to not spend 30 minutes before bed on Instagram Reels.” He lowered the New York Times app, Instapaper, Libby and Kindle and said he has been reading more and less since then.

“There’s an old joke we all learned in Psych 101,” Martin said, “that the physical environment is important. I think a separate device is important here: sometimes you’re reading, and you’re in a slow section, and you have that random thought, like, What was that thing I wanted to buy on Amazon? And you’re there without thinking about it.” A device like Palma adds enough friction to stop the train before it goes too far.

Mod liked Palma so much that he wants Boox to go even further. “I would love to have that as my main motivator,” he said, “much more than the dopamine casino iPhone where it fights for your attention every two seconds.” He also wants Boox to get rid of the camera on the back of the Palma, which, frankly, I had completely forgotten about until he brought it up. I suppose it’s nice to have a pinch, but this isn’t a point-and-shoot.

Boox hasn’t built a perfect gadget here. Not by far. The plastic body is a little flimsy, the screen is well behind the bezels, everything takes half a second longer than it should, the screen can be unresponsive at times, and I wish it would fully update the E Ink to remove ghosting with a little more frequency. (There’s a dedicated button for doing the last part, though, which helps.) For a $280 e-reader, I’d expect a little more polish in hardware and software. The worst of all is that the Palma runs Android 11, which is already completely outdated, and I don’t expect Boox to update it soon or ever. Most likely, my Palma will slowly stop working, app by app, over the next few years. This is particularly frustrating given the simplicity of my needs; to play music and read articles, there’s no reason why this can’t last forever.

All Boox has really done is bring together the right set of ingredients – size, screen, apps – into something that feels less like a replacement for my smartphone and more like a complement to it. I keep finding little new things that I like to do on the Palma rather than on the phone; I have The New York Times‘ is there now for some E Ink crosswords, and I just installed the Roku app, for example, so now it’s a backup remote and a place to plug in my headphones when I need to listen quietly.

This year has been full of companies trying to revamp the way we use our gadgets. Humane, Rabbit, and others have introduced new types of devices, hoping we can find new and different things to do with them. The Palma represents a much less ambitious – but perhaps much more likely – alternative: it merely tweaks the smartphone formula, leaving what works but subtly altering the device’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s not as bright, nor as fast, nor as frictionless. Instead, it is quiet, simple and sensible. And I love it.