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The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted

The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted

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I thought I was buying an e-reader. And I was! But the smartphone-sized device
does just enough other stuff that it now goes with me everywhere.

By [16]David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade
of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street
Journal, and Wired.

Jun 25, 2024, 1:30 PM UTC

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A photo of a person using a smartphone-like device near water.
Imagine the exact middle between an iPhone and a Kindle. That’s the Palma.
Image: Boox

There are really only three things you need to know about [22]the Boox Palma.
One: it’s about the size of a smartphone. Two: it runs Android, with the Play
Store. Three: it has an E Ink screen. There are other specs and features I’ll
get to, but that combination — smartphone, Android, E Ink — is the Palma’s
whole reason for existence.

In a couple of months of using the Palma, a [23]$280 device that has been on
sale since last fall, that combination has turned out to be exactly what I
needed. Because it’s smartphone-sized, with a 6.1-inch screen and an overall
footprint just a smidge larger than the [24]Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus, I can hold
it in one hand and fit in my pocket. Because it runs Android, I can download
any app I need. And because it’s E Ink, the battery lasts somewhere between
four days and a week, the screen is easy to look at even in the dark, and — and
this is the most important part — most apps are just awful to use.

Sure, the Palma can technically download TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It can
even, stutteringly, play videos from those apps. But because of E Ink’s low
resolution, slow refresh rate, and overall black-and-white-ness, it’s a crummy
enough experience that I’m never tempted to do so. Instead, I find myself doing
the things the Palma’s screen is built for. This thing is first and foremost an
e-reader. It’s just that, unlike all the other e-readers, this one lets you
read in whatever app you like to use.

If you want to hear more about our thoughts on the Palma, check out [25]this
episode of The Vergecast.

The first app I downloaded onto the Palma was Amazon Kindle, which is where all
my digital books are. And before you’re like, dude, why didn’t you just buy a
Kindle, the second app I downloaded was Readwise Reader, an app for [26]reading
and organizing longform articles, PDFs, and just about anything else. Already,
I’d accomplished something no other e-reader offers. Then, I downloaded a
couple of news apps, Flipboard, and the note-taking app Obsidian.

Two months later, those 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 barely
touched those. Who needs ‘em when I have Android! I downloaded Pocket Casts and
Spotify instead, and now my Palma is my iPod in addition to being my Kindle.
When I go out for coffee in the morning or to walk the dog in the afternoon,
only the Palma comes with me. 

An image of a woman reading on a Boox Palma in bed.An image of a woman reading
on a Boox Palma in bed.
An image of a woman reading on a Boox Palma in bed.An image of a woman reading
on a Boox Palma in bed.
The rare marketing image that actually matches how I use the device, every
night before bed. Image: Boox

I’ve been amazed by how much of my phone activity disappeared when I put all my
listening and reading onto another device. I never noticed how often I’d dig my
phone out to change songs, only to get pulled in by a Slack message or a Gmail
notification. (Come to think of it, thanks to the “Notification Mute” feature
in Boox’s version of Android, I don’t think I’ve gotten a single notification
the whole 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 getting more reading done because TikTok
isn’t remotely tempting on this device. I’m actually offline most of the time
— I’ll just take it off Airplane mode to sync the various apps, then shut off
the connection and go back to reading. A device that is easy to have with me,
that can technically do everything but only makes it easy to do the stuff I
want, has been everything I wanted.

“It’s just the absolute perfect amount of friction,” Craig Mod told me when I
recounted my experience with the Palma. Mod — a blogger, author, and bookmaker
who has been writing about digital reading for years — loves his Palma, too. He
wrote [27]a blog post about it in May that got a lot of people excited about
the device — he reckons he convinced at least a few hundred people to buy one.
“You wouldn’t want to go surf YouTube and be like, ‘All right, let me watch
MKBHD,’” he says. “But if I needed to… I could pop into that for a second.” 

“It’s just the absolute perfect amount of friction”

That friction is a function of the device itself: E Ink screens just don’t
refresh fast enough to look good playing video. Serviceable in a pinch? Sure.
But not good enough to really suck you in. 

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

Matt Martin, the CEO of calendar startup Clockwise and another new Palma owner,
echoed the sentiment. “I aspire to read more,” he said. “I aspire to not spend
the 30 minutes before bed on Instagram Reels.” He downloaded the New York Times
app, Instapaper, Libby, and Kindle and said he’s been reading more and
Reels-ing less ever since. 

A Boox Palma on a stand, playing music.A Boox Palma on a stand, playing music.
A Boox Palma on a stand, playing music.A Boox Palma on a stand, playing music.
The Palma is definitely a reader first, but I’ve enjoyed it as a music and
podcast player, too. Image: Boox

“There’s the old anecdote we were all taught in Psych 101,” Martin said, “which
is that physical environment matters. I think a separate device matters 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 the Palma adds just enough
friction to stop that train before it goes too far.

Mod has enjoyed the Palma so much that he wants Boox to go even further. “I
would love to have this thing as my main driver,” he said, “so much more than
the dopamine casino iPhone where it’s vying for your attention every two
seconds.” He also wants Boox to get rid of the camera on the back of the Palma,
which, candidly, I’d completely forgotten about until he mentioned it. I
suppose it’s nice to have in a pinch, but a point-and-shoot this is not. 

Boox didn’t build a perfect gadget here. Not by any stretch. The plastic body
is a little flimsy, the screen is set pretty far behind the bezels, everything
takes a half-second longer than it should, the screen can be unresponsive at
times, and I wish it would full-refresh the E Ink to remove ghosting a little
more often. (There’s a dedicated button for doing that last part, though, which
helps.) For a $280 e-reader, I’d expect a little more polish in both hardware
and software. Worst of all, the Palma runs Android 11, which is already wildly
out of date, and I’m not counting on Boox updating it soon or ever. More than
likely, my Palma will just slowly stop working, app by app, over the next
couple of years. That’s particularly frustrating given how simple my needs are;
for playing music and reading articles, there’s no reason this shouldn’t last
forever.

All Boox really did was put together the right set of ingredients

All Boox really did was put 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 small new things I
like doing on the Palma rather than my phone; I have The New York Times’ games
app on there now for some E Ink crosswords, and I just installed the Roku app,
for instance, so now it’s a backup remote control and a place to plug in my
headphones when I need to listen quietly.

This year has been filled with companies trying to overhaul the way we use our
gadgets. Humane, Rabbit, and others have introduced wild new kinds of devices,
hoping we might find new and different things to do with them. The Palma
represents a much less ambitious — but maybe much more likely — alternative: it
just tweaks the smartphone formula, leaving what works but subtly changing the
device’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s not as bright, not as fast, not as
frictionless. Instead, it’s quiet, simple, sane. And I love it for that.

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[31] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/9/24190843/etsy-handmade-vintage-policy-change
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