There are really only three things you need to know about the Boox Palma. First: it’s about the size of a smartphone. Two: it runs on Android, with the Play Store. Three: It has an E Ink screen. There are other specs and features I’ll get to, but this combination – smartphone, Android, E Ink – is what the Palma is all about.
After a few months of using the Palma, a $280 device on sale since last fall, this combination turned out to be exactly what I needed. Because it’s smartphone-sized, with a 6.1-inch screen and a slightly larger overall footprint than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus, I can hold it in one hand and slip it into my pocket. Since it runs Android, I can download any app I need. And since it’s E Ink, the battery lasts 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 simply horrible to use.
Of course, the Palma can technically download TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. It can even, stutteringly, play videos from these applications. But because of E Ink’s low resolution, slow refresh rate, and overall black-and-white nature, it’s a lousy enough experience that I’ll never be tempted to do it. Instead, I find myself doing the things the Palma’s screen is designed to do. This machine is above all an e-reader. It’s just that, unlike all other e-readers, this one lets you read in any app you like to use.
The first app I downloaded on the Palma was Amazon Kindle, where all my e-books are located. And before you were 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 had already accomplished something that no other e-reader offers. Next, I downloaded a few news apps, Flipboard and the note-taking app Obsidian.
Two months later, these are still the applications I use the most on the Palma. Boox pre-installs a few others, like a voice recorder and a music app, but I’ve barely touched them. Who needs it when I have Android! I downloaded Pocket Casts and Spotify instead, and now my Palma is my iPod as well as my Kindle. When I go out for coffee in the morning or walk the dog in the afternoon, only the Palma accompanies me.
I was amazed at how much activity on my phone disappeared when I moved all my listening and reading activities to another device. I never noticed how often I would pull out my phone to change songs, only to be drawn in by a Slack message or Gmail notification. (Come to think of it, thanks to the “Notification Mute” feature in the Boox version of Android, I don’t think I’ve received a single notification since I got this thing.) Now that I’m bringing the Palma and not my phone with me to the coffee shop, I do more reading because TikTok is not at all tempting on this device. In fact, I’m offline most of the time. I’ll just turn off Airplane mode to sync the different apps, then cut the connection and go back to reading. A device that is easy to have with me, that can technically do everything but only allows me to easily do what I want, has been everything I wanted.
“It’s just the perfect amount of friction,” Craig Mod told me when I recounted my experience with the Palma. Mod – blogger, author and bookmaker who has been writing about digital reading for years – also loves his Palma. He wrote a blog post about it in May that got many people excited about the device. He estimates he’s convinced at least a few hundred people to buy one. “You wouldn’t want to surf YouTube and say, ‘All right, let me watch MKBHD,'” he says. “But if I needed to…I could come back to that for a second.”
“It’s just the perfect amount of friction”
This friction is a function of the device itself: E Ink screens simply don’t refresh fast enough to look good when playing a video. Repairable in a pinch? Of course. But not enough to really attract you.
Like me, Mod said the Palma’s size and screen combination sold the device for him. “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 have it in your hand with your thumb on the volume controls, and you can easily flip through an article until you fall asleep.” Did I mention that you can set the Palma to flip pages when you press the volume buttons? I like this. Mod called the Palma “a reader’s sweet lullaby.”
Matt Martin, CEO of calendar startup Clockwise and Palma’s other new owner, echoed that 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 Reels more and less since.
“There’s the old anecdote that we were all taught 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 this random thought, like: what was this thing I wanted to buy on Amazon? And you are there without thinking about it. A device like the Palma adds just enough friction to stop that train before it goes too far.
Mod liked Palma so much that he wants Boox to go even further. “I would love to have this thing as a prime mover,” he said, “much more than the dopamine casino iPhone where it competes 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 guess it’s nice to have a clamp, but a point-and-shoot isn’t.
Boox hasn’t built a perfect gadget here. No way. The plastic body is a little flimsy, the screen is placed quite far behind the bezels, everything takes half a second longer than it should, the screen can be unresponsive at times, and I wish that it completely refreshes the E Ink to remove it. ghosts a little more often. (There is a dedicated button to do that last part, though, which helps.) For a $280 e-reader, I’d expect a bit more polish in both hardware and software. Worst of all, the Palma runs Android 11, which is already very outdated, and I don’t count on Boox to update it soon or ever. It’s more than likely that my Palma will slowly stop working, application by application, over the next couple of years. This is particularly frustrating given the simplicity of my needs; to play music and read articles, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t last forever.
All Boox really did was put together the right set of ingredients
All Boox has really done is put together the right set of ingredients (size, screen, apps) to make something that feels less like a replacement for my smartphone and more like a complement. I continue to discover little new things that I like to do on the Palma rather than on my phone; I have The New York Times‘ for some E Ink crosswords, and I just installed the Roku app, for example, so it’s now a backup remote and a place to plug in my headphones when I need to listen quietly.
This year has been filled with companies trying to rethink the way we use our gadgets. Humane, Rabbit and others have introduced new types of devices, in the hope that 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 simply 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 smooth. Instead, it’s calm, simple and sane. And I love him for that.