Boox Tab X C Review

Following my Unboxing and First Impressions, I’ve been using and testing the Boox Tab X C for over a week. What follows is my full review of this 13.3″ colour e-ink tablet.

Design and build

Keen-eyed readers will notice that this section is remarkably similar to my review of the Boox Note Max earlier this year.

The reason for this is simple – the Tab X C uses pretty much the same chassis design, the only real differences being the colour, the fact that the Tab X C has a wireless charging pad on the right edge (for the stylus), and the Tab X C is slightly thicker (an extra 0.7mm).

Because the Boox Tab X C has a 13.3″ screen (around A4-sized), it has a larger footprint and is heavier than tablets that use a 10.3″ e-ink panel. This makes it a bit less portable and a bit more bulkier – it is not all that comfortable to hold in one hand.

The black screen bezel is uniform all the way around, but there is a wider dark-grey panel on the left side, which makes the whole unit feel quite square (as opposed to rectangular, like a piece of paper). The wideness of the unit also contributes to the discomfort of holding it one-handed, because there is more horizontal leverage. Of course, all 13.3″ tablets are going to have this issue to a certain degree – what you gain in screen size, you lose in portability – however, I wanted to mention this because I find 13.3″ models that have the wider panel on the bottom edge (such as the Boox Tab X and old Boox Max Lumi2) somewhat more comfortable to hold.

Also adding to the weight is the metal chassis, however, this does make the unit feel quite robust and durable.

Although the Tab X C feels a bit bulky and weighty when trying to use it as a reading or writing tablet whilst standing, it is absolutely fine to use at a desk or even on your lap, and is no great pain to carry around in a rucksack, particularly if the thin and lightweight standard folio is used. However, if you plan on using the keyboard folio, this does add to the weight significantly (and has some design flaws which are discussed below).

The edges of the Tab X C are metallic silver , and are flat (so that the stylus attaches flush to the right edge, via the magnets). The corners are nicely rounded and the shell, as a whole, is very well machined with no visible imperfections.

As previously mentioned, it is a bit thicker than the Note Max, and also slightly thicker than the reMarkable Paper Pro.

The left edge has a POGO connector and two rectangular holes to connect it up to the keyboard folio for typing. Each of these indents is flanked by a speaker grille.

On the bottom edge (on the left) is the USB-C port, used for charging and data transfer, and an indicator LED. There are also two pinholes, which I thought are for the microphone, but there are also two pinholes on the top edge as well, which threw me a little. So I did a little experiment by tapping/talking into each of the holes whilst recording to see which was loudest. The outcome was that just one of the pinholes on the bottom edge (the one closest to the centre) appears to have the integrated microphone.

As well as the two pinholes on the top edge (the function of which I am unsure), there is also a power button. The button is raised slightly so that it is not flush with the chassis, which makes it easy to locate with your fingertips. It has the same silver colouring as the tablet’s edge.

And, the right edge is smooth other than a slight sausage-shaped indentation, which is the wireless charging pad for the stylus.

Overall, the Boox Tab X C appears to be very well built and robust, and has a decent design. Of course it is bigger, bulkier, heavier, and less portable than tablets that utilise a smaller screen, but this is one of the trade-offs of a 13.3″ e-ink tablet. Similarly, it is perhaps not quite so sleek, elegant, and aesthetically-pleasing as some other devices, but feels more like a tablet designed for purpose, rather than beauty.

Hardware specs

The Boox Tab X C has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 (2.8GHz octa-core) processor, along with 6Gb RAM and 128Gb of storage capacity. It also has Boox Super Refresh (BSR), which means that using a combination of a graphics processor (GPU) and Boox’s proprietary software, you can get better/faster refresh rates from an e-ink screen. Essentially, this means that resource-hungry or faster-frame-rate third-party apps often perform better on a BSR tablet than a non-BSR tablet (however, they are still not as smooth as a conventional screen).

On paper, this is a great spec for an e-ink tablet, but how did it perform in my CPU benchmarks?

In the single-core test, it scored 1002, and in the multi-core test, it scored 2678. This means it rockets into the top spot in my CPU benchmarks table, pushing the previous leader, the Bigme B1051C into second place.

You can check out the benchmark results of all the e-ink tablets I’ve tested here.

Like the Boox Note Max, there are just two refresh modes to choose from in the E-Ink Center; either Normal or A2. Previous Boox tablets had four refresh options, but these now appear to have been consolidated into just two. Essentially, the HD mode is geared for quality (reading text), and the A2 mode is geared for faster refresh rates (with heavier ghosting)

When I reviewed the Note Max, I noticed that there seemed to be quite a bit of ghosting (essentially, faint images of previous pages in the background), but this doesn’t seem as bad on the Tab X C, particularly when a little time is spent optimising the refresh rate configuration. However, I should point out that this may be because of improvements to the firmware since I reviewed the Note Max – when time allows, I will go back and see if it has improved since my original testing.

On the whole, performance on the Boox Tab X C is excellent – perhaps the best I have seen. Everything is quick and snappy, and a wide variety of third-party apps run well on it – web browsing was perfectly usable. Of course, you’re never going to get as good an experience with e-ink as you would with a conventional screen, particularly for things like video and other media consumption, but the Tab X C comes about as close as you can get with e-ink.

Screen

The obvious thing to start with in relation to the screen is its size. It is 13.3″ across the diagonals, which is comparable to a A4 piece of paper, and close to twice the area of a 10.3″ tablet.

Regular readers will know that I am very fond of larger-screened e-ink tablets, and there are several reasons for this.

Firstly, they are so much more comfortable for reading PDFs that have been created with an A4 or legal-sized piece of paper in mind. You can’t really reflow the text in a PDF like you can with an ePub (essentially, everything that is on page 1, stays on page 1, like a printout). This means that when you have a PDF that uses a small font or columns of text, it’s not all that comfortable to view on a 10.3″ screen. There are software solutions to this – for example, you can zoom in/out, view half a page at a time, or (with some reading software) view a column at a time. But this requires more work and configuration. On a 13.3″, you can simply read a PDF as the author intended it to be read.

The extra note-taking canvas space that a 13.3″ tablet provides can also be very useful. If I am doing some complex calculations, I often run out of space on a smaller-screened tablet, and have to roll over to a new page. Then I have to keep flicking back and forth between the pages to check what I’ve previously written. This happens with far less frequency on a 13.3″ screen.

E-ink tablets with a 13.3″ screen are rather rare, with manufacturers often opting to go down the 10″ route because the e-ink panels are cheaper (consequently, 13.3″ tablets are more expensive, often prohibitively so, which reduces their market appeal). As well as the cost, the other downside to 13.3″ tablets is that they have a larger footprint (are bulkier) and tend to be heavier (as I alluded to earlier).

It used to be the case that you would also have to accept a drop in pixel density with a larger screen. For example, the Note Air2+ has 227PPI, but the Max Lumi2/Tab X have 207PPI. This is no longer the case – the Tab X C has 300PPI in monochrome and 150PPI in colour, just like its ~10″ contemporaries. Below are some examples of the screen quality in different apps.

Unlike the Note Max, the Tab X C has a colour (Kaleido 3) screen, and a frontlight (with warm and cold settings), which gives it an extra level of versatility – colour ebooks and websites can be viewed with more comfort, and you don’t have to rely on external lighting conditions to see the screen. However, there are some compromises that must be made for these additional features.

Firstly, the frontlight means that there is an extra layer between the surface of the screen and e-ink panel, which gives the impression that pen strokes (and to a lesser extent, text in ebooks) are slightly below the screen. This creates a very small gap between where the nib of the stylus touches the screen and where the mark is made, which can be a little off-putting for some users (including myself). You can read more about this here.

Secondly, e-ink colour screens are inherently not as high-quality or vibrant as conventional screens. There are far fewer colours, and a lower pixel density, which means colours look muted and washed out, and photographs don’t look right. When compared with monochrome e-ink tablets, Kaleido 3 screens are a few shades darker and have lower contrast between the foreground and background when the frontlight is turned off (see pic below). This is perhaps the reason that all Kaleido 3 e-ink tablets (at least those that I’m aware of) also have a frontlight – unless you are in daylight or a brightly-lit room, you often need to crank up the brightness. I discuss this in more detail in this article.

The Tab X C has a capacitive (touchscreen) layer to pick up taps and swipes with your fingertips. I also believe that this layer is used for stylus input as well. There’s no Wacom EMR layer as with previous Boox tablets. Instead, Boox have decided to use a cheaper Active Stylus, which they have called InkSpire. There does not appear to be a paper-like film over the surface of the screen to emulate the ‘scratchiness‘ of paper. Instead it feels quite smooth and low-friction. I’ll discuss how these factors affects the writing experience below.

Overall, the screen is really very good. It has a large viewing area, and text is high quality and well-defined. Although colours are not as high quality as you would expect from a conventional screen, they are about as good as you are going to get with e-ink. The screen does have a inherent darkness to it (meaning the background ‘whites’ are not quite as white as they are on monochrome tablets), but there is a frontlight present to mitigate this.

Writing experience

So far, this review has been mostly positive, but this is the point where it gets a bit ugly.

In short, the writing experience is rather unpleasant, and the primary reason for this is Boox’s inexplicable decision to use an Active Pen/ Digitiser instead of Wacom EMR for stylus input.

Wacom EMR provides such a better writing experience that I struggle to understand why Boox would do this. The only reason I can come up with is that of cost – I imagine Wacom charge some hefty licencing fees to the manufacturers of products that use their technology.

Why is Wacom EMR better than Active Pen?

Firstly, it doesn’t require its own power source because it uses electromagnetism (magnets in the stylus itself). This means that there is no integrated battery and no need to charge the stylus. The Tab X C does offer convenient wireless charging whilst the stylus is magnetically snapped to the side of the tablet, but this relies on you remembering to connect it and if the battery stops working (which eventually it will because it is a consumable) then the stylus is no longer usable.

In addition, most Wacom nibs are finer at the tip, providing more accuracy and precision. In contrast, Boox’s InkSpire stylus has a cone-shaped tip with a slightly wider-diameter at the tip. The materials used on the tip of Wacom styluses tend to be softer and rougher providing a degree of friction when writing. An active stylus uses a smoother plastic nib which tends to glide across the screen a bit too freely.

As stated earlier, there is no paper-like film over the surface of the screen of the Tab X C, which also reduces the level of friction as you write. However, having recently becoming accustomed to using Boox’s other Active Pen (the InkSense stylus on the Boox Go 7), I was able to to discern that there is a slight improvement in writing experience with the InkSpire stylus. The nibs used on the InkSpire have a softer and more rubbery texture, which offers a little more resistance than the InkSense. It also means that the annoying tapping sound every time the stylus hit the screen with the InkSense, is not as harsh with the InkSpire. In short, InkSpire is better than InkSense, but still way behind Wacom.

Boox have also introduced haptic feedback, which is a physical vibration in the stylus whenever certain brush tools in the note-taking app (such as the pencil) are used. When I first heard of this, I felt it was gimmicky, and would negatively affect the writing experience. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised when I used it because it did quite accurately mimic the physical sensation of writing on a rougher surface and simulated a level of friction. But despite my admiration of how this technology was able to fool me, it was still not, in my opinion, as good as the real thing – the actual sensation of physical friction between the pen nib and the screen surface. It is a very good imitation but you sort of know that its fake – you can hear a buzz/hum of the electricity whilst using it, and not accurate

Precision feels a bit off, and this is due to a combination of the frontlight (creating a gap between the screen’s surface and where the pen strokes appear) and the thicker crayon-like nib of the pen.

However, both tilt-sensitivity, and pressure-sensitivity worked pretty well and there was very little lag. Having said that, if the stylus is left unused for a few minutes, it doesn’t immediately start working again when you want to start writing. It takes a few blank strokes before it kicks back into life, which I found to be very frustrating. Presumably, it is going into sleep mode to conserve the battery, and takes a moment to wake back up again – an issue that doesn’t even exist with battery-less Wacom styluses.

Update July 25: A recent Boox firmware update (ver 4.0.4) has resolved the issue where the first stroke does not register. I’ve decided to knock the Tab X C up a percentage point for this improvement because it makes writing a bit less frustrating.

Overall, the writing experience with the InkSpire is not the worst I have experienced. In fact, out of all the e-ink tablets I’ve tested that use Active Pens (as opposed to Wacom EMR), the InkSpire stylus is probably the best. And InkSpire is a significant improvement over the InkSense pens used with the Boox Go 7 series because the nib is slightly more rubbery, so there is a bit more friction and less audible tapping. It is perfectly capable of being used for writing purposes….but when compared to Wacom EMR styluses, the tactile experience is significantly poorer.

Hardware features

In addition to the solid CPU, memory, and storage space, the Tab X C has additional hardware features that expand its capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, it has BSR, which means faster refresh rates, and better performance of third-party apps. However, this does come at the cost of battery life (see below).

For connectivity, there is both WiFi and Bluetooth. In addition, the USB-C port can be used for data transfer (as well as charging). It can also be used as an OTG port so that other peripherals and storage devices can be hooked up.

It has dual speakers for listening to audio – not the greatest quality, but sufficient – and, for audio input, there is a microphone.

There’s also a G-Sensor, which means that the screen will auto-orientate between landscape and portrait simply by physically rotating the tablet. And, as discussed earlier, there’s a wireless charging pad on the right edge for the stylus.

As with most Boox tablets, there is an array of additional hardware that increase the capabilities of what it can be used for. As well as the core reading and writing tasks, you can also listen to music/podcasts or record voice notes/meetings. The presence of BSR also means that it is possible to watch videos with some degree of comfort (although e-ink is still not great for this type of media consumption) and run third-party apps. You can also connect other devices via OTG, such as USB sticks, MicroSD cards, or a mouse. Keyboard input is also a possibility, using either Bluetooth or USB/OTG – however, Boox also manufacture a dedicated keyboard folio for the Tab X C (see below).

Battery

The Tab X C has a 5500mAh battery, which is one of the highest capacity batteries on the market for an e-ink tablet. However, with the graphics processor that powers the BSR, the frontlight, and the stylus charging pad, it is probably going to need that extra stored energy!

The table below shows how much battery is depleted by performing certain operations for an hour.

Test (1hr)	Tab X C (% battery used)
Note-taking	5%
Reading	2%
Wifi On	+1%
Frontlight On (medium)	+1%
Frontlight On (full)	+4%

So, you could expect to drain about 5% of the battery per hour when note-taking, and 2% per hour when reading. Having Wifi turned on uses around 1% extra per hour. With the frontlight on medium, you could expect to consume around 1% extra per hour, and if on full brightness, around 4% extra per hour.

I calculate typical battery life from these figures by assuming 3 hours of note-taking and 3 hours of reading each day. If the frontlight is not used, you could expect to use up about 21% of the battery per day, which would give you about 4.8 days of usage. If the frontlight is turned on on a medium setting for the duration, the percentage of battery used increases to around 27% per day, and you could expect it to last around 3.7 days before recharging. Because it uses a colour Kaleido 3 screen, which is darker than monochrome screens (as discussed above) it is likely that you will need to have the frontlight turned on at least a little.

You can see a full comparison of battery life across e-ink tablets here, but, in simple terms, the Boox Tab X C has around average performance in this regard (despite having a larger capacity battery than most of the other tablets on the list).

Accessories

The accessories I received from Boox included the InkSpire stylus, the magnetic case (standard folio), and the keyboard folio.

InkSpire Stylus

I’ve already discussed many of the issues with the InkSpire stylus when compared to Wacom EMR styluses, but to quickly recap:

• The cone-shaped nib has quite a wide diameter, which means precision is a bit off
• It requires charging
• It goes into sleep mode when unused and takes a moment to start working again

But when compared to other Active Styluses I’ve used (such as the Kobo Pen, Meebook Stylus, and Boox’s InkSense Pen), it is actually pretty good.

It is almost cylindrical, with one side flattened to prevent it rolling on uneven surfaces. This flat edge is also used to ensure that the stylus is flush with the right edge of the tablet when snapped to it magnetically for wireless charging. The shaft is a little smooth, which means that when I am writing a lot and my hand starts to get a bit sweaty, I begin to lose my grip. I find that the stylus is nicely-weighted (not too heavy, not too light), and fairly well-balanced (if a little too top-heavy).

It is black in colour with a silver-gray cap at the top – there is no eraser at the top, and there are no buttons on the shaft, which suits me just fine, but may be an issue to others.

The Pen Plus uses replaceable nibs, which will wear down with use, however, I would expect them to last longer than the regular nibs on a Wacom stylus because they are made from a harder material – but this is something I will need to test properly over the long term. Another slight advantage of these nibs over Wacom EMR is that they don’t generate as much debris on the screen (tiny pieces of the nib that break off as the nib wears).

The stylus attaches magnetically to the right edge of the tablet, and holds with a fairly firm grip (although a vigorous shake will cause it to become detached). Of course, you will be unlikely to jolt your tablet with such force during general use, but it can be knocked off in in transit inside a bag or rucksack. The folio does contain a magnetic flap to keep the stylus in place, but I’ve said in previous reviews, I really don’t like the flap solution.

As Active Styluses go, the InkSpire tablet is pretty good, but the technology used is far worse than Wacom EMR, which really is the gold standard for writing with e-ink tablets. If you’ve never used Wacom, you may not think it so bad, because it does work okay, but if you’ve previously been using a Wacom stylus, you will notice the poorer writing experience immediately.

Standard folio

NOTE: This is a copy/paste from my Boox Note Max Review, because the Boox Tab X C uses exactly the same magnetic cover.

The standard folio is very plain, but very practical. It is also thin and fairly lightweight.

The exterior is dark gray and has a textured plastic feel to it, with the Boox logo embossed in green in the bottom right corner. The interior is also green, and has the slogan ‘Make a difference‘ embedded on the left-hand side.

The tablet sticks to the folio using magnetism. It’s not the strongest hold, and will fall out with a vigorous shake whilst the folio is open, but is unlikely to become detached with normal everyday use. I’ve carried it in a rucksack to and from my office for the past few weeks without any issues.

A fold on the rear panel converts the folio into a stand (landscape mode only). The Go 10.3 folio had a similar design, however, it wasn’t very stable and tended to slip very easily. Boox have improved the design of the Tab X C folio by adding in a couple of grooves on the interior of the front panel, which holds the tablet in place. Two grooves means two possible viewing angles – i don’t have a protractor hand but they look to be around the 110-120 degrees mark.

Overall, it’s a simple but effective folio that appears to perform its primary role of protecting screen well. On a subjective level, I don’t really like the green coloring, but that is a personal preference.

Keyboard folio

Having been ‘wowed‘ recently by the keyboard folio of the reMarkable Paper Pro, I was eager to see how Boox’s offering would compare.

Like the regular folio the exterior is made from a textured polymer, but with an orange-brown colouring. The Boox logo is embossed centrally in the middle of the front panel but uses a similar color, so it is not too prominent. The interior of the front panel is softer and gray, and the interior of the rear panel has the keyboard unit/panel stuck to it, covering its entire surface. It has a silvery metal look to it, but appears to made from plastic.

The keyboard unit/panel is split into three sections, each roughly taking up about a third of the surface area. The rear section is mostly smooth and nondescript, apart from an indented gully which the Tab X C slots into when you want to use the keyboard. Pogo connectors in the gully connect the keyboard to the tablet and small plastic brackets slot into the holes on the edge of the tablet to provide extra stability in this configuration. Compared to other Boox keyboard folios I’ve used, the Note Max is exceedingly sturdy – even tapping the screen towards the top edge does not make it shake very much.

The middle section is the keyboard itself. It is a standard QWERTY layout but the character keys have the US layout (i.e. the @ and ” switch places and the # replaces the £ when pressing shift+3). As a Brit, this took a little getting used to, and I was unable to find a setting in the software to change the keyboard layout, but was not a major barrier to use. There’s no backlight on the keyboard, but there is a small LED on the CAPS LOCK button to let you know if it is enabled. There are function keys to increase/decrease the brightness and warmth – in my Note Max review, I speculated that the presence of these keys could be an indication that Boox have plans to release a a new frontlit 13.3″ tablet that is compatible with this keyboard folio (and it seems I was correct, for once!)

Finally, the front section is the trackpad, which not only allows you to move the mouse pointer, but is also equipped with a set of gestures that can make navigation quicker and easier. For example, a three-fingered swipe up takes you to the home screen, and a four-fingered tap takes a screenshot. Although I made a lot of use of the gestures (once I’d learned the ones I use regularly), I did not like moving the mouse pointer around with the trackpad. There’s somewhat of a delay between your finger movement and the pointer movement, and rather than moving, it often jumps from one place to another, as though it is quantum tunneling. However, this is perhaps to be expected from an e-ink screen because of the slower refresh rates – although I find it unpleasant to use, I’ve not seen an e-ink tablet where mouse cursor movement is any smoother. Besides, because it is touchscreen, its much easier to tap the screen rather the point-and-click.

The keyboard panel is quite thick (around half a centimetre) and adds a fair bit of additional heft to the package.

On the whole, typing is really very good, although you do have to ensure the refresh rate is set to A2, otherwise the cursor lags behind the characters you are typing momentarily. Each keypress has an audible and tactile click, and although there is a very slight delay between pressing a key and it appearing on screen, it is not enough to make it frustrating or even problematic to use – although faster typists than myself may disagree.

A couple of visitors to eWritable have mentioned that some reviewers have had issues with the spacebar effectively double-tapping with each press. I can’t say I’ve noticed this at all. There were a couple of occasions where alphanumeric characters showed up twice, but this was very infrequent, and I’m happy to admit that it was probably my typing skills that were the issue rather than the hardware/software.

One thing I did notice from time to time is that when switching between apps, the keyboard would throw a bit of a wobbly. For example, if I do a four-fingered press on the trackpad to take a screenshot, and then go back to my typed document, most of the keys don’t do anything, some throw out strange characters, and some toggle some option on/off (e.g. the T button would turn the trackpad off). It’s almost as if a function key is being held down. I’m sure there’s an easier way to fix this, but my solution was to simply lift the tablet away from the keyboard momentarily and then slot it back in to reset it.

There are not all that many e-ink tablets that have an optional dedicated keyboard, and out of all the ones I’ve tested, the reMarkable Paper Pro has, by far, the best design. The keyboard on the rMPP folds out from the rear panel, preventing the keyboard from touching the screen when it is closed. In contrast, the screen of the Tab X C is physically touching the surface of the keyboard panel when it is closed, which does concern me. In addition, there is some movement between the front and rear panels, which causes the screen to easily slide back and forth across the keyboard panel when in the closed position. There is a fairly weak magnetic attraction that helps to keep the front panel closed and Boox supply a magnetic flap to shore it up a little more (and keep the stylus in place), but there is still a little movement there that could possibly damage the screen over the long-term. This was enough for me to decide that I would keep the Tab X C in the standard folio by default, and only use the keyboard folio when it came to typing tasks.

The video below shows how easily the screen and keyboard panel can slide against one another (this particular video shows the Note Max in the keyboard folio, but it is the same for the Tab X C).

So, overall, the keyboard folio works well. I’ve had very few practical issues with typing. Key presses are nice and the tablet is very sturdy when the folio is configured to be used as a tablet stand and connect to the keyboard. And aesthetically, it looks very nice.

But the way it has been designed for the closed position does worry me a bit. As I said, the screen is in direct contact with the fairly rigid keyboard panel, and there is movement between the front and rear panels, which means that the screen will rub against the keyboard panel very easily. I imagine that if it was in a rucksack, and you were walking along, the screen and keyboard would slide across each other a lot. This may have very little effect over the course of days/weeks, but over months/years, scratches may begin to appear, simply due to this friction. Another concern is that the keyboard panel is quite heavy and its weight could apply pressure to the screen when the folio is closed – the fragility of e-ink means that it is not a good idea to compress the screen if you can avoid it. In addition, when not using the keyboard, there is no comfortable place for the keyboard panel. You can fold the front cover back so that the keyboard is facing the desk, but then the tablet becomes unstable and the keyboard panel slides over the desk. Of course, you can keep the folio open, but this takes up a fair chunk of desk space. The best option I’ve found is to simply take the tablet out of the folio when not using the keyboard. The final negative for me is that it utilises a magnetic flap, which I really don’t like (as I’ve mentioned in several previous reviews).

Software

My review of this tablet should be read in conjunction with my review of the current firmware (see table below), which includes aspects such as the Operating System, User Interface, and Native Apps.

The hardware and software reviews have been separated because the firmware used at the time that this review was written may not be the same firmware being used currently. This could result in the review quickly becoming outdated. Also, as several tablets may use the same firmware, this would mean going back and updating every single tablet review from a particular manufacturer to account for the new firmware. By splitting them up, if there is a firmware update, I am able to make the updates on a single page.

Current versions of this brand’s firmware are shown in the table below, along with the tablets running them.

My rating	Firmware version	Tablets using this firmware
	4.1 (current version) Aug 2025	Boox Go 10.3 Boox Note Air5 C Boox Palma 2 Pro Boox Note Air3 Boox Note Air4 C Boox Note Air3 C Boox Go 7 Boox Go Color 7
	4.0 (current version) Oct 2024	Boox Note Max Boox Tab Ultra C Pro Boox Tab X Boox Tab X C Boox Tab Mini C Boox Tab Ultra Boox Max Lumi 2 Boox Tab Ultra C Boox Note Air2 Plus Boox Note 5
Older Boox firmware versions may be found here

Brand

For some people, it is also worth considering the brand as whole, including aspects like customer service, ecosystem, values, and criticisms.

My full overview of the Boox brand can be found here, but I have provided a summary below.

Final verdict

Overall, the Tab X C is an excellent e-ink tablet in almost every way…..except the tactile writing experience.

And because writing and other mark-making is the primary reason that most people will buy an e-ink tablet, it seems crazy to me that Boox would skimp on such an integral aspect of the experience. For me, the move from the tried-and-tested Wacom EMR technology for stylus input to something that is quite simply inferior is mind-boggling.

The positives are considerable. The Tab X C is one of only a couple of colour 13.3″ e-ink tablets on the market, so it has great appeal in that regard – if you want a big colour e-ink tablet, you aren’t really spoiled for choice. The screen quality is excellent (or as good as you can get with colour e-ink) and it is quick and snappy, with BSR, and the best CPU benchmarks that I’ve ever recorded.

It has a frontlight, with both warm and cold settings, and runs Boox’s feature-rich e-reading and note-taking apps. These run on top of Android, and there is support for the Google Play Store, so myriad third-party apps can be installed and used.

The battery life isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible either. It’s a bit cumbersome to hold whilst standing, and is quite heavy, but that is perhaps to be expected from a larger screen.

The keyboard folio works well as a keyboard/stand but isn’t really fit for purpose as a folio because it is heavier and bashes the screen unless you are very careful when closing it. And when it is closed, it rubs against the screen and applies pressure to it.

On the whole, the Tab X C has a lot going for it, but the InkSpire stylus is a massive downgrade from the Wacom stylus that Boox shipped with previous models in their range. No e-ink tablet is perfect, and I will usually drop the odd percentage point or two in my ratings for design flaws. But, for me, the quality of the tactile writing experience is such an important factor when I’m reviewing e-ink tablets that I really have no choice but to knock lots of points off based solely on this. Similarly, I can’t honestly make it one of my recommendations, even though it is such a great device in virtually every other way.

It really is a massive shame because the Tab X C could have been so much better, except for this one thing.

My experience of Boox is that they usually have unfathomable flaws in every new device. With the Note Air 3/3C/4C the charging port was on the left edge so that you couldn’t charge the tablet with the folio closed. With the Go 10.3, the edges were thin and contoured so that the stylus didn’t stick to it very well. And now, the Tab X C, Go 7 and Go Color 7, are fantastic devices in almost every way, except that they all use an inferior non-Wacom stylus, making them quite unpleasant to write on. It’s got to the point now (and I should note that this is pure speculation) where I feel like Boox are deliberately putting flaws into their devices so that they can “correct” them with their next release. Their fast product cycle and small incremental improvements seem to suggest this. For this reason, I’m going out-on-a-limb to predict that Boox will launch a Tab X C Pro later in the year (perhaps October-time) that uses a Wacom stylus (and perhaps has four microphones to utilise the other pinholes on the chassis).

Buying options

The Tab X C can be purchased from the following outlets from 17th June 2025.

• The Boox Global Store*
• The Boox EU Store*
• Amazon*

Tablet Overview