Boox Palma 2: A great little e-reader with bigger ambitions

The Palma is a strange product. It’s a small e-reader with far bigger gadget ambitions. On its site, Boox describes the product as a “distraction-free device that lets you reclaim your focus in the exact middle between tech and life.”

In a lot of ways, the company’s ambitions appear to mirror those of Light Phone’s by building a secondary device designed to remove you from your smartphone’s built-in distractions. That’s a nice enough sentiment many of us can no doubt get behind, having experienced yet another deeply polarizing U.S. presidential election through the lens of social media.

What, precisely, constitutes a “distraction” versus an essential function is extremely subjective, however. Turning back to Light Phone for a second, we see a product that was intentionally launched with a limited feature set, only to subsequently introduce new functionality that was initially deemed “nonessential” by the startup.

For better or worse, we rely on our little pocket communicators for nearly every aspect of our lives. Reducing dependence and distraction are valiant goals, but depriving users of genuinely helpful features can be counterproductive.

The Palma doesn’t start from that same place of functional minimalism — at least not fully. There are certain limitations baked directly into the product by the nature of its ePaper display. There’s certain functionality that works better on the technology — reading, for example — but it lacks a tremendous amount of versatility compared to your standard smartphone/tablet screen.

The device, however, runs Android (albeit a few generations behind) and has access to the Play Store. It has a camera, microphone, speakers, and Bluetooth connectivity. The Palma 2 features an upgraded octa-core processor and adds in privacy by way of a fingerprint reader.

The interesting choices of what to put in and what to leave out make it feel like PDA with an identity crisis: a strange consumer electronic chimera that’s not entirely sure what it wants to be when it grows up. As it turns out, that’s part of the fun.

Playing around with the Palma 2 sent me down some unexpected rabbit holes, including Reddit threads wherein people discuss ways to backdoor functionality onto the device. There is, for example, a microSD slot for expandable memory, but not one for a SIM. That means, in spite of the inclusion of microphones, speakers, and Bluetooth, it’s not specifically designed to make phone calls.

As such, people debate the viability of using WhatsApp’s voice feature as a work-around. There’s no GPS, which puts the kibosh on mapping functionality, but how about piggybacking on a device that does? It’s a lot of work for relatively little reward, but it’s always hopeful to see the ways in which technological limitations spur clever user innovation.

Granted, I’ve only been using the Palma 2 for a short time, but I tend to fall in the camp of users content to think of the device as a pure e-reader. It enjoys many of those features, including ePaper that’s far easier on the eyes (and sleep schedule) and extends battery life far beyond what the average smartphone is capable of.

The new processor adds zip to the Palma, while removing the annoying latency from the previous generation. That said, the product is still hampered by ePaper’s refresh limitations. If Boox were to make a version of the Palma that was a true e-reader, stripped of much of the potentially extraneous features, and delivered it at a lower price, I could see these things flying off the shelf.

Just the promise of a reader that’s thin enough to carry in a pocket will likely attract a lot of attention. I’ve wasted more time than I care to mention trying to decide whether to take my Kindle with me on a long train ride, knowing it would mean awkwardly carrying the device around for the rest of the evening and potentially leaving it behind in a dark corner.

Boox makes some great e-readers, and the Palma fits the bill. It’s nice hardware, with a flush 300 ppi display and a solid front light for reading in bed. The $280 asking price, on the other hand, is hard to justify unless you plan to utilize most of the other features.