I'm switching to e-ink! - BOOX Tab Ultra
The author of this article begins by describing their initial impressions of the device, which they were given to test. They mention that they wanted to quickly check out a video that someone had sent them, and that they used pinch-to-zoom functionality to make it more readable. The author notes that the display is high-resolution, but the speakers are not impressive.
The author goes on to discuss the various features of the device, including its use case as a reading device. They mention that the stylus has 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity, which they remember being associated with other high-end styluses. The author notes that the stylus feels "thin" and presses down into the screen when used lightly, but becomes thicker when pressed more firmly.
The author then dives into the various apps and features of the device. They open up the Notes app, which seems cool and user-friendly. However, they note that there is no multitasking menu, even when setting the default refresh speed to "ultra fast". The author also mentions a feature called "Brew", which appears to be a stylus calibration tool.
The author then discusses the keyboard experience on the device, noting that typing feels good but there is too much travel distance between keys. They also mention a camera app on the back of the device, which seems to be limited in its functionality. The author notes that they can import photos, crop and rotate them, add text, and detect text in documents.
The author then moves on to discuss gaming on the device, noting that it has an e-ink display with support for 60Hz refresh rate. They also mention that the device has a Qualcomm octa-core CPU and 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM. The author notes that they can play games like Genjen Impact using just touch controls.
In conclusion, the author is impressed with the usability and build quality of the device. They note that it is more impressive than they expected, particularly in terms of its full-featured Android capabilities. They also mention that it would be useful for reading large documents and scanning papers, thanks to its built-in camera app.
The article ends with a call to action, encouraging readers to watch more videos from the author on YouTube. The author signs off by saying "I love you" and promises never to leave.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneditor editor go in my face to start and then I'm reading this so show this pretty quick okay books hey everybody it's a books make a different in the world make a different product which is what the books is I can't say the name of the product without laughing books really it's a variant on it must be like book because if you don't know this product is a tablet it's an Android 11 tablet with an e-ink screen so I guess you know obviously when you think eating screened you think e-readers reading what do you read you read books books are spelled with a KS let's change it to an X for fun books I actually was interested in this product when it popped up in the queue because I'm like listen I'm the iPad guy right this is a tablet but it's got an eating screen that's very interesting and but it's got also an iPad like keyboard folio it's called the tab Ultra which is a Samsung thing we got Apple in here we got Samsung we got Kindle it's all the same okay this is kind of cool packaging I like that it feels premium wow it's got It's kind of Hefty I mean apparently it's only 6.7 millimeters thin but how much does it weigh that's my question apparently it's 480 grams so that's something but before we get deeper into there let's uh let's dive deeper into the box okay we got a stylus that I will look closer at later we got a USB a to c chord quick start guide now I've ignored the quick start guy before to my Peril so I'm just going to take a quick quick Gander okay nice I read the quick start guide so hopefully this thing will go smooth as a baby's bub bottom now we also have before I really get into that we also have the fancy iPad cover are they gonna sue me for saying that come at me boots this immediately feels very similar to the iPad one oh nope it's got more of like a leathery feel oh you know what I was viewing this product in such a derogatory way I was like who's gonna buy this thing like I thought it was kind of cool but like you know a lot of the times I'm interested in kind of Niche Tech products that a lot of people aren't but now I'm looking at it and I'm like yo this looks premium if there's a different colored key that's really the main contributor to me changing my mind about this I have to have a specialized oh oh now it's dirty okay uh the the stylus I gotta say right off the bat though it feels nice it's like the apple pencil in the sense that it is like the actual real size of a proper pencil once again like I'm sorry I'm sorry books for making fun of you in the beginning because this feels this feels nice 600 for the tablet the folio the stylus and if I spent 600 on that and I got this it feels premium I mean we got to this like kind of like metal brushed metal type of thing going on in the back they say it's an anti-fingerprint coating although I do see some marks on it already on this side I don't know if that counts as the bottom we got a uh I'm not gonna call it a SMART connector I guess Pogo pins oh and it also tells you how much how fast it can charge as well five volts at 3 amps that's 15 watts okay and on the I guess on the left side looking at the screen we got I guess that must be the power button and a fingerprint reader it is it is a fingerprint reader nice this is a speaker this might be a mic I think this is an indicator light perhaps but we'll find out when we turn it on on this side we have oh this is the magnetic mount for the stylus boom just like an iPad look at that once again I feel taken care of oh if I did it like that it would come off the iPad too I think the real test is whether you can shake it up and down like oh ah I had it on wrong Jake I had the pen on wrong it's doing great now and on the I guess right side we have another speaker uh stereo speakers nice and a SIM card slot oh my bad this is not a SIM card slot it is a SD card slot which they call a TF card slot and agree to disagree oh a USBC right which is why the the card came with that and on the back of that camera module I don't know what the specs are right now I will find out later after this word from our sponsor you like that this video is brought to you by manscape you know Christmas is right around the corner and their new performance package 4.0 will make a great gift for your partner the package includes their waterproof and cordless lawnmower 4.0 their weed whacker ear and nose trimmer for tricky trimming and they're crop preserver and crop reviver for your deodorizing and hydration needs for a limited time you'll also get two free gifts the shed travel bag and the manscaped anti-chafing box of briefs don't wait go to manscape.com and use promo code short circuit for 20 off plus free international shipping go turn on oh man that really made me feel like I was about to play some Pokemon I'm intrigued by the idea of e-paper tablets but I think that there's a reason that they haven't become incredibly popular except as e-readers which is primarily the fact that you know oh the backlight kicked in that's cool the fact that the refresh rate necessarily has to be lower for an eating screen than it is for like you know an LCD a regular type of screen but books apparently has multiple refresh modes where there's like an HD mode for reading books with a low refresh rate and then there's a balanced and high refresh rate and super high refresh rate as I swipe nothing's happening until I complete the swipe and then it decides to refresh but I'm gonna want to go into the settings right away and try and get to the faster refresh rate just like scrolling a little bit like that I'm skipping past like four items here's power power is going to be at the bottom even if I just scroll like a little bit so that's something that's kind of annoying to me right off the bat I want to be able to like just adjust a little bit the other thing that's jumping out to me is this is Android 11 but this looks like iOS there's a sidebar with all the categories and then over here you've got once you click into a category it's going to show you the options anyways display full refresh frequency what does that mean oh every five Taps it's gonna fully refresh the screen instead of like partially refresh it there's gentian impact on here I mean it is on Ultra fast okay so you can set specific apps to have certain types of refresh rates we've got HD mode balanced mode fast mode and Ultra fast and Ultra fast has even heavier detail loss but suitable for like playing videos oh my gosh wow so this is an ultra fast mode and even just when nothing's happening on screen it degrades the quality in order to have that higher refresh rate so like I had to like look close to like see that this this text looks pretty rough I mean like I said okay so right from the control center you can get right into like refresh modes and you can I guess you can change it while you're actually in the app I'm opening the books website and I'm scrolling okay we have finder control over scroll okay let's see fast is that better I can't even tell I think it's like a little bit better but not that different let's go to ultra fast I mean okay so that's noticeably smoother that's interesting so if you just go to the control center you can oh okay you can you can adjust the backlight it's not just on and off there's like levels to it that's pretty cool what's the moon thing wait what oh it is dual tone that's what they mean by dual tone light is that you have a backlight that is cool and you have a backlight that is warm oh you can have them both at Max for like a mix can I zoom in oh look at this I'm zooming in on paper but actually so I'm in Ultra fast mode I'm going to switch real quick to HD and see if that makes the image look any better he's got ghosting lines oh I'm the ghost of Linus Sebastian can you see the that's weird because I had it set to five Taps it let me kind of like tap around five times before it like did a full refresh and got rid of the ghost image so if I zoom in here we have that ghost image there until I do a number of TAPS and then is it going to do a full refresh maybe it like knows when I just like stop touching it for a bit Yeah and then it's like okay lay off for a second so I can do the full refresh I'm fairly happy with the like browsing experience especially it's like scrolling like this this is an eating screen that's pretty impressive this thing has a 1872 by 1404 resolution and it's a 10.3 inch screen which I never said although you should be able to tell based on you knowing exactly how big my hands are okay we're back to the super premium feeling keyboard this thing is about to go from janky E Ink tablet to the most premium ooh so you can set it to auto rotate like a normal device or you can set it to only auto rotate to the flipped orientation that you're that you that you desire for it it's kind of Awesome it is kind of cool if you're like I'm only using this to e-read to read books and I only read books like this so I only wanted to know if I like in in my bed and I have my phone upside down or something okay I'm in the keyboard folio and now this is interesting unlike an iPad or I turned auto rotate off oh keyboard Access Auto landscape and they may have keyboard shortcuts cool so I guess it's saying when you connect it into the keyboard folio it'll automatically go to landscape but it wasn't I thought it wasn't doing that but you got keyboard shortcuts here which is actually pretty cool that they tell you right up front but it only applies to the Onyx official keyboard which is this thing so you can use other Bluetooth keyboards with it although it comes with it so that might be kind of weird but Oh I thought that was part of the crab Rave but no that this is so funny because I'm also there's also ghosting hello it sounds a little less offensive when you turn the volume down a little bit and it's not trying so hard at max volume that definitely sounds obviously distorted it doesn't sound very well uh very good just the fact that this is an e-ink tablet and I'm playing a video with sound on YouTube is kind of that's that's fun that's fun by itself this entire time the video has been playing the ghosting from various other things app icons the control center Reddit pinch to zoom that's all there if I was using this for either work or for reading and someone sent me a video and I wanted a chickly chickly and I wanted to quickly check it I get the gist of what was going on very blurry okay now just for just for Giggles Jake humor me I'm gonna play the video in HD mode which is the lowest refresh rate okay do you see that uh the speakers weren't incredibly impressive but you know they've they'll do the job a big use case of this other than just reading books is taking notes they have the pen and everything and you know I'm sure that's part of the marketing is that like oh this is a device you could get take nice notes with so let's open the notes app I'm guessing this is books's own Notes app if I put my hand on nothing wait but I thought we were not we were just in regular HD mode hello because like it it seems pretty responsive for like an eating screen honestly that's crazy the stylus apparently has 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity which is a number that I remember being associated with other styluses that I've used so I'm going very lightly it's a thin line and then I press it gets thick thin thick yeah nice the notes app seems cool real quick I want to see the multitasking huh is there no multitasking menu even when you set the default like home screen refresh speed to ultra fast when you scroll on something like this it doesn't scroll like the web page incrementally it just jumps which is annoying but this is kind of cool when you swipe to the right from the home screen you get this little like launcher place where you got your library with a number of books that I imagine that you might be reading recently let's go back to notepad because there's a couple features I just want to look at hello nice bro Brew with two o's nice but if I wanted to actually type with the keyboard typing experience is pretty good the key keys feel kind of mushy yeah there's not as much of a tactile bump as I would like they definitely feel I think at first glance you feel them and you're kind of like oh that feels kind of tactile but there's a lot of travel distance there's more travel distance than I would like she's like oh you want to press me okay so on the back there's a 16 megapixel camera but I couldn't find a camera app so it might be that it's called the smart scanner because it's only really meant to be used to scan documents that's so funny okay uh smile here's your photos what do you want to do with it I can import it I can go to the next step all right here we are crop it you can rotate it you can hand write on it add text you can detect text in the document it right here on the tablet and then send it to your notes app or to or to create a PDF okay I can send to a node I can send it over Bluetooth use onyxmail nearby you can use nearby share like Androids feature yeah this is like the default Android nearby share so it's like airdropping but for Androids the problems of philosophy give me a little sample boom how do I change the view and stuff I don't know how people use I've never used an e-reader this big so I don't know how people like read I would want the text to be smaller and I'm there must be a way to do that I don't know how to do it though anyways the reading seeps fine but what I'm really interested in is gaming on the e-ink on the books tab Ultra because yeah this thing has we installed gentian impact on it can you play that with just the touch controls I've never played this game they don't say in the specs page what the actual CPU is it just says Qualcomm octa-core there's four gigs of lpddr4x RAM and 128 gigs of storage okay will it go in the background if I go to the home screen hopefully okay uh this is I'm this is me gaming uh we wanted to open genjen impact for the memes but that didn't really work out in conclusion I came into this thinking that this was just gonna be like a janky uh you know like fun little tablet but this is like a full-featured Android tablet with the whole app ecosystem with the refresh rate that actually makes it usable in some cases that you wouldn't expect the e-ink tablet to be able to be usable in overall I'm pretty impressed with with the usability with the build quality more impressed than I thought I'd be thanks for watching Short Circuit that's us if you want to watch more videos click this one somewhere to watch the one of my iPad ones and I love you and uh never leaveeditor editor go in my face to start and then I'm reading this so show this pretty quick okay books hey everybody it's a books make a different in the world make a different product which is what the books is I can't say the name of the product without laughing books really it's a variant on it must be like book because if you don't know this product is a tablet it's an Android 11 tablet with an e-ink screen so I guess you know obviously when you think eating screened you think e-readers reading what do you read you read books books are spelled with a KS let's change it to an X for fun books I actually was interested in this product when it popped up in the queue because I'm like listen I'm the iPad guy right this is a tablet but it's got an eating screen that's very interesting and but it's got also an iPad like keyboard folio it's called the tab Ultra which is a Samsung thing we got Apple in here we got Samsung we got Kindle it's all the same okay this is kind of cool packaging I like that it feels premium wow it's got It's kind of Hefty I mean apparently it's only 6.7 millimeters thin but how much does it weigh that's my question apparently it's 480 grams so that's something but before we get deeper into there let's uh let's dive deeper into the box okay we got a stylus that I will look closer at later we got a USB a to c chord quick start guide now I've ignored the quick start guy before to my Peril so I'm just going to take a quick quick Gander okay nice I read the quick start guide so hopefully this thing will go smooth as a baby's bub bottom now we also have before I really get into that we also have the fancy iPad cover are they gonna sue me for saying that come at me boots this immediately feels very similar to the iPad one oh nope it's got more of like a leathery feel oh you know what I was viewing this product in such a derogatory way I was like who's gonna buy this thing like I thought it was kind of cool but like you know a lot of the times I'm interested in kind of Niche Tech products that a lot of people aren't but now I'm looking at it and I'm like yo this looks premium if there's a different colored key that's really the main contributor to me changing my mind about this I have to have a specialized oh oh now it's dirty okay uh the the stylus I gotta say right off the bat though it feels nice it's like the apple pencil in the sense that it is like the actual real size of a proper pencil once again like I'm sorry I'm sorry books for making fun of you in the beginning because this feels this feels nice 600 for the tablet the folio the stylus and if I spent 600 on that and I got this it feels premium I mean we got to this like kind of like metal brushed metal type of thing going on in the back they say it's an anti-fingerprint coating although I do see some marks on it already on this side I don't know if that counts as the bottom we got a uh I'm not gonna call it a SMART connector I guess Pogo pins oh and it also tells you how much how fast it can charge as well five volts at 3 amps that's 15 watts okay and on the I guess on the left side looking at the screen we got I guess that must be the power button and a fingerprint reader it is it is a fingerprint reader nice this is a speaker this might be a mic I think this is an indicator light perhaps but we'll find out when we turn it on on this side we have oh this is the magnetic mount for the stylus boom just like an iPad look at that once again I feel taken care of oh if I did it like that it would come off the iPad too I think the real test is whether you can shake it up and down like oh ah I had it on wrong Jake I had the pen on wrong it's doing great now and on the I guess right side we have another speaker uh stereo speakers nice and a SIM card slot oh my bad this is not a SIM card slot it is a SD card slot which they call a TF card slot and agree to disagree oh a USBC right which is why the the card came with that and on the back of that camera module I don't know what the specs are right now I will find out later after this word from our sponsor you like that this video is brought to you by manscape you know Christmas is right around the corner and their new performance package 4.0 will make a great gift for your partner the package includes their waterproof and cordless lawnmower 4.0 their weed whacker ear and nose trimmer for tricky trimming and they're crop preserver and crop reviver for your deodorizing and hydration needs for a limited time you'll also get two free gifts the shed travel bag and the manscaped anti-chafing box of briefs don't wait go to manscape.com and use promo code short circuit for 20 off plus free international shipping go turn on oh man that really made me feel like I was about to play some Pokemon I'm intrigued by the idea of e-paper tablets but I think that there's a reason that they haven't become incredibly popular except as e-readers which is primarily the fact that you know oh the backlight kicked in that's cool the fact that the refresh rate necessarily has to be lower for an eating screen than it is for like you know an LCD a regular type of screen but books apparently has multiple refresh modes where there's like an HD mode for reading books with a low refresh rate and then there's a balanced and high refresh rate and super high refresh rate as I swipe nothing's happening until I complete the swipe and then it decides to refresh but I'm gonna want to go into the settings right away and try and get to the faster refresh rate just like scrolling a little bit like that I'm skipping past like four items here's power power is going to be at the bottom even if I just scroll like a little bit so that's something that's kind of annoying to me right off the bat I want to be able to like just adjust a little bit the other thing that's jumping out to me is this is Android 11 but this looks like iOS there's a sidebar with all the categories and then over here you've got once you click into a category it's going to show you the options anyways display full refresh frequency what does that mean oh every five Taps it's gonna fully refresh the screen instead of like partially refresh it there's gentian impact on here I mean it is on Ultra fast okay so you can set specific apps to have certain types of refresh rates we've got HD mode balanced mode fast mode and Ultra fast and Ultra fast has even heavier detail loss but suitable for like playing videos oh my gosh wow so this is an ultra fast mode and even just when nothing's happening on screen it degrades the quality in order to have that higher refresh rate so like I had to like look close to like see that this this text looks pretty rough I mean like I said okay so right from the control center you can get right into like refresh modes and you can I guess you can change it while you're actually in the app I'm opening the books website and I'm scrolling okay we have finder control over scroll okay let's see fast is that better I can't even tell I think it's like a little bit better but not that different let's go to ultra fast I mean okay so that's noticeably smoother that's interesting so if you just go to the control center you can oh okay you can you can adjust the backlight it's not just on and off there's like levels to it that's pretty cool what's the moon thing wait what oh it is dual tone that's what they mean by dual tone light is that you have a backlight that is cool and you have a backlight that is warm oh you can have them both at Max for like a mix can I zoom in oh look at this I'm zooming in on paper but actually so I'm in Ultra fast mode I'm going to switch real quick to HD and see if that makes the image look any better he's got ghosting lines oh I'm the ghost of Linus Sebastian can you see the that's weird because I had it set to five Taps it let me kind of like tap around five times before it like did a full refresh and got rid of the ghost image so if I zoom in here we have that ghost image there until I do a number of TAPS and then is it going to do a full refresh maybe it like knows when I just like stop touching it for a bit Yeah and then it's like okay lay off for a second so I can do the full refresh I'm fairly happy with the like browsing experience especially it's like scrolling like this this is an eating screen that's pretty impressive this thing has a 1872 by 1404 resolution and it's a 10.3 inch screen which I never said although you should be able to tell based on you knowing exactly how big my hands are okay we're back to the super premium feeling keyboard this thing is about to go from janky E Ink tablet to the most premium ooh so you can set it to auto rotate like a normal device or you can set it to only auto rotate to the flipped orientation that you're that you that you desire for it it's kind of Awesome it is kind of cool if you're like I'm only using this to e-read to read books and I only read books like this so I only wanted to know if I like in in my bed and I have my phone upside down or something okay I'm in the keyboard folio and now this is interesting unlike an iPad or I turned auto rotate off oh keyboard Access Auto landscape and they may have keyboard shortcuts cool so I guess it's saying when you connect it into the keyboard folio it'll automatically go to landscape but it wasn't I thought it wasn't doing that but you got keyboard shortcuts here which is actually pretty cool that they tell you right up front but it only applies to the Onyx official keyboard which is this thing so you can use other Bluetooth keyboards with it although it comes with it so that might be kind of weird but Oh I thought that was part of the crab Rave but no that this is so funny because I'm also there's also ghosting hello it sounds a little less offensive when you turn the volume down a little bit and it's not trying so hard at max volume that definitely sounds obviously distorted it doesn't sound very well uh very good just the fact that this is an e-ink tablet and I'm playing a video with sound on YouTube is kind of that's that's fun that's fun by itself this entire time the video has been playing the ghosting from various other things app icons the control center Reddit pinch to zoom that's all there if I was using this for either work or for reading and someone sent me a video and I wanted a chickly chickly and I wanted to quickly check it I get the gist of what was going on very blurry okay now just for just for Giggles Jake humor me I'm gonna play the video in HD mode which is the lowest refresh rate okay do you see that uh the speakers weren't incredibly impressive but you know they've they'll do the job a big use case of this other than just reading books is taking notes they have the pen and everything and you know I'm sure that's part of the marketing is that like oh this is a device you could get take nice notes with so let's open the notes app I'm guessing this is books's own Notes app if I put my hand on nothing wait but I thought we were not we were just in regular HD mode hello because like it it seems pretty responsive for like an eating screen honestly that's crazy the stylus apparently has 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity which is a number that I remember being associated with other styluses that I've used so I'm going very lightly it's a thin line and then I press it gets thick thin thick yeah nice the notes app seems cool real quick I want to see the multitasking huh is there no multitasking menu even when you set the default like home screen refresh speed to ultra fast when you scroll on something like this it doesn't scroll like the web page incrementally it just jumps which is annoying but this is kind of cool when you swipe to the right from the home screen you get this little like launcher place where you got your library with a number of books that I imagine that you might be reading recently let's go back to notepad because there's a couple features I just want to look at hello nice bro Brew with two o's nice but if I wanted to actually type with the keyboard typing experience is pretty good the key keys feel kind of mushy yeah there's not as much of a tactile bump as I would like they definitely feel I think at first glance you feel them and you're kind of like oh that feels kind of tactile but there's a lot of travel distance there's more travel distance than I would like she's like oh you want to press me okay so on the back there's a 16 megapixel camera but I couldn't find a camera app so it might be that it's called the smart scanner because it's only really meant to be used to scan documents that's so funny okay uh smile here's your photos what do you want to do with it I can import it I can go to the next step all right here we are crop it you can rotate it you can hand write on it add text you can detect text in the document it right here on the tablet and then send it to your notes app or to or to create a PDF okay I can send to a node I can send it over Bluetooth use onyxmail nearby you can use nearby share like Androids feature yeah this is like the default Android nearby share so it's like airdropping but for Androids the problems of philosophy give me a little sample boom how do I change the view and stuff I don't know how people use I've never used an e-reader this big so I don't know how people like read I would want the text to be smaller and I'm there must be a way to do that I don't know how to do it though anyways the reading seeps fine but what I'm really interested in is gaming on the e-ink on the books tab Ultra because yeah this thing has we installed gentian impact on it can you play that with just the touch controls I've never played this game they don't say in the specs page what the actual CPU is it just says Qualcomm octa-core there's four gigs of lpddr4x RAM and 128 gigs of storage okay will it go in the background if I go to the home screen hopefully okay uh this is I'm this is me gaming uh we wanted to open genjen impact for the memes but that didn't really work out in conclusion I came into this thinking that this was just gonna be like a janky uh you know like fun little tablet but this is like a full-featured Android tablet with the whole app ecosystem with the refresh rate that actually makes it usable in some cases that you wouldn't expect the e-ink tablet to be able to be usable in overall I'm pretty impressed with with the usability with the build quality more impressed than I thought I'd be thanks for watching Short Circuit that's us if you want to watch more videos click this one somewhere to watch the one of my iPad ones and I love you and uh never leave\n"