Why I Fell in Love With This Phone-Sized E-Reader

I love books. Each has its own personality—defined by its size and shape, the texture of its pages, the way it smells—and I’m addicted to that tangible feeling of progress as I traverse the pages from front cover to back.

So, naturally, I hate e-readers.

But physical books are big and heavy (looking at you, The Power Broker), and I cannot bring an entire library with me when I travel, no matter how much I’d like to. And sometimes, I cannot wait a whole year for a book to come out in paperback—I simply must read it right now. An e-reader is an obvious solution to these problems, I must grudgingly admit.

Since I bought my Kindle Paperwhite eight years ago, it has been sitting in a corner of my living room, gathering dust. Sure it has been useful for travel, but I find myself reaching for it only out of necessity; it does its job, but it doesn’t spark joy. And so I find myself drifting back to my true love, paper books, and agonizing over how many is a reasonable amount to pack for a weeklong work trip. (Four? Five? The answer is one, but I’ll never learn.)

But then I discovered the Boox Palma, a handy, phone-sized e-reader that runs on Android. It isn’t a traditional e-reader, because you can play music, listen to podcasts, and write on it too, and it isn’t locked into Amazon’s ecosystem. Its versatility and size have won me over: I’ve read more books on the Boox Palma in five months than I ever read on my eight-year-old Kindle.

The Palma’s phone-sized form is friendlier and comfier to hold than a traditional e-reader, and it’s even more convenient to travel with and read on the go. (Or on the toilet, to be honest.)

This thing is so dang cute—everyone who sees me with it asks about it. (When I shot the photos for this article in a nearby coffee shop, someone I’d never met approached me to ask if they could check it out.) I’m sure the adorable composition-book case decorated with stickers from my favorite artists helps, too.

The Palma’s battery lasts for a couple of weeks in my experience; I’ve read multiple books on a single charge. Reading on the Palma also saves my phone’s battery for more essential tasks, especially when I’m traveling. And it’s lighter than a regular e-reader or my phone in a case—at just 6 ounces, it hurts less when I drop it on my face while I’m reading in bed.

Because the Boox Palma runs on Android, it isn’t locked into any one ecosystem. That means I can read from my Kindle collection, I can read directly in the Libby app, I can read the Humble Bundle collection of Discworld books that I belatedly discovered are locked to Kobo, I can read long news features in a browser, and I can enjoy all the fanfiction that AO3 has to offer without having to download EPUB files and email them to myself.

It can do more than a regular e-reader, but not so much more that I’m drowning in notifications as I am on my phone. (The Boox Palma lacks a SIM slot, so you can’t use it as a phone even if you wanted to.) But you can listen to music, podcasts, and audiobooks on your app of choice, and it works well as a distraction-free writing device, too. It even has a camera, though I’ve never used that.

E Ink displays of the past were too slow to keep up with the speed of typing or scrolling websites. But E Ink has improved in recent years, and the Palma has handy presets that balance how good the text looks and how fast the display refreshes. This makes it easy for me to swap from high-quality text for reading to a faster refresh rate that can keep up with how quickly I type.

I pair a portable keyboard, the Logitech Keys-to-Go 2, to the Boox Palma and use the iA Writer Android app for a perfect compact writing setup that fits inside a purse. I hate writing anything longer than a text on my phone, so I find myself reaching for this setup for Sunday-afternoon writing sprints at the coffee shop, or to sneak in some focused work at the airport without having to whip out a whole laptop.

As I was drafting this article, Boox announced a successor to my beloved Palma, the Palma 2. The new version has a faster processor, a newer version of Android, and a fingerprint reader on the power button. Otherwise, the two models are completely identical—same size, shape, materials.

After spending about a month with the Palma 2, I found that the processor didn’t seem notably faster, and the fingerprint reader didn’t matter to me. The upgrade to Android 13, however, is an improvement. The first Palma is stuck on Android 11, which stopped getting security updates in February 2024. I recommend buying the Palma 2 for that reason alone, but if you already have the first one, there’s no reason to upgrade.

Compared with our e-reader picks, the Palma is expensive at about $280. You’re definitely paying extra for a phone that isn’t quite a phone. I’d love to see a cheaper version without a camera that I will never, ever use. But for me, the Palma has been totally worth it.

The Boox Palma hasn’t completely replaced paper books in my life—I don’t think anything ever will. But this handy little guy fills in all the gaps in my reading life. Now I bounce effortlessly between physical and digital copies of books, and I use it frequently enough that it isn’t gathering dust in a corner as my Kindle has for years.

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