BOOX Palma 2 Pro Review: Color, Mobile Data and a Pen in a Phone-Sized E-Reader

The Kaleido 3 panel lays a color filter over a black-and-white layer. Text keeps its 300 pixels per inch, but color drops to 150. E Ink rates Kaleido 3 at 4,096 colors and 16 levels of gray.

In exchange you get color, in muted tones closer to newsprint than to a phone. Book covers, comics, app icons, web pages and highlighted documents all gain from it. Plain text sits under the same filter as everything else.

Novels and long articles belong on the monochrome Palma 2 or Palma 3, with no filter in front of the ink. The Pro's screen is worth having for comics, magazines, color PDFs and a browser.

The body measures 159 by 80 by 8.8 mm. BOOX lists it at about 175 g, around the weight of a small phone. The 2:1 shape is tall and narrow like a phone, which suits people who already read on one. It also puts fewer words on each line than a 6-inch Kindle.

BOOX fits volume and page-turn buttons, a programmable smart button, and a power button with a fingerprint reader.

The body is plastic, and BOOX calls it water-repellent against spills, splashes and light rain. It has no IP rating, so it is not a reader for the bath.

The Pro runs Android 15 with the Google Play Store, where the Palma 2 runs Android 13. That means the Kindle, Kobo, Libby and Google Play Books apps all install. They sit alongside BOOX's NeoReader, which opens EPUB, PDF, CBZ and most other formats directly.

BOOX pairs an octa-core chip with 8 GB of memory, up from 6 GB. Its update pledge runs for more than three years from launch, which is shorter than a Kindle's support window. Android 15 is an advantage for now, and the Palma 3's Android 16 will soon overtake it.

The battery is the same 3,950 mAh cell as the Palma 2's, and BOOX gives no runtime for either. Mobile data, GPS and the front light all draw on it, a load that a Wi-Fi-only reader never puts on its battery.

The hybrid tray on the bottom edge takes either two SIM cards or one SIM and a microSD card of up to 2 TB. BOOX says it supports a data-only SIM on 2G to 5G networks. The reader makes no calls and is no emergency phone. BOOX publishes no band list, so check with your carrier before buying a SIM for it.

The Pro adds A-GPS, which lets map apps and apps that need a location, such as some banking apps, work away from Wi-Fi.

The 16 MP rear camera with a flash is for scanning a page or a receipt. There is also a speaker, two microphones, Bluetooth 5.1 for headphones, and a USB-C port that doubles as an audio jack.

The Pro is the only Palma that works with a pen, and the one pen it takes is BOOX's InkSense Plus. That active pen has 4,096 pressure levels, charges over USB-C and needs no pairing. Neither the pen nor the magnetic case comes in the standard box, and the case fits only the Pro.

A six-inch screen in a 2:1 shape is a notepad for shopping lists and margin notes, with too little room for pages of handwriting.