The BOOX Note Mini C costs $579.99 and carries a 3,150 mAh battery. The Tab Mini C, the older color tablet on the same BOOX store, costs $399.99 with its pen and carries 5,000 mAh. BOOX announced the Note Mini C on September 24, and US pre-orders are marked to ship around October. The extra $180 buys a larger screen, Android 16 and more memory, at the cost of more than a third of the battery. Of those, Android 16 justifies the price.
Two color tablets, three years apart
The Tab Mini C went on sale in June 2023 and is still listed, at $399.99 with the magnetic Pen Plus or $349.99 without it. Both tablets use a Kaleido 3 color panel with the same density: 300 ppi for black and white, 150 ppi for color. Text and color look equally sharp on either one. Only the screen area differs.
The Note Mini C’s panel measures 8.52 inches and 2048 by 1536 pixels, against 7.8 inches and 1872 by 1404 on the Tab Mini C, and with both screens in a 4:3 shape, the Note Mini C shows about 19% more page. That is the whole display upgrade, and it counts most with documents laid out for paper.
What a PDF looks like at each size
BOOX pitches the Note Mini C for “PDF-first reading”. So take a full A4 page. Held upright, an 8.52-inch 4:3 screen is about 6.8 inches tall while A4 paper is 11.7 inches tall, so a page fitted to the screen shows at about 58% of its printed size. The Tab Mini C, 6.2 inches tall, manages about 53%.
A 10-point body font becomes roughly 5.8 points on the Note Mini C and 5.3 points on the Tab Mini C. Both are small print. The larger screen helps, but either tablet still needs margin cropping or landscape half-pages for dense documents. For an A4 page at close to its real size, look at the 10.3-inch Note Air6 C, which costs the same $579.99.
The battery, and a pen that needs charging
The Note Mini C’s 3,150 mAh is 37% less than the Tab Mini C’s 5,000 mAh, and it has a larger screen to light. BOOX gives no hours for either model. Its footnote for the Note Mini C promises only “several days with normal use”, and nobody has published a measured figure yet.
The pens differ too. BOOX describes the Note Mini C’s new InkSight stylus as an active pen that “charges via USB-C”. The Tab Mini C’s Pen Plus works on EMR, the same passive system as a Kindle Scribe pen, so it has no battery at all and any Wacom-compatible EMR stylus can replace it. With the Note Mini C you have two things to charge, and the pen that makes the $579.99 bundle cannot be swapped for a cheap spare.
Android 16 and the update clock
The Tab Mini C runs Android 11, a 2020 release. The Note Mini C runs Android 16. Every Android app sets a minimum version, developers raise it over time, and a reading tablet that depends on the Kindle, Kobo or Libby apps is only as useful as the oldest version those apps still accept.
The firmware promise points the same way. BOOX commits to “free firmware updates for all models for more than 3 years since the product launch date.” For a June 2023 tablet, that minimum ran out in June 2026. A Note Mini C bought this fall starts a new three-year clock, which runs to at least 2029.
The Tab Mini C may keep receiving updates, but nothing obliges BOOX to send them.
Memory and storage follow the same pattern. The Note Mini C has 6 GB of RAM to the Tab Mini C’s 4 GB, and it adds a microSD slot that takes cards up to 2 TB. The Tab Mini C has 64 GB of storage and no card slot.
Size in the hand and in a pocket
The weights are close: about 300 g for the Note Mini C and 310 g for the Tab Mini C. The shapes are not. At 187.7 by 156 mm and 6 mm thick, the Note Mini C is a squarer slab, 19.5 mm wider and 6.3 mm shorter than the 194 by 136.5 mm Tab Mini C, which is 8.3 mm thick. BOOX says the new model slides into a jacket pocket. Measure yours first, since the new model grew in width.
BOOX lists no keyboard cover and no fingerprint lock for the Note Mini C. If typing on the tablet is part of the plan, the Note Air6 C is the BOOX that supports a keyboard, and our Note Air6 C comparison covers what that bundle costs.
Which one to order
Buy the Note Mini C if you read in Android apps and want the tablet to last. Android 16, 2 GB more memory and a firmware promise that has three years to run are worth more over five years than the battery it gives up.
The BOOX Tab Mini C makes sense for comics and EPUBs in BOOX’s own reader, at $349.99 without the pen or less, bought knowing its update promise has already run its course. Its passive pen and larger battery are real advantages, and they are the only ones it keeps.
Wait for the first measured battery tests. A Note Mini C that lasts under a week of daily reading would undo the case for it. Pre-orders are only shipping around October, so waiting for those figures costs you little.
