I don’t know how long the sale is going to last but I noticed that Banggood has the Onyx Boox Max on sale for $679 with free shipping.
Granted that’s still expensive for an ereader but that’s the lowest price I’ve seen the Onyx Boox Max selling for since it was released earlier this year.
Other listings on Amazon and eBay are currently charging around $799 for it.
Now that the Sony DPT-S1 has been discontinued, that leaves the Onyx Boox Max as the only viable option for an ereader with a 13.3-inch E Ink screen.
The larger display makes the device a lot better suited for reading PDFs and other large-form content, of course. Plus it has an electromagnetic touchscreen and stylus pen for writing notes on-screen.
As far as specs, the Onyx Boox Max has the usual 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, and a microSD card slot. It has WiFi, Bluetooth, a 4100 mAh battery, a micro UBS port, a speaker, a microphone, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The Onyx Boox Max runs Android 4.0 and can install 3rd party apps. On the downside it does not have a frontlight like smaller ereaders and the touchscreen does not support finger touch—stylus touch only.
No finger-touch capability = no go!
What were they thinking when they chose not to incorporate this essential feature?!
I’d gladly pay up to $1000 for a 2.0 version which has finger-touch + 2-gigs of RAM (so I can use the web browser with multiple tabs open) & a front-light. I need it for my sore eyes which can’t look at an LCD for more than 5 minutes at a time w/o my eyes starting to burn.
Good-E-Reader has a 13″ coming out, but with only 512M of RAM, what’s the point?!
Sir,you seem not to know what you would like to have.You claim suffering from your burning eyes,but still waiting for 2 gigs RAM for multiple tabs on browser plus finger-touch function?! I have my Max for almost 6 months and I use it with pleasure with its pen.Not to mention that it can hold,open and run,up to six tabs without flaws.
This is insane really. Sony DPT-S1 is lighter, more mobile and the battery also stands for 3 weeks. Has finger touch but only reads pdf. Here’s onyx which is heavier but runs android and opens other file types. But it lacks finger touch – wtf. Good-E-Reader has finger touch but runs ancient android 4.0.4 with 512MB o RAM. Is it really so hard to make one perfect device? Body and specs of Sony + other file types. Is it really that hard?
It is interesting that there are practically no videos on the web showing the browser capability of the MAX (nor the Sony DPT-S1) … not even from Onyx?! The 2 videos I saw show the browser in 1200×1600 resolution mode, where the webpage text is sooo tiny on a 13.3″ screen. My eyes get sore focusing on small print and I need the pinch & zoom capability of an iPad to enlarge the specific-text I am trying to read within the webpage. How do you pinch & zoom with the pen on a MAX?
On an Ipad, you can also double-tap on the words within a text-passage and it automatically zooms in so that the specific-text is flushed from the-left-to-the-right side of the screen, which really increases the font size for better reading. Then you can pinch & zoom back-out-again to see the whole webpage.
ALSO, is the web browser fixed in a 1200×1600 pixel dimension, or can you go into the browser settings and enlarge EVERYTHING viewed in the browser by telling it to display (say) 800×1200 (where the 800 pixels-across is stretched by 1.5x to fit the 1200 pixel MAX screen … and the 1200 pixels-down is stretched by 1.5x ti fit the 1600 pixels of the MAX screen)?
Thanks for your insight!
-Dave
Hi Dave
Please see my youtube channel, I have posted on here as I was also looking for this device in action. So I have tried to show what it can do.
Yes I wish it had touch screen, but for PDF reading it is great. Everything else is secondary for me…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKj3jIKEkI8
The above/previous message was meant to be a reply to “Amir”. For anyone that owns the Onyx Max or Sony DPT-S1: I will be using the browser to access Gmail & other web-accounts. Will I need to manually type in my user-name & password EVERY TIME these accounts need to be accessed … or does the browser have a feature of saving passwords for future logging-in to these accounts (e.g. GMAIL, DropBox, Los Angeles Times)?
I saw your message late,and I now write a reply back to it.I can use either pen or my finger to pinch and zoom into it while browsing.Also,My chrome browser can easily save user/pass within.I hope that helps.
Thanks Amir … however, how can you use “my finger to pinch & zoom” if the Onyx Max only uses a Pen to navigate/select on their tablet? It is my understanding that you cannot use “finger touch” on the Onyx Max?!
Do you think this means there is a new version about to be released? Any rumors to that effect?
E Ink devices have a very slow refresh cycle so the Max will probably stay on the market for a few more years at least, especially since it’s been available for less than a year. They might eventually come out with a model that supports finger touch or a model that has a higher resolution screen, but knowing how slowly E Ink produces these kind of screens it might be another couple years before something actually gets released. Who knows…
Thanks for your response. I didn’t realize it has only been on the market for a year. I have a Sony Digital Paper but it is starting to have issues and I am looking for a replacement.
“it might be another couple years before something actually gets released”
Did you mean “moths?” The Max Carta is now out, with many more pixels… but still no touch screen.
They’ve been more accurate with their release date estimates lately. They say the Max 2 will be out be the end of the year. We’ll see what happens…