The 13.3-inch Onyx Boox Max is finally starting to become more widely available. It was first released a couple of months ago but production problems slowed things down for several weeks.
Mostly the Onyx Boox Max has been at pre-order status for the past few months; it’s good to see it finally becoming available from a few different distributors now.
One Onyx reseller has the Max for sale at Amazon for $799, plus $6.49 for shipping.
Banggood has started selling the Onyx Boox Max as well. They’re a wholesale retailer based in China that sells a number of Onyx’s ereaders.
They have the price at $745 currently, with 6% off and free shipping. Apparently the regular price is $788 (depending on current currency conversion rates).
A couple of months ago the Max was available for pre-order from Amazon for a little over $650 from a new seller, but then production delays set things back and now that listing still says that it is unavailable. Too bad because that was a good price.
There aren’t many options for Onyx ereaders in the US because Onyx doesn’t have very many distributors selling their devices.
Meanwhile the 13.3-inch Sony DPT-S1 is on sale for $599. It only supports PDF format so it’s not nearly as versatile as the Max but it has the benefit of the added capacitive touchscreen for finger touch as well as a more stable operating system.
Not having a capacitive touchscreen is a deal-breaker. I am STILL waiting for a 13.3″ e-ink where I can surf the web for long periods of time without it thrashing my eyes! I would gladly pay up to $900 for such a device, but this would require it to also have ~2-gigs of RAM and bluetooth capability so I can use an external keyboard.
Web browsing is quite demanding. My Android 6 phone has 150M 4G / 802.11ac network, 3 gigs of RAM, fullhd screen, and a quad-core Snapdragon. It’s still dog slow. For web browsing an absolute minimum is Intel i4770k and 16 gigs or RAM. I don’t really care about the screen refresh rate when reading web pages. It’s just a fact that i.MX6/7 is a low power budget CPU and can’t operate in the web environment. Android 6 also requires at least 1,5 GB of RAM for web browsing a single tab.
Those requirements seems a tad overambitious to me. I never had a PC with 16GB RAM and until earlier this year I was happy running on 4GB. Sure, 8GB is noticably better if you’ve got tons of tabs open, but I wouldn’t say that it was unbearable to browse with 4GB, and in fact even 2GB if needs be (on an Atom tablet).
Apart from that, we’re talking about an e-ink reader here, realistically I don’t think that 16GB RAM will be a realistic option there in the next couple of years (and beyond that it remains to be seen how e-ink will fare in general).
No argument on the underpoweredness of the i.MX6 though (and probably 7?). I suspect at least using the dual core versions of those CPUs might make for a small improvement (depending on what one wants to do) – I’ve been trying to run Linux via Linux Deploy and XSDL Xserver and that really gets quite slow (a bit better via VNC, which brings its own problems).
I’d be curious if the C67ML Onyx devices with their dual core CPUs would be noticably faster for things like that.
Not sure why these haven’t caught on more with students. I would love to be able to read my textbooks on a screen size comparable to a physical copy.
Probably because it is too expensive. Moreover, if you have to buy it on the internet, you can see and try it only after the purchase.
I am a student and I also would love to read my pdf books and papers on a large screen without front light; in this way I would not need to print them. The problem is that I am not sure it is a good device and for knowing that I should pay a lot of money (the prize is too high!!).