A couple of Onyx’s newer ebook readers have turned up for sale on Amazon over the past few weeks.
I’ve delayed posting about them because they aren’t being sold through Onyx’s official Amazon store, but who knows if they’re ever going to sell them anyway since Onyx’s resellers have been selling them for awhile now. Apparently Onyx would rather have shady 3rd party sellers distributing their products instead of selling them themselves.
The the 7.8-inch Onyx Boox Nova is being sold by Ectaco for a whopping $349. They always have outlandish prices; I don’t know why anyone buys from them.
By comparison, the Likebook Mars with the same screen and same general features (plus a microSD card slot) sells for around $250.
The original 7.8-inch ereader, the Kobo Aura One, sells for $229, so $350 for the Nova makes no sense on any level.
The 6-inch Onyx Boox Poke is selling for $143 from a seller with a good rating but they seem to be shipping from China based on the estimated delivery time.
If it was the Poke Pro that would be an acceptable price, but since it’s the regular Poke it should be avoided altogether since it runs Android 4.4, which completely defeats the purpose of it being a new “upgraded” model.
Could you imagine Amazon releasing two versions of the Kindle Paperwhite, one with the current software and one with software from 5 years ago? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Onyx is such an odd company. If they’re going to sell these new models in the US you’d think they could at least do so from their own Amazon store. Instead they’ll release ten different versions of the same ereader through ten different vendors, and they’re probably already working on replacements for these new models.
Onyx was my go to Android E-Reader. They want to sell their device at a premium price but are they ready to provide their customer premium support? At least a service center to handle warranty claim?
Boyue at least still have a micro SD card slot.
Seriously, are there any reputable sellers for this device? Between Amazon sellers, Alibaba, eBay, and that other ereader blog that also runs its own store, there’s almost no one I trust. It kind of feels like the whole ereader marketplace is some sort of over-wrought scam for Chinese and Russian hackers to collect Google & Amazon logins.
The German ereader store is probably the most reputable, having been in business for many years, but the high cost of shipping to the US makes it a non-option for most. Ectaco has been selling ereaders for a long time too, but their prices are generally much higher than other resellers.
I think James above is spot-on in his skepticism–there is something fishy about a product that is so stunted developmentally–whose interests are served by these half-functional Android e-readers–how hard could it be to make one that could really compete with Oasis as an e-reader and add low-level color tablet speed and functionality? It makes no sense that the best Android e-reader available to me is still my Onyx i86, which was introduced in 2014/15.
“it should be avoided altogether since it runs Android 4.4, which completely defeats the purpose of it being a new “upgraded” model”
I don’t know if this is the case here, but as Android versions change, every so often they require a minimum ARM processor. On lots of Chinese off-brand devices (e.g., e-readers, phones, etc.) they will often run an older version of Android because the processor they are using isn’t supported by newer versions.
Personally, it never really bothers me for a device that’s supposed to be a single-purpose appliance. If it were a generic tablet, I might be concerned.
Not sure this is the reason in this case, but it could be. One could check the processor and see what the last version of Android to support it was, and that might figure it out.
They made two versions of the Poke, one with Android 4.4 like their older devices and one with Android 6.0 like their newer devices, and both have a quad-core 1.6GHz processor so it doesn’t make any sense.
The pro has a faster CPU.
Hello Nathan,
After using the Boyue Likebook Mars and the Onyx Boox Nova, which one would be prefer?
This question is very popular and maybe you should do an article or a video to compare the two.
Thanks.
Hi Ahmed,
I don’t have a Nova because Onyx isn’t selling it the US, nor are there any reputable resellers in the US, so I won’t be recommending it or reviewing it until that changes.