this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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How's the battery life on the Boox? What are the pros and cons of running an Android e-reader?
Battery life is good. Not as good as when I got it in 2020, but I only need to charge it maybe every 3 weeks or so. I charged it 9 days ago and it’s currently at 79%. Days it still has 17 days left on the battery stats page. Actual battery life varies based on LED brightness used and refresh frequency.
Pros are what you’d expect. Flexibility, works with Android apps. Very customizable experience.
Cons… some android apps don’t play nice with e-ink, I don’t personally take advantage of much of what makes it good (few apps, I don’t do note taking), and Boox never updates the underlying OS. The Nova 2 is still on android 9. I keep it offline so no big deal.
Overall it was worth it to me when I bought it, and it’s still my preferred reader. There aren’t many (any?) current eReaders in an 8” format without the side handle button thing. I don’t like that square-ish form factor.
Sounds great. I'm a bit interested in a Boox just as a fun thing to have, and sometimes would like to read PDF which are generally quite badly supported on most e-readers. I'm guessing PDF reading works better on an Android, also because the specs are better.
PDF reading is particularly good on it, and the built in reading app (Neo Reader) has incredibly good post auto-cropping and reflow tools. If you read a lot of PDFs it’s definitely worth it.
Also, having access to android apps means it’s great for manga as well.
The nice part about Boox is that you never have to worry about formats really. They all read equally well, and you can crop yourself if it for some reason doesn't crop as expected. It then applies the same crop to all pages.
For other formsts like epub you can adjust font etc which is nice, and I use the built in dictionary a lot as I am not native English speaking but prefer to read in English generally. You can download and configure several dictionaries which is cool for multilingual people.
This is in the Nova 3 btw but I hear they are very similar.
Nova 3 is essentially identical to the Nova 2, but with a slightly faster chipset.
koreader has good support for PDFs and runs on my Kobo devices better than the native reader.
Just installed KOReader and tried it out a bit, mostly for Chinese dictionary reasons, but I'm really impressed tbh. I don't know if I'll have it as a daily driver though, I find the collections system on Kobo stock firmware much more convenient and nicer than the folder system KOReader runs on. I know there's Calibre metadata search too, but my tags are seriously messed up so I need to clean them up before that becomes useful.
Glad it was helpful. I also switch between the systems depending on what I need.