I am a very well-equipped ereader household. I already have a basic Kindle, plus an 8-inch Fire tablet, and sundry other Android and Windows tablets. So why did I make the ONYX BOOX Go 6 my birthday present of choice this year? Now read on.
The ONYX BOOX Go 6 is basically a 6-inch E Ink tablet running Android 11. Looking behind the numbers, that should immediately explain its appeal. The form factor and weight is exactly comparable to the low-end 6-inch Kindle – in fact, the BOOX Go 6 is very slightly smaller than the 6-inch Kindle. The screen quality is definitely on a par with Amazon’s E Ink – ONYX quotes the screen technology as E Ink Carta Plus with 300 dpi pixel density and faster refresh than previous epaper screens. I won’t split hairs – or pixels – about the difference, but I do find in real-world reading conditions that the BOOX Go 6 is easily as comfortable to read with as the Kindle.
So what else do you get on top of an e-reading experience of Kindle standard? Well, for one thing, the Google Play Store and all the other apps normally accessible to Android users but not available – or suitable – for the Kindle. In principle, you can even use YouTube to play video on the BOOX Go 6, although I haven’t tried it and doubt that the experience would be especially grateful. You can certainly download and use most ereader apps, including the Amazon Kindle app, so you can have your usual Kindle experience and library, and a whole lot besides. The BOOX Go 6’s own ereading app is at least comparable to most of its Android peers, and makes short work of PDFs – always a stumbling block for the Kindle, in my experience. The user interface provided is basic but serviceable, but there’s no reason why users couldn’t download a different launcher from the Play Store.
As for the hardware, the BOOX Go 6 has Wifi and Bluetooth 5.0, as well as 32 GB of built-in storage and a microSD card slot, so running a large library is no problem. It also has audio capabilities, though no speaker – audio has to be played via USB-C headphones, or Bluetooth peripherals. The USB-C socket is on the bottom of the device, while the power button is on the top, fixing a bugbear for Kindle users who find their devices switching off when placed on a stand. There is a screen backlight, perhaps slightly inferior to the Kindle’s, but certainly perfectly usable. Battery life is excellent for an Android device – I’m getting some 2-3 days of usage without a charge, although admittedly with a lot of ereading and less use of power-hungry apps.
Be it understood, the BOOX Go 6 is not (yet) going to replace a full Android device. The screen refresh is still slow in certain use cases, such as taking handwritten notes – although I may just not have found the right refresh setting yet. A black and white E Ink screen is less than perfect for many websites and apps that lean heavily into shaded multicoloured graphics, although ONYX does its best to assist with that via app-specific optimization settings to fit them better to the device. But for text-based and word-heavy applications, it can even come close to being a productivity tool. I already have Wikipedia, the Google Keep notes app, and Google Docs installed on mine. I have a feeling that the 2GB of RAM will start to feel cramped soon, but that’s a measure of the number of apps I’m already putting on the device.
There are obvious areas for improvement in the BOOX Go 6. The device could be faster, especially for screen refresh. Android 11 is still an older-generation version of the OS, and I hope the company – or some hacker – works out how to upgrade it. And E Ink technology as a whole is still an area where we hope to see improvement. Nonetheless, the BOOX Go 6 is basically comparable with, and priced similarly to, a Kindle Paperwhite, but with far greater versatility, flexibility and usability. The only areas where it feels limited are the Android-based experiences that the Kindle can’t do at all. It’s hardly left my hands since it’s arrived. Form your own conclusions based on that, but I’ve certainly had a very happy birthday.
