I hedged and waited for months, but finally got the Boox Palma.

I’ve had it for a few days and it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to:

keep my phone out of my hand

I’ve left my phone in other rooms many times at home. I’ve taken walks without it. I even left my phone in the car at a concert (and took an OCR of the schedule to refer to in the Palma). Between a watch with cellular ability to catch me in an emergency, and this Palma, the desire to have a device to “do stuff” or “just in case” fades away.

The OS is based on Android and it’s a little sketchy, but I’m only going to use this for reading, and am locking it down otherwise.

Oh, and of course I’m reading much more, too.

To that end, I’ve installed:

Most of these work great! There have been a couple hiccups:

  1. Kindle and Readwise don’t play well together with highlights on the e-ink. Readwise adds a tag for any highlight color that’s not the default neon yellow1, and neon yellow doesn’t show up well on the default layout in Kindle. I worked around this by switching to the “dark mode” theme in Kindle and sticking with the default highlights.
  2. Micro.blog/Epilogue doesn’t support passwords2, so you have to hand copy in an app token or risk turning the Palma into pocket computer with email and web browser, defeating the purpose of the device!

Reader has been the standout winner. It has access to all my saved articles, important newsfeeds, and my DRM free ebooks (including a great collection from Standard Ebooks). In addition, it has a lot of smart extra features, like “volume buttons for page turn” and other quality-of-life improvements over other article, feed, or book readers.

I’m very glad I got this, and kicking myself a little for waiting so long.

the Boox Palma, an eink device based, based on Android, that fits in your palm.

  1. This is normally a useful feature, especially with the ability to auto-rename/auto-adjust tags…but not helpful here ↩︎

  2. It uses email auth links, apple ID, and/or app tokens ↩︎