Boox Note Air5 C Review

Design

• Metal casing
• Plastic display cover
• Supports keyboard accessory

The Boox Note Air5 C is a large, very thin E Ink tablet. It’s just 4.6mm thick and, like the previous generations, has a heathy border on one side for your thumb. You can easily rotate the interface, so there’s no worries for left-handers here. 

This feels like a high-end piece of tech too. It’s dense as well as thin, and has a metal outer casing with a fairly sharp sense of style. A bold stripe of orange sits across the back, but it manages to avoid seeming juvenile or overly attention-grabbing. 

There are a couple of design parts missing, though. The Boox Note Air5 C does not have any official water resistance rating, and its top-most screen layer is plastic rather than an etched glass. As such, it’s more likely to pick up display scratches in general use than, say, an iPad. 

Changes you can actually see for this generation amount to a pop-out microSD slot and a set of metal pins on the back. These interface with an official keyboard case designed to turn the Boox Note Air5 C into something like a low-distraction laptop replacement. 

I have not had a chance to try this out, but it’s demonstrative of how Boox is pushing a little more aggressively at the borders of what these devices might be used for, compared to Amazon’s Kindle Scribe series. 

Screen

• Familiar Kaleido 3 panel
• Very good sharpness
• Lesser contrast than B&W ereaders

The Boox Note Air5 C has a 10.3-inch colour E Ink screen. There is no major hardware change here over the previous generation Air 4C. 

They both have Kaleido 3 screens, the current top option for mainstream colour ereaders. Its resolution and perceived sharpness are great. 2480 x 1860 resolution works out at 300ppi, enough for excellent, Kindle Paperwhite-matching text smoothness. 

Like all of these colour ereaders, colour resolution is much lower (1240 x 930). But I don’t find this much of an issue. 

There are some points to note, though, especially if you have experience with classic black and white ereaders. The Boox Note Air5 C’s “white” page is darker, more mottled-looking, than that of a monochome model. And that leads to lower contrast, and a greater need to rely on the front light to get a nice white-looking page. 

And as with all these colour E Ink devices, colour saturation is limited. The number of colours it can render is super-limited too, at 4096. This means gradients are going to look crude. Smooth transitions aren’t the forte, although the limited colour pop is far more obvious. 

To be clear: these issues apply to the Boox Note Air5 C’s rivals too. And while there’s an alternative tech called E Ink Gallery 3 with better colour, but there’s a trade-off in the refresh style that has seemingly put most manufacturers off using it. 

At the time of the Boox Note Air5 C’s release Kaleido 3 remains the most practical all-round solution for colour E Ink. 

This is also a far better screen for PDFs and reading comics and graphic novels than 7-inch and smaller ereaders. While the Boox Note Air5 C isn’t as large as the average comic page, you can comfortably look at a smaller form factor version on this display. 

Stylus support really helps for note-taking too. This is a proper pressure-sensitive stylus, and the tablet screen has a textured surface to make doodling and scrawling feel more natural. There’s minimal lag until you start trying to aggressively sketch in an app that challenges the CPU, although I would recommend a tablet with stylus like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE or S10 Lite over this for digital art.

The colour and responsiveness benefits of OLED and LCD versus E Ink are just too great in that situation.

Software and Reading

The Boox Note Air5 C runs Android and has full access to Google Play. But a bunch of apps come preloaded and there are some important customisations to the interface. 

Alongside the usual navigation soft keys at the bottom of the screen you’ll find two extras. One performs a manual full refresh of the screen, to get rid of any ghosting. The other lets you comprehensively alter the refresh behaviour of the screen, and this can be set per app. 

Boox offers a “store” app that features free, out-of-copyright books. And you are free to use whatever other app you like, including Amazon Kindle, Kobo or the Libby app – among others. 

The general reading experience here is excellent, with the main potential issue being the flip side of one of its great strengths. The Boox Note Air5 C is a larger tablet that weighs a good bit more than a Kindle Paperwhite and isn’t the best fit for breezy bedtime reading – for many, anyway. 

Just as I’d take this tablet over a Kindle Paperwhite or Colorsoft any day for graphic novels and PDFs, I’d much rather use a smaller e-reader to read a novel – particularly for bedtime reading.

Unlike most ereaders these days, though, it does have physical page-turn buttons, after a fashion, anyway. The pair that act as volume controls and sit where such buttons usually do on a phone, but not on a tablet, turn into page buttons when in a book.

Features and performance

• Weak processor does the job just fine
• Short battery life when used for apps rather than reading
• Can run most Android apps

One of the Boox Note Air5 C’s apparent key upgrades is a processor upgrade. This really isn’t worth getting excited about. 

The tablet has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 690 processor with 6GB RAM, whereas the Note Air 4C used a Snapdragon 750G at launch, but some batches had a Snapdragon 690 anyway. 

I tried the Boox Note Air5 C with benchmarking tool Geekbench 6, and not only did the process take an inordinately long time, the scores were poor too. It’s no great surprise. The Snapdragon 690 was mostly used by affordable phones half a decade ago. 

It has enough power for an e-reader – no problem there – but if this were a standard Android tablet I’d be laying into it for its lack of power. 

Testing out of the Boox Note Air5 C’s comfort zone shows it’s still a modern and capable processor, though. For example, you can run Fortnite. The frame rate is really too low for comfort, milling around the teens of frames per second with default settings, but it does work. 

This is not an all-rounder entertainment device, though. Fast motion, colour content like Fortnite doesn’t look great on the Boox Note Air5 C. And the tablet’s speakers are quieter and much thinner-sounding than more conventional tablets at a similar price. 

The Boox Note Air5 C also has a far lower capacity battery than more conventional tablets of this size. It’s a 3700mAh cell, where the 11in Samsung Galaxy Tab A11+ has a 7040mAh battery, for example. It matches its predecessor in this respect.

Lower capacity is used because E Ink screens don’t consume significant energy when simply displaying a page of text. Of course, it also has a somewhat more demanding operating system than a Kindle too – it’s full Android 15.

Boox doesn’t make any grand claims about battery life, but it’s not going to be terrific when used actively, as the product page contends you might. When playing video at high screen brightness, the Boox Note Air5 C lasts only about 3.5 hours – less than you might expect given the fuss made about how energy-efficient E Ink readers can be.

Should you buy it?