BOOX Palma 2 Pro 6" White

The BOOX Palma2 Pro crams Android 15 and LTE into a pocket eReader, but it fails where it counts. Reading quality is mediocre and battery life is laughably bad, and it costs well over $400. Skip it unless you absolutely need a SIM card in your eReader.

The octa-core Qualcomm chip and 8GB RAM push Android 15 along without much stutter, and the connectivity is a standout, LTE with solid Wi-Fi puts it well above average. But the screen is a letdown: 1648x824 resolution on a 6-inch ePaper panel makes text look softer than you'd expect from a device sold as an eReader. And the 3950mAh battery is tiny, meaning you'll be hunting for a charger before the day is over. Storage is average eMMC speed, nothing fancy, but for loading books it's fine.

Pitting this against the iPad Pro M5 or Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is like bringing a pocketknife to a sword fight, these full-sized tablets demolish it in screen, battery, and performance. But that's not a fair fight. The Palma2 Pro's real rivals are dedicated eReaders. Compared to a Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Clara, the BOOX offers more app flexibility but loses badly on the core job: actually being pleasant to read on. Even the original Palma (non-pro) is a better deal if you can skip the color screen and stylus.

With a price spread from $400 to $547 across vendors, the Palma2 Pro lands in a weird no man's land. For that kind of money, you could grab a Kindle Paperwhite for half the cost and get a vastly better reading experience, plus a tablet that does everything else better. Unless you desperately need Android apps and a SIM card in an eReader body, the value proposition is shaky. Newegg currently has the lower end of that range if you're still tempted.

The BOOX Palma2 Pro is a tiny 6-inch eReader that tries to double as a pocket Android tablet. It runs Android 15, packs a decent octa-core chip, and even has a SIM slot for LTE data so you can download books anywhere. On the spec sheet, it sounds like a commuter's dream.

But when we ran it through our benchmarks, the cracks showed fast. The reading experience, which should be the whole point, scored a weak 25.3 out of 100, and battery life plummeted to the 4th percentile, one of the worst we've seen. So you get a lot of flexibility, but the fundamentals are shaky right out of the box.

If you're simply after a dedicated eReader, skip this one. The screen and battery are letdowns for long reading sessions. Pick up a Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Clara instead, you'll save a heap of cash and get a far better page-turning experience.

The Palma2 Pro will appeal to a very specific person: someone who wants a tiny, always-connected device for reading articles, checking email, and scribbling notes, all on an ePaper screen. For that niche, it works. But for anyone else, this thing is hard to recommend. The battery can't keep up, the screen disappoints, and the price stings. If you just want to read books, look elsewhere.