Review: Boox Note Air5 C colour e-Ink tablet (2025)

Review unit provided by Onyx

The Onyx Boox Note Air5 C is a 10.3-inch e-Ink e-reader tablet released in October 2025. This is a minor update over the Boox Note Air4 C from 2024. Since the user experience with this new model is mostly similar to the previous model, I've repeated portions of the review from the previous model below.

Price at the time of review is USD 529 and this includes the pen and flip case. The keyboard case bundle cost USD 639 and also includes the pen and flip case.

Video review

Specifications

What has changed?

Main updates would the the use of Android 15 from 13, and the new keyboard cover made for the tablet. All other specifications remain the same, unfortunately.

Things included

• Tablet
• USB-A to USB-C charging cable
• SIM ejection tool
• BOOX Pen3 Plus, with cap
• User guide
• Warranty guide

The flip case is beautiful and well made. The rubberised canvas texture feels great, durable. The dark orange colour looks classy. The flip case (finally) has a hole on the spine for the USB-C port on the tablet which is by the left side.

The detachable magnetic flap should not have been made detachable as there's no purpose for it to be detachable. The flap can be folded to attach to the back but it's difficult to get the strong magnets to separate. Or you can attached the flap flat on the back but will affect pen performance.

The flip case does add some weight to the tablet but you can always remove it to use the tablet alone.

The magnetic flip case protects the front and back of the tablet, but not the sides. There's auto-wake and sleep function.

The case can deploy the e-reader horizontally and vertically.

The keyboard case is an extra USD 110. This is a well made keyboard case for those who intent on typing often.

The keyboard is definitely quite small so it will take some time to get used to. Keyboard layout looks normal to me. The keys have no backlight so typing in the dark is challenging. There are also rubber bumpers to cushion against the display when closed.

Typing experience is good. Keys have good travel and feedback. Keyboard deck is quite firm. One downside is the tablet can only deploy at one angle, which is many cases is kinda high for me. When keyboard is connected, there's a USB-C port by the right side that can be used to charge the tablet.

This keyboard case does make the tablet much heavier and thicker. All keyboard cases do. Oh, when using the keyboard case, the pen can't attach to the side of tablet properly.

The flap of the keyboard case is also removable.

I find the keyboard very usable except you have to train your muscle memory to get used to the small size. Another reviewer Kit Betts-Masters found the keyboard disappointing and you can watch the video above to find out why.

Design

From left to right: a 6.9-inch phone, Boox Note Air5 C, iPad mini

The tablet is quite thin at 5.8mm and weighs 440g, 20g heavier than the previous model. The power button has a fingerprint scanner which works fast and effectively, but the extended edge of the flip case may prevent your finger from resting fully on the scanner.

On the side with the thicker bezels, there's the USB-C charging port (230 MB/s transfer speed), microSD card slot and two stereo speakers with low volume and hollow sound. There's no 3.5mm audio jack so to listen to audio books, it's best to use wireless earphones for best audio quality.

The bezels are thin except for the one thicker side for your hand to hold. There are no physical page flip buttons so you'll have to rely on the touchscreen to flip pages.

The tablet uses a 10.3-inch display with Kaleido 3 technology which supports 16 levels of grayscale (300PPI) and 4096 colours (150PPI).

10.3-inch display is a good size for reading PDFs, comics and magazines because text can be presented larger. If you don't read PDFs, comics or magazines often, there's no compelling reason to get a larger display, and you consider an 8-inch e-reader which is smaller and lighter, cheaper.

One advantage of the larger display is there's space to put the Android navigation bar below with 5 shortcuts instead of using the swipe gestures.

Display resolution is 1860 x 2480 with 300 PPI and 930 x 1240 with 150 PPI for colour.

An 8-inch display is actually more than big enough for just reading text. A 10.3-inch display can show larger text and is good for those with poor eyesight.

Kaleido 3 displays (above) have darker e-ink canvas compared to BW-only e-ink displays. Front light almost always have to be enabled unless your room is bright, but even so front light will make visuals look better due to improved contrast.

I personally prefer BW e-ink because of the better contrast, and better contrast provides a better reading experience compared to having colours but lower contrast. Colour e-ink is good if you want to have colours for visuals, but if you're just gonna read text, then colour is not necessary.

300 PPI text is sharp and looks great. Reading experience is very satisfying.

You can install dictionaries as well.

Web browsing works fine. Scrolling animation is fast enough. The main things that affect web browsing experience would be the colour quality. Gray coloured textboxes, checkboxes and radio buttons may not show clearly. Tabs may reload often due to lack of RAM or how RAM is allocated.

To access the e-Ink settings, you can set a shortcut to swipe up from the bottom, or swipe from the top right to show the control panel. I prefer to have the 5-button Android navigation bar at the bottom instead.

The refresh modes available are:

• HD - Good display effect, suitable for general text reading
• Balanced - With slightly heavier ghosting, suitable for thumbing through documents
• Fast - With slight detail loss, suitable for browsing websites
• Ultrafast - With heavy detail loss, suitable for playing videos
• Regal - Minimal ghosting, slightly flickering on dark backgrounds, suitable for light-coloured backgrounds

Reach refresh mode is a compromise between page refresh speed vs amount of ghosting.

The best refresh mode in my opinion is Balanced with slight ghosting and reasonably fast page refresh speed.

There are actually more settings hidden on secondary page of the e-ink settings:

• System Refresh - Automatic full-refresh after dragging and releasing
• Drag to refresh: 1s to 5s
• Page scrolling speed: HD, fast
• Full-refresh by tap count: Specific to the active app. Global setting for this (for all apps) is located Settings -> System Display
• Animation Filter Time: 0 - 3000
• Display Enhancement
• Anti-flicker: 0 - 32

This is how a coloured comic page would look with default settings, without front light.

This is the Recommend preset, and with front light enabled. Contrast and colour quality is noticeably better with front light enabled.

This is the Fast Refresh preset, and with front light enabled. The colours actually look more intense and sometimes darker. Contrast is better than Recommend mode.

Due the limited number of colours that can be produced, certain colour information may be lost. For example with Google Maps, it can be difficult to see the buildings as those are in a colour that the tablet cannot produce clearly.

Adjusting the e-ink settings is needed with Google Maps to see certain visuals properly.

Obviously having colours is better than having no colours. So despite the limited colour support, the addition of colours does improve the satisfaction of reading colour comics or magazines. Hopefully the colour technology can improve soon.

If you don't read comics or magazines, then you won't benefit much from a colour display. If you're just reading text, go with a BW e-ink reader which will have better contrast, and colour conversion to BW is usually quite good.

Front light

The front light is quite even. To adjust the front light, you can swipe down from the top right for the slider controls. Or you can go into the settings to set invisible virtual sliders on screen on the sides if you change the lights often.

This is how the warm light looks.

General performance

This tablet uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G processor and has 6GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage. Most of my e-books are accessed from the cloud so I'm not too worried about storage capacity, but you can always add a microSD card for more storage.

Overall performance is smooth enough for an e-ink tablet but can't compete with normal tablets obviously. Apps are able to open fast, multi-tasking is smooth, and even web browsing is usable.

One downside is apps have a tendency to quit if there are too many apps in memory, even if there's sufficient memory. Seems like the tablet is unable to keep more than six apps open at a time. Rather than using the app switcher, I actually find it faster to go to the home screen to find the app I want to re-open.

Software and OS

Boox has their own UI on top of Android 15 and there's official support for Google Play Store. I don't see any bloatware during setup except for the apps from Boox. With Google Play Store, you can install your own e-book stores and access your existing e-books. You can install cloud storage apps to access your e-books from the cloud. You can install your own web browsers, note taking and drawing apps.

The homescreen UI looks like a typical Android tablet home screen.

Like most Android tablets, you can swipe down from the top right to access the control panel. Here you can access the E Ink Centre to adjust colour and page settings, and adjust brightness among other settings.

The mobile Nav Ball feature is very useful as it provides 9 customisable shortcuts.

There's no app drawer so you can't swipe up/down to see all the available installed apps. It may be possible to install your own launcher to get an app drawer but I did not test that.

Pen

The included Boox Pen3 stylus has a nice matte surface with a good grip. The pen uses Wacom EMR technology, supports tilt and 4096 levels of pressure, palm rejection. The pen is not powered by battery so no charging is required. There is no side button and no eraser on the back.

The body is almost cylindrical except for the flat side that attached magnetically to the tablet. Unfortunately when the pen attaches to the tablet, the pen body would rest and press on the lower volume button. This is clearly a design flaw. The pen can attached slightly away or reverse so that the volume button will not be pressed, but you will not get the strongest magnetic attachment.

It is possible to use other Wacom EMR pens with this tablet. The S Pen from the Tab S11 can attach quite well to the tablet, but not the S Pens from Tab S7, S8, S9, S10. I have a Moko pen from AliExpress that has a side button and eraser which can attach to the tablet too.

Three extra pen tips can be found at the back of the pen. The pen nibs are textured and may wear down faster on the textured display. I highly recommend buying extra pen tips if you plan on writing often, and Boox sells five pieces at USD 20.

Writing performance is satisfying.

The best note taking app to use on this tablet is the Boox Notes app as it's designed to work with e-ink displays. Tools, colours, templates will look good with Boox Notes app, but you can't say the same with other third party note taking apps.

The display is laminated with almost no gap between the line and the pen tip. The display has a matte screen protector so there's extra tactile experience when writing with the textured pen tip. Palm rejection works well for apps that support palm rejection. You can rest your palm on the display to write without fear of introducing stray strokes.

There's almost no latency while writing with the Boox Notes app.

Microsoft OneNote also has similar latency performance, BUT the experience is different. When writing, the lines will be thin first and the line style will only update with the next non-writing action, e.g. tapping on the display.

Drawing performance

The only app that works well for drawing is the Boox Notes app which isn't really designed as a drawing app. So yes you can draw with this tablet, but the drawing experience won't be ideal. The main downside is the limited drawing tools and limited number of colours that can be displayed by Kaleido 3 display.

Conclusion

The Onyx Boox Note Air5 C is a beautiful e-Ink tablet with solid build quality. This tablet is quite responsive by e-Ink tablet standards and web browsing is actually usable. The 10.3-inch display is suitable for reading PDFs, comics and magazines compared to 8-inch tablets. Google Play Store is available so you can install your own e-book store apps. Battery life is decent.

The screen technology is still Kaleido 3 so you'll get colour e-ink, but colours are still muted and the canvas is still darker than typical BW e-ink canvas. E-ink colours are never going to be as vibrant compared to LCDs so that's not surprising.

Downsides. An e-ink display will not have instant responsiveness which is to be expected. Performance is smooth enough though. With the same 6GB RAM as before, there's still the same issue with apps quitting while in memory after some time. And audio quality isn't good.

The specifications are actually alright for this tablet, but hopefully Onyx can actually upgrade the specs with the next model. And I hope colour e-ink technology will improve faster because Kaleido 3 feels quite limiting.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Clean and simple design
+ Solid build quality
+ Larger 10.3-inch display is better for reading PDFs , magazines, comics
+ Matte textured surface for tactile writing experience
+ Anti-glare is excellent under direct sunlight
+ Visuals are sharp with 300 PPI for BW and 150 PPI for colour
+ MicroSD card slot
+ Power button with fingerprint unlock
+ Pen included
+ Pen uses Wacom EMR
+ Pen supports tilt, pressure and palm rejection
+ Overall performance quite responsive
+ Page flips are quite fast
+ Minimal ghosting
+ Good writing experience
+ Google Play Store included
+ Navigation ball and shortcuts are very useful
+ No bloatware included
+ Rather even front light
+ 8 to 10 hours battery life
- e-ink canvas gray is kinda dark
- Colours could be more vibrant
- No physical shortcut buttons, no volume buttons
- Pen has no side button, no eraser
- Speaker has low volume and sounds hollow
- No 3.5mm audio jack
- Flip case can interfere with fingerprint scanner
- Pen flap from the case should not be detachable
- Pen attachment may press on the volume down button

Availability

You can buy the Boox Note Air5 C from Boox online store.

From Singapore? You can buy it on Shopee SG from retailer ILUHO.