Boox Tab8 Unveiled – 7.8-Inch Android Digital Paper Tablet

Onyx unveiled the Boox Tab8 today, which is a 7.8-inch e-ink tablet with Android and digitizer support. It’s launching in China first on August 28, for the equivalent of $399.

Onyx had hyped this digital paper tablet / e-writer a lot in advance, but it’s not really the game changer that it was hyped as.

But it should still be something of a hit in the market, as it offers a combination that a lot of people still want.

As a 7.8-inch Android 11 tablet with pen support, that alone is more than enough for some. But unlike the Boox Nova Air C, it doesn’t feature any e-ink color screen though, so it is still jus a two-tone e-ink screen, although one with a resolution of 1872 x 1404.

The latency between the screen and the pen is 24.17ms, so it still has some catching up to do compared to the best tablets from Apple, Microsoft, Lenovo, and Samsung, but at least the stair stepping seems pretty low with the 4096 pressure sensitive support. And the pen is included.

The OS is an Android based Boox OS, which makes a lot of sense for a tablet that after all is a little specialized compared to regular all-purpose color tablets, and that’s where a lot of the main point of this tablet lies too. It’s supposed to be productive, with emphasis on shortcuts, ease of access through gesture support and so on, as well as good integration of office and document type of apps and file execution.

Hardware specs includes an octa-core 2.0 GHz Qualcomm processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, dual-band Wi-Fi 5, BT 5.0, a 5000 mAh battery, and USB C port.

Boox Tab8 is 8.3mm thick, and while it’s still light at 264 grams, some of these e-ink writers have started to get close to the weight of regular tablets. The very light 8-inch Android tablet TCL Tab 8 weighs 295 grams, so the weight difference is certainly getting smaller.


– Tom Bowen