Onyx today announced a new tablet with an E Ink display capable of rendering colors: the 10.3-inch Boox Tab Ultra C. The E Ink tablet is the first in the Tab series to feature a Kalido 3 E Ink Screen, the latest version of E Ink’s electronic paper color technology. It is still limited to 4,096 colors, but allows for higher color resolution.
Don’t expect colors as vibrant as an iPad’s, though. The new color display offers a crisp 300ppi resolution when you’re in black and white mode, but drops to 150ppi when viewing content in color. As a result, colors look more subtle and pastel, but they should still look more vibrant than last year’s Onyx Boox Nova Air C display. That color E Ink was equipped with a last-generation screen limited to a color resolution of 100ppi, which, as my colleague Jon Porter pointed out in his review, made colors look washed out.
Aside from color, the Kaleido 3 display also comes with a front light and blue light reduction technology. The Kaledo 3 screen is also advertised as being more responsive, so video playback shouldn’t be as slow as on older E-ink color screens. However, that’s a claim we’ve yet to test.
However, aside from these changes, the Boox Tab Ultra C is a similar tablet to its monochrome counterpart, the Boox Tab Ultra, which was released late last year. Both tablets have the same 16-megapixel rear camera with OCR functionality. It seems that Onyx added the camera to help professionals – the tablet’s target market – scan documents instead of taking pictures of pets.
Under the hood, both the monochrome and color tablets are powered by a Qualcomm octa-core CPU. They also each have four refresh modes that you can enable for different tasks, such as a slow mode for reading books and faster options for browsing the web and watching videos. Each tablet also runs a modified version of Android 11 and shares a 6,300mAh battery, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage. In addition, each comes with 10 GB of free Onyx cloud storage, which new and existing customers can take advantage of.
The Boox Tab Ultra C is expected to ship on May 10 and will retail for $599.99, including the Pen2 Pro stylus and magnetic case. However, you can pre-order it now in the official Boox Shop. As part of the pre-order sale, Onyx will also be throwing in a discounted $109.99 keyboard case that you can get for $50 with the tablet.
We’ll be trying out the tablet soon, so stay tuned for our full review.
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