One Week With the Boox Palma 2 Pro
For years I read on a Boox Leaf3. It did one thing - show text - and it did it well. Then a recent firmware update made it noticeably slower, and somewhere in the same week my son stepped on it and cracked the screen. Two bad things at once is usually the universe telling you to upgrade.
I read a lot. Phones and tablets stop working for me after an hour or two - my eyes start to ache in a specific, grinding way that nothing in Android's dark mode can fix. E-ink is the only display that lets me read through an entire evening without paying for it the next morning. So the replacement had to be another e-ink device, and ideally something small enough that I wouldn't make excuses to reach for my phone when I had ten quiet minutes in a queue.
I bought the Boox Palma 2 Pro last week.
First impressions: still slow
This is not a complaint. E-ink is slow. You know that going in. What surprised me was how slow it felt out of the box relative to my old, battered Leaf3. Ghosting on boot. Noticeable lag on a home-screen swipe. App launches that felt like a deliberate pause rather than a transition. The Palma 2 Pro's factory configuration is tuned for a kind of generic "Android on e-ink" experience, with everything animated and everything smoothed, and on an e-ink panel, smoothed just means sluggish.
The first evening I used it, I wondered if I had made a mistake.
The settings that fixed it
Boox ships a system-level tool called BOOX Inkwise that governs refresh behavior for every app installed on the device. Most of the win is here. I set the global refresh mode to Speed, which is the first thing anyone should do, but that is only the ceiling. The real gains come from overriding each reading app's profile through the gear icon in the app list.
My per-app custom profile, for the apps I actually read in:
Refresh tab
- Full refresh every: 5 taps
- Animation filter time: 300 ms
Display tab
- Text outline: 1
- Remove font anti-aliasing: On
Color tab
- Background color: 15 (the slider runs 0 to 255, and the default is 0)
Other tab
- App launch acceleration: On
A full-refresh interval of five taps keeps ghosting manageable without flashing the entire screen on every single page turn. 300 ms of animation filtering is long enough to eat the transitions that would otherwise smear across the panel. Text outline at 1 plus disabled anti-aliasing trades slightly rougher glyph edges for noticeably sharper strokes. At reading size, your eye registers the sharpness more than it registers the pixel stair-stepping.
The background color setting is the one I spent the most time on. The slider runs 0 to 255, the default is 0, and I ended up at 15. That is a small bump, not a maximum. Pushing it all the way up washes out the text and costs you contrast, which is the opposite of what you want on a reader. A small bump raises the panel's apparent white point just enough to make pages look cleaner, while keeping the dark ink looking dark. App launch acceleration, the last setting on the list, is free: it skips the opening animation, which is pure latency with no benefit.
None of these settings is individually dramatic. The combination is. The device that felt sluggish on day one now feels, after an hour of tuning, the way my Leaf3 felt at its best, before the update, before the crack.
A launcher that gets out of the way
The other thing I changed is the launcher itself. Boox ships with its own home screen, which is dense and full of sections I do not use. I replaced it with Niagara Launcher: a vertical, alphabetical, single-column list that you thumb through with one hand. On the Leaf3 it was a small improvement. On a pocket-sized reader like the Palma 2 Pro, where the whole point is to hold it like a phone and reach for it with one hand, it turned out to matter more than I expected. Both of my Boox devices now run the same launcher, and the muscle memory is shared across them.
One week in
I read on it every night. I take it on the subway. I leave my phone in the other room on purpose. The Palma 2 Pro isn't fast, but it is quiet, and that is the only speed that matters for a reading device. A book doesn't need 120 Hz. It needs a page that appears when you ask for it and disappears when you are done.
The display side is sorted. What's still on my list is the software side: the preinstalled apps, the background services, the phone-shaped bloat on a device that has no business being a phone. Boox ships every Palma 2 Pro with a dialer, an SMS app, a SIM toolkit, and a contacts book. I don't plan to call anyone from my reading device.
That is a different post.