Boox’s Palma 2 is not trying to replace your phone. That framing, which shows up constantly in reviews, misses what makes it interesting. It’s a 6.13-inch Android device with an e-ink display that fits in a jeans pocket, runs the full Google Play store, and gets roughly two weeks of battery life doing light reading and podcast queuing. The question isn’t whether it replaces anything - it’s why nobody built this sooner.
The display is the obvious sticking point for anyone who hasn’t used e-ink in a few years. Refresh rates have improved significantly; the Palma 2 handles scrolling and page turns without the full-screen flash that defined older Kindles. It still can’t do video in any useful sense, and anything with animation looks like it’s being rendered through wet glass. But for reading long articles, RSS feeds, ebooks, or Instapaper saves, the screen is genuinely better than an LCD - lower eye strain, readable in direct sunlight, no blue light chewing through your sleep.
What Boox does that Amazon won’t is ship a real Android OS. That means you can install Pocket, Libby, KOReader, or any reading app you already use. No walled garden, no proprietary format lock. The tradeoff is that Boox’s own software layer is mediocre - the home screen feels like it was designed by a committee that hadn’t agreed on a goal - but you can mostly ignore it once you’ve set up your preferred apps.
The hardware itself is surprisingly solid. It’s light enough that holding it one-handed for an hour doesn’t become uncomfortable, and the physical page-turn buttons on the side are better than they look in photos. The camera is there technically. Don’t use it.
At around $280, it’s not cheap for something this narrowly useful. But that narrowness is the point. Pulling out a dedicated reading device instead of a phone genuinely changes behavior - there’s no notification pull, no reflex to check something. It’s a single-purpose object in the way a paperback is a single-purpose object, except it holds your entire Calibre library and syncs your highlights to Notion.
The Palma 2 won’t suit anyone who needs their second screen to do real work. But for the person who reads a lot and wants to stop doing it on a device that also texts and doomscrolls - this is a better answer than the Kindle ecosystem currently offers.