Onyx Boox Go Color 7

Verdict

The Onyx Boox Go Color 7’s compact body and colour E Ink display makes it great for consuming comics and illustrated books on the go. The lack of water resistance and stylus support hamper it against the similar Kobo Libra Colour, but superior app and file support brings it back level.

Introduction

Amazon has the traditional e-reader market all sewn up with its Kindle range, and this is forcing its rivals to do things a little differently. The Onyx Boox Go Color 7, like the Kobo Libra Colour before it, seeks to offer a more colourful alternative.

We mean that quite literally, with a 7-inch colour E Ink display making this compact e-reader better suited to comics and illustrated book content than anything Amazon has to offer.

Is that enough to recommend the Onyx Boox Go Color 7 over its rivals? Probably not, but thankfully it has a few more tricks up its sleeve. With an asking price of £249.99 / $249.99 / €279.99, it’s going to need every one of them.

Design and accessories

• Slim, robust plastic body
• Physical page buttons
• No IP rating
• Decent magnetic case bundled in

Unlike the Boox Go 10.3, Onyx isn’t trying to do anything fancy with the Boox Go Color 7’s design. It’s a classic square-ish e-reader with a relatively compact 156 × 137mm footprint. At 6.4mm thick and 190g, it’s a tad thinner and lighter than the Kobo Libra Colour, but not massively so.

Its body is made from the kind of hard-wearing plastic we’ve come to expect from the product category, while the back cover has a stippled texture that makes it feel warm and grippy.

One side of the e-reader (the screen orientation can be freely rotated in the settings menu) has a thicker screen bezel for holding purposes, and this also houses the up and down buttons for volume and page-turning. There’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about how these two buttons feel and click under the thumb, but they’re still way preferable to the pure touch controls favoured by the Kindle range, and their function can be customised.

The power button sits on one of the narrower edges of the Boox Go Color 7, while the side of the thicker bezel also houses the USB-C port, microSD tray (something the pricey Boox Go 10.3 lacks), and twin speaker grilles – though only one of these is an actual functioning speaker. The latter is fine for spoken word content, but suffers with anything fuller or more musical.

All in all, it’s a pretty standard e-reader design that feels encouragingly robust. Another quibble is how much of a fingerprint magnet both sides of the device proved to be – though I should say that I did my testing during one of the hottest weeks of the year here in the UK.

One big omission compared to the aforementioned Kobo Libra Colour is the lack of any sort of IP certification. For a device that many people will want to wield by the pool or on a beach this summer, that’s a strange thing to overlook – especially at this, a higher-than-average price.

Of course, you could say that the Boox Go Color 7’s bundled in magnetic cover justifies such a price. In the event, I much prefer this accessory to the fiddly case that comes with the Boox Go 10.3. It’s easy to align, thanks to a recess for the page turn buttons, and there’s no removable clasp. Everything fits into place using subtle magnetisation, and it works exactly as you’d want it to.

One accessory you don’t get, unlike its big brother, is a stylus in the box. That’s understandable, if only in the name of keeping costs down, but to omit compatibility with the Onyx Boox Pen 2 Plus stylus seems like a missed opportunity. This is in contrast to the Kobo Libra Colour, which lets you annotate books and scribble notes with an additional £70/$70 outlay.

Screen

• Colour display good for comics
• Nice 7-inch size
• Front lit with warmth control

The main component of any e-reader is its display, and especially so with the Onyx Boox Go Color 7. As the name suggests, this 7-inch E Ink Kaleido 3 touch screen can output in colour.

It only has a limited range of 4096 colours, and if you’re expecting the punchy photorealistic look of even a bog standard Android tablet you’re in for a disappointment. However, this screen retains all the benefits of a classic E Ink display – print-like text reproduction (albeit not as inky as the Boox Go 10.3) and impressive energy efficiency – whilst being able to render more than mere monochrome.

As well as making book cover art pop much more, this makes the Onyx Boox Go Color 7 viable as a comic book reader. Again, it’s not going to do justice to anything especially vibrant, but reading through issues of Invincible proved much more pleasant here than on the monochrome Boox Go 10.3, despite the latter’s larger and clearer monochrome picture.

Such colour content doesn’t look particularly sharp, though. As with every other colour E Ink display, the colour mode halves the resolution from 1264 x 1680 and 300ppi to 632 x 840 and 150ppi.

My biggest issue with this screen, especially when viewing comic books, was ghosting – that is, previous text and objects remaining on screen for a time. It’s a problem that’s inherent to E Ink screens, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. This can be partially mitigated by selecting the Regal output option in the E-Ink Center settings screen, but it never completely goes away, and I felt compelled to hit the manual Refresh button on more than one occasion.

One thing the Onyx Boox Go Color 7 screen includes that the Onyx Boox Go 10.3 quite fatally doesn’t is a front light. You’ll be able to read in lesser lighting conditions, or even the dark, while you can also adjust the warmth of the display to prevent eye strain and sleep disruption.

Performance and software

• 8-core processor with 4GB of RAM
• Stripped back UI based on Android 12
• Access to Google Play Store

Onyx doesn’t specify the processor used here, merely describing it as an 8-core processor with 4GB of RAM. It would appear to be a low-end Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, the kind you’d expect to see running a cheaper smartphone or tablet.

Not that using the Boox Go Color 7 feels particularly snappy. Navigating through its menus remains a somewhat laggy, ponderous experience, largely thanks to an E Ink display that prioritises clarity and efficiency over refresh rate.

The reason the Boox Go Color 7 might need that Qualcomm chip could be because it runs on Android 12, much like a traditional tablet from a couple of years ago. It’s an extremely stripped-back take on Google’s full-blooded OS with a basic tabbed UI.

While this doesn’t make for the most fluid navigation, it’s fine for an e-reader. More importantly, it grants the Boox Go Color 7 access to the Google Play Store and all of the media-providing apps that entails. You can download Amazon’s Kindle app and download your library, or indeed the Google Play Books app.

Why not download your chosen podcast or audiobook app and use those speakers to listen to something? Or better yet, use the Bluetooth connectivity and hook up your headphones. We’ll all thank you for it. With some 25 supported file types, Boox e-readers are some of the most far-reaching and flexible around.

I mentioned the ability to adjust the orientation of the display in the settings menu, but I did observe a few occasions where the picture would appear upside down until I moved to a new app or menu screen. It would seem to be a bug, as it occasionally flips when moving to a different section of the same app.

Onyx has also included access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 chat tool, letting you ask any question you like and receive a natural, pithy answer. This seems rather unnecessary in an e-reader, and smacks of a bandwagon-jumping exercise, but it certainly works.

There’s 64GB of storage, which is double that of the Kobo Libra Colour, and you also get a microSD slot for expansion purposes. That’s another feature the pricier Onyx Boox Go 10.3 lacks.

It’s always tricky to judge battery life in e-readers, given that they generally last way longer than a standard review period on a single charge. Suffice to say, the Boox Go Color 7 has a highly competitive 2300mAh battery (significantly larger than the Kobo Libra Colour’s 2050mAh) that should last the average reader weeks rather than days.

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