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Old 04-19-2018, 02:15 PM   #402
flibber
Junior Member
flibber began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 6
Karma: 10
Join Date: Apr 2018
Device: boox note
Hi,
After following the Boox note on here, I decided to buy one off Amazon and I thought I would give my specific feedback here.

I won't repeat all the info and good features of the Note previously given on this forum, instead I will just concentraite on some of the things that haven't been mentioned. To that end, I am affraid that most of the below will sound somewhat negitive.

The first thing I would say is that "out of the box" the Note really peforms badly. It was bad enough for me to think I had a faulty unit. However, a quick dig around in the settings I found that there is a firmware update. Strangely, the "auto update" is switched off by default, so you will never get an update unless you go looking. Thankfully after the update (dated late March) the Note was much better.

Onto the play store. I installed my Outlook email, word, excel, powerpoint, onedrive and they all worked great... thumbs up. As mentioned before, sadly MS onenote doesn't work... in fact its pretty much unusable. However, although the othr MS products worked fine they did highlight some issues which are big problems for on the go daily use.

Problem one) Security. When you apply a O365 account to a device, it forces you to set a password (on all devices). The same happened with the note and I set the Pin. However, for the next 3 days when the note went to sleep or was restarted or was cold started, it didn't once ask me for the pin number. I even checked the settings... yup pin set but never asked the user for it. At the time anyone could have looked at my email as there was nothing to stop them.

Problem two) I have sympathy for the screen tecnology however the update lag really does mean that pinch zoom and page scrolling becomes a quessing game. You simply don't know how much to scroll or zoom because while in the process of movement the screen is a blur so you just have to guess when to stop.

Problem 3) Battery life and/or network connection. While using the device you have the option for the wifi to "timeout" after a set time. I didn't do loads of experimentation on this but I found quickly that if you picked up and started using the note after the network had timed out, it wouldn't kick back in again until you clicked on the wifi??? So after this annoyance I set the wifi to "never timeout". This it seems was a big mistake. After a full charged, I used the note lightly for an hour or two and had about 80% battery left when I clicked to standby. The next morning the battry was flat. Now you may think I have hundreds of emails or loads of onedrive documents. I don't during the time the battery flattened itself, I had 4 emails and no onedrive documents updated. I wasn't impressed to say the least.

The final killer was the boox "Note" taking app. When it worked it was really good, and it really feels and looks like writing on paper. Before the firmware update the lag was terrible. After the update it had no lag.... most of the time but again and again I would randomly have issues where you would start writting and nothing would happen for a few seconds. 80% it was fine but each time I picked it up and used it I had no confidence that it would work flawlessly. This was the end for me. I can appriciate the technology and the expence of the screen but at the end of the day its a lot of money and the minimum I expect is that the native note taking app should work flawlessly. It didn't. I purchased the Note to mainly keep an eye on the odd email and take the odd note. However, there is no way I could take this into a meeting not confident if I would have problems or not. So it went back to Amazon.

It is a shame, it could be a great device... it is so light it would could be brilliant as a exec device. However, at this price I expect premium performance, not lag and buggy issues like a cheap tablet.

On last point is with the pen. The pen works great and the writting experince feels just like pen on paper. However the pen itself looks and feels (to hold) like very cheap plastic pen. I also don't doubt that it has 4000 levels of pressure but in reality I found in practice this only really equated to 3... light, medium and heavy. You really need a magnigying glass to notice any other pressure levels than that.

I hope this helps some
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