Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C review: Could an e-ink tablet replace your notebook and iPad?

E‑ink tablets sit somewhere between Kindles, iPads, and paper notebooks. Their electronic‑ink displays look like real paper rather than a glowing LCD, and they support stylus input, handwriting, and apps.

Why bother? They’re far easier on the eyes, you can write for hours without fatigue, the pen‑on‑paper feel is miles ahead of glass, and they remain perfectly readable in bright sunlight.

But the compromises matter. E‑ink refresh rates are slow, making video, gaming, and animation‑heavy apps a non‑starter. Websites look strange, colours are muted, and while you can technically stream video, you almost certainly won’t want to.

E‑ink tablets are built for people who live in text and handwritten notes: writers, students, academics, PDF‑marking designers, and anyone who walks into meetings with a notebook in hand. They’re also great for reading, especially technical documents and long‑form material. What they’re not is art tablets — if you need polished colour illustration, an iPad or Wacom is still the right tool.

With that in mind, the Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C is one of the strongest options in the category, blending colour e‑ink, full Android support, and robust note‑taking features. Here’s how it holds up in real use.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Key specs

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Pricing

In the UK, the Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C starts at around £499.99 for the basic tablet, with bundles including the stylus closer to £570. In the US, it typically retails at about $529.99 for a similar bundle, though prices vary slightly by retailer and whether accessories like a case are included.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Design and build

The Note Air 5 C is a slim, understated slab of aluminium and glass. At just 5.8 mm thick, it slips easily into a bag, and the black aluminium frame feels premium, with rounded edges that make it comfortable to hold.

Its 10.3‑inch, roughly A5‑sized display is ideal for note‑taking, spacious without feeling bulky, and the thicker left bezel gives you a reliable grip whether you’re left‑ or right‑handed.

At 440g, it’s on the heavy side for a 10‑inch device. It’s fine on a desk or lap, but long reading sessions will remind you of the weight; manageable, but noticeably heftier than a Kindle or paperback.

Build quality is excellent: no flex, no creaks, and all the essentials are here, including USB‑C, microSD expansion, and a fingerprint reader in the power button

New physical volume buttons sit on the right edge, and the included folio case has a woven texture and folds into a stand for portrait or landscape use. Crucially, it now has a cutout for charging, so you don’t need to open the cover. There’s also a magnetic flap for securing the pen when travelling.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Writing experience

This is the Note Air 5 C’s strongest suit. The matte screen offers just the right amount of resistance, giving strokes texture and control. It's not quite paper, but far closer than writing on glass.

The included Pen3 stylus supports 4,096 pressure levels and tilt, so line variation and shading feel natural, and latency is low enough that ink appears almost instantly.

Thanks to Wacom EMR, the pen never needs charging, feels solid in the hand, and even hides spare nibs under the cap. The only downsides are its slightly top‑heavy balance, which can cause fatigue over long sessions, and the lack of an eraser end.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Note-taking capabilities

The built-in Notes app is intuitive and well designed. You can simply open it and start writing without digging through menus or tutorials. You get a good selection of tools – ballpoint pen, fountain pen, pencil, brush, highlighter and text – along with adjustable line thickness, 18 colours, and up to six layers. Layers are especially useful for diagrams or structured notes.

There’s a lasso tool for rearranging content, shape tools for clean diagrams, and handwriting recognition that converts notes into typed text. Results are solid if your handwriting is legible, though it struggles with messier scrawl.

You can also insert images, links and voice recordings, organise notebooks with a table of contents, and use “infinite canvas” pages that expand as you scroll; I found these ideal for mind maps and brainstorming.

The toolbar is customisable and can be saved in different configurations for different tasks. Over the past few months, I’ve used the Note Air 5 C for meetings, layout sketches, concept notes and article planning, exporting everything as PDFs to share or archive.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: PDF annotation

PDF annotation is where the Note Air 5 C truly shines. If you regularly mark up documents, this feature alone could justify the price. Open a PDF and start writing — it feels like scribbling on paper, but with all the digital perks: different pen styles, typed notes, movable annotations, and even split‑screen for viewing two documents at once.

The PDF viewer’s smart modes help too, especially the column view that automatically zooms and navigates multi‑column layouts, making academic papers and technical manuals far more readable on a 10‑inch screen.

Best of all, annotations are saved directly into the PDF. Move the file to another device and everything is exactly where you left it, no exporting or conversion needed. For designers, editors, architects, and anyone who reviews documents, it’s genuinely transformative.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Reading

While it’s not designed purely as an e-reader, the Note Air 5 C performs well for reading. The 10.3-inch screen provides plenty of space, and the 300ppi monochrome resolution delivers crisp text on par with dedicated e-readers.

The front light is excellent, with adjustable brightness and colour temperature. It’s comfortable in both dark rooms and bright sunlight, where the matte screen completely eliminates glare.

The NeoReader app supports a wide range of formats, including PDFs, EPUBs, MOBIs and comic files. You can customise fonts and layouts and even use text-to-speech if you want to listen while multitasking. The main drawback is weight. For long reading sessions, especially one-handed, this 440g device is less comfortable than a smaller e-reader.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Colour e-ink

The Note Air 5 C uses E Ink's Kaleido 3 technology, which overlays an RGB colour filter on top of a standard black-and-white e-ink panel. This allows it to display up to 4,096 colours, which sounds impressive until you actually see them.

Let's be clear: these are not iPad colours. They're muted, washed-out and pastel-like; more watercolour than vibrant print. The technology works by darkening specific areas under red, green or blue filters, which inherently limits colour saturation. The resolution also drops to 150 pixels per inch for colour content (half the monochrome resolution), and the screen appears darker overall than a pure black-and-white e-ink display.

Colour may be limited on the Note Air 5 C, but it still adds real value. Charts and graphs become far easier to interpret, coloured highlights make notes and PDFs more organised, and app interfaces are simply clearer when you can distinguish elements by hue.

Comics and graphic novels are a mixed experience: they look livelier than in monochrome, but the colours aren’t true to print, and how much that bothers you will depend on your tolerance.

One clear improvement is ghosting. E‑ink screens often leave faint remnants of previous pages, but the Note Air 5 C handles this better than any device I’ve used. With the right settings, ghosting is minimal and rarely distracting, which makes full‑page colour content, especially comics, far more enjoyable.

To be clear, this isn’t a full‑colour art tablet. Illustrators creating finished work should look elsewhere. But for designers marking up mockups, architects annotating plans, or anyone who wants colour‑coded highlights while reading, the muted palette is more than sufficient

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Interface

The Note Air 5 C runs full Android 15 with unrestricted Google Play access, so apps like Kindle, Kobo, Notion, Drive and Dropbox are all available. Most apps work well for reading and writing, though animation‑heavy ones still clash with e‑ink. Boox’s simplified display modes help you optimise apps quickly without diving into endless settings. In practice, it’s a full Android tablet — just with an e‑ink screen.

Performance is smooth: writing feels instant, apps launch quickly, and page turns are snappy for e‑ink. Battery life is more modest than you might expect, though. You’ll get around six hours of continuous handwriting with the light on, or up to 30 hours of reading with it off. With mixed use, I averaged about four days per charge. Perfectly acceptable, but nowhere near the weeks‑long stamina of basic e‑readers.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Should I buy one?

The Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C makes perfect sense for a very specific kind of user and almost none for anyone else.

If you’re a designer constantly marking up PDFs, a writer who prefers longhand, a student drowning in lecture notes, or someone exhausted by glowing screens, this could genuinely change how you work. The writing experience alone can justify the price if you use it daily, and its PDF tools are unmatched in the e‑ink world.

But if you’re merely e‑ink‑curious, look at cheaper options like Boox’s smaller models or a basic Kindle Scribe. At $529.99 / £530, this is a professional tool for people with professional needs, not a casual experiment. If you’ll use it for hours every day, you’ll quickly wonder how you lived without it; if your answer is “maybe”, your money is better spent elsewhere.

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Buy it if

• You take extensive handwritten notes
• You regularly annotate PDFs
• You read for hours and want to reduce eye strain
• You work outdoors or in bright environments

Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C: Don't buy it if

• You expect iPad-quality colours
• You need to watch videos or animations
• You want a very lightweight e-reader
• You prioritise battery life