Digest note. We have not tested the BOOX Palma 2 ourselves. This page condenses published third-party reviews in our own words; sources are linked on the device page.
What it is. Onyx’s Palma 2 is an e-reader built in the shape of a phone. A 6.13-inch Carta 1200 panel at 300 ppi under a flat cover, about 170 grams, Android 14 underneath. The power key doubles as a fingerprint reader (a screen password has to be set first), and a long bar key on the side cycles between volume, page turn and web scroll. It carries a 16-megapixel rear camera with a flash aimed at document scanning plus on-board OCR, 128GB internal storage with a microSD slot that opens to 2TB, USB-C with speakers and microphones on either side of it, and a dual colour-temperature front light. Because the OS is Android, the reader is not welded to one bookstore: the techbang editor installed Readmoo and the Rakuten Kobo app and reported vertical and horizontal layout, font switching and audiobook playback all working.
What reviewers like. The one-hand shape is where the three written reviews agree. techbang wrote that the phone-proportioned body sits easier than a boxy 6-inch reader and that the G-sensor auto-rotate lets the page and side-key layout follow whichever hand you switch to; mrmad.com.tw took the Palma 2 outside alongside an iPhone 16 Pro Max and reported the e-paper reading without reflection or backlight glare, calling outdoor legibility a clear win over the phone. The fingerprint-in-power-key combo was praised by both (mrmad.com.tw compared its speed to a phone). techbang singled out the top and bottom microphones for meeting notes and the TTS stack, which lets you adjust speed, volume, gender of voice and 15-second skip and set a sleep timer, and noted the official case adds a stand plus sleep-on-close and wake-on-open. manread.me, writing from several months of using it as a backup device, said a magnetic case cut for an iPhone 15 or 16 Pro fits and pairs directly, or you can stick a ferrite ring on the back; a Bluetooth keyboard supports long writing sessions, and Notion, Simplenote, YouTube and Spotify all run. The rear camera plus OCR is genuinely useful on documents, with techbang recommending you split dense small-text pages into several shots.
What they don’t like. Two themes carry most of the negatives. Apps written for LCD screens look and behave like apps written for LCD screens once you put them on e-paper. techbang said response speed and smoothness are always discounted; manread.me logged a few near-freeze incidents that ended in a manual restart, said apps are often closed outright instead of staying in the background, and wrote that reconnecting to Wi-Fi after a reboot takes a while. He added that you have to slow your typing or keys mis-fire. mrmad.com.tw flagged the physical limits of the form: at 6.13 inches, magazines and image-heavy layouts never feel satisfying, and the rear camera is scoped for document scanning rather than photography. techbang wrote that the four-side bezel reads wider than a contemporary phone. A Bilibili buying-guide video lined the mainland-facing model up against the overseas Palma 1 and Palma 2, and its value is on that correspondence, not on measurement: it is a video with no transcript we could check, so it stays as a model-and-channel note.
Longevity and lock-in. Palma 2 is the more open side of the lock-in question this site cares about. techbang’s unit runs Android 14 and lets you install whichever book apps you want, so the reader is not attached to a single first-party store account; the reviews describe reading, TTS, dictionary lookups and on-device OCR as functions that work without a Boox cloud round-trip, and manread.me used the device as a standalone backup for months without mentioning a first-party service dependency. Two things still bind a long-term owner. None of the reviews states the firmware-update cadence, whether the battery is user-serviceable, or how warranty works on an imported unit. The channel split is real and matters: that Bilibili buying guide spells out that the mainland-facing SKU in this same shape is sold as Onyx P6, while the Palma 1 and Palma 2 names go to Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Western markets and Korea. Same hardware, different SKU, different after-sales route. The rear camera and the paired top and bottom microphones do their scanning and recording work offline; the ChatGPT-plus-Notion voice-memo pipeline manread.me set up obviously does not.
Our judgment. Palma 2 suits a reader who wants a phone-shaped, one-hand device for text and is happy picking their own book apps. Both Taiwan-based reviews treat it as a comfortable novel and long-form machine, with the fingerprint power key and the 2TB microSD ceiling as real quality-of-life wins, and manread.me’s long-term note says it replaced an older 7.8-inch tablet in his reading rotation. Do not buy it expecting flagship-smooth apps: the Android layer runs at e-paper speed, background behaviour is aggressive enough to close your apps on you, and at least one long-term owner hit occasional freezes. If your reading is magazines, image-heavy titles or complex PDFs, the 6.13-inch panel will fight you. If you are in mainland China and want local after-sales, the P6 SKU is the right-hand door rather than an imported Palma 2.
Who should skip it. Readers who want a sealed, no-fiddling ecosystem, anyone whose main diet is magazines or heavy-image PDFs, and anyone unwilling to accept a manual restart when the app layer gets crowded.