Great if you love tinkering
First, let me preface that I’m a power user. I only really had 2 options when upgrading my Kindle: 1) purchase the most current Kindle and figure out how to jailbreak it to run Alpine Linux (and hope it doesn’t get bricked at some point down the line), 2) get an Android based e-reader. The latter being a more turnkey solution, I looked at the offerings from Boox. As luck would have it, the v2 of the Color Go happened to be launching the same week that I started seriously considering making a purchase, so the timing was impeccable.

With regards to the device itself, it feels pretty robust. The weight and feel of it is premium to my hands. The large bezel on the side makes it very easy to hold and I do like the texture on the back of the device for even better grip and feel. While the weight makes it feel more substantial than my outgoing Kindle, it’s still nowhere near heavy enough for me to feel uncomfortable during 4-5 hour reading sessions. I think my own gripe with the device is that the volume buttons feel slightly loose in the housing, but this is being nitpicky. Battery life so far has been acceptable to me. With stock settings the device completely shuts down after 10-15 mins. At these power settings, the device easily lasts weeks between charges. Since the startup time of the device is quite long (~1 min), I only shut the device down after 8 hours of idling, since I don’t always have long reading sessions. Oftentimes, I’ll read a few chapters in between other activities, and doing this setting allows me to hop straight back in within 1-2 secs. Even at this setting I’m getting about a week of life.

When it comes to actually using it, the glass of the screen has a nice finish and the touchscreen is plenty responsive for an e-reader. The resolution seems more than adequate for the content I consume. There are lots of refresh modes and a few toggles with regards to contrast and vividness, and I’ve found that each type of content has its own optimized setting.

Manga: There’s enough resolution and contrast to where this reads almost like an actual tankoban. Only downside is when using Viz or ShonenJump app, there’s no way to map the volume buttons to page turn. I believe this is an app limitation, not a device limitation. My manga through the Kindle store works just fine.

Comics: I was hoping to use this to catch up on back issues from series that I’ve fallen behind on. This is probably where the device is the weakest. The colors are muted and cause the screen to be very dark. I’ll either have to turn up the brightness really high (which causes even more washing out of the color), or use an external light source. However, for my use case, this is still completely passable as the only other alternatives are to use a bulkier Android tablet, or reading from the actual raw books instead. This is mainly where I’m taking off a star, since this was my primary reason for going with color instead of black and white.

Ebooks: Being that the device runs on Android, I have access to literally everything. Over the last decade, I’ve amassed a collection of DRM ebooks from different marketplaces, as well as random epubs and pdfs. I can read my Kindle books through the Kindle app, Google books through Google Books, etc.. I also have a Calibre server at home which I can easily access using this device. I’m able to open all of my books using its respective native app.

Compared to other devices, there’s a fair amount of customizability that you’re able to do. The device is great once you figure everything out, and it’s somewhat required to get the most out of it. That said, I suspect that people looking for a turnkey ereader for all of their content might get frustrated. As an Android and Linux user, I’m no stranger to any of this, and it’s right up my alley.

Last note, I had no desire to get the pen for this device since I have other devices for that. I have no idea if this feature is any good.