Onyx Boox has submitted a letter to the FCC, letting them know that they will be using the same internals as the Nova 2, except they are calling it the Nova 2 Color. The company has just launched the Poke 2 color today, but they only produced 100 units and were sold out in a few hours. They have not submitted any documentation to the FCC for the Poke 2 Color, which leads me to believe this was a test to see if people would respond to a color e-reader, which they did. It looks like Onyx is now taking color seriously.
The Onyx Boox Nova 2 in its current form is a digital note taking device, which means this would be the first e-note to have the new E INK Kaleido Color technology. We saw the possibilities of what Onyx could do with our note taking review of the Pocketbook Color, which has a new Linux based app, with paint brushes, pencils in our note taking review of the Pocketbook Color.
The Onyx Boox Nova 2 came out earlier this year. It features a  7.8 inch E INK Carta HD capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1872×1505 with 300 PPI. The screen is completely flush with the bezel and is made of glass. I believe that they will remove the glass layer and do a sunken screen, they did this with the Poke 2 Color.  Underneath the hood is a Qualcomm octa-core 2 GHZ Cortex A53 processor and not some cheap one, Qualcomm is really good, the only other Onyx devices that employ this processor is the Note 2 and Max3. The Nova 2 also has a whopping 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. It is powered by a respectable 3150mAh battery, has Bluetooth 4.1 and USB-C with OTG.
The Nova 2 retails for $399 and the color panel will add an additional cost, but it remains to be seen what the final price point will be. I believe it will be around $450 to $499. This is quite expensive for a 7.8 inch e-reader that has note taking functionality, but it would be the first color e-note, and early adopters would likely buy one as a preview to the eventual release of a Note 2 Color and Max 3 Pro Color.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
