BOOX Tab XC Tab XC 13.3 Color ePaper 6G 128G 2025

The BOOX Tab XC is a 13.3-inch color ePaper tablet that nails large PDF reading and offers a flexible Android experience. Its stylus lacks an eraser and battery life is only okay, but for the right user, this huge e-ink screen is hard to beat.

The BOOX Tab XC's processor performance is among the best we've seen in an e-ink device. Our database puts its CPU in the 97th percentile among all tablets, and the GPU isn't far behind at the 96th, but that's a bit of a party trick on a screen that refreshes too slowly for gaming or video. The real-world payoff is a responsive Android experience: opening apps, navigating PDFs, and using the stylus feel fluid. With the BSR chip reducing ghosting, you can even scroll through web pages without wanting to throw the tablet across the room.

Battery life, however, is nothing to write home about. The 5,500mAh cell lands in the 59th percentile, which means you'll get about a week of mixed use with light and Wi-Fi on, or much less if you're heavy on apps. It's fine for daily charging, but don't expect the multi-week endurance of a Kindle. The front light with warm and cold tuning is a plus for nighttime reading, and the auto-rotation works as you'd expect.

The obvious competitor from the user's perspective is the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but that's an entirely different animal. It's a retina LCD, far better for video and color accuracy, but it's heavy, glossy, and not pleasant for hours of reading. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is similar, a gorgeous OLED slab that's best for creators, not readers. If you're eyeing the BOOX Tab XC, you probably already know you want an E Ink display. In that case, your real alternatives are the BOOX Note Air3 C (smaller, lighter, cheaper) or the reMarkable 2 (no color, simpler OS, great writing). There's also the Kindle Scribe for pure reading and note-taking, but it lacks color and Android apps. The Tab XC sits alone in offering a huge color e-ink canvas for annotating PDFs and installing any Android app you like, but those perks come at a clear premium.

At its core, the BOOX Tab XC is a niche tool. You're looking at around $820 on Amazon, but that only makes sense if you absolutely need a 13.3-inch color ePaper screen for work or study. For comparison, a 10.3-inch BOOX Note Air3 C costs less and also gives you Kaleido 3 color, but the smaller canvas makes a big difference for full-size documents. If you can live without color, the reMarkable 2 is cheaper and offers a superior writing feel, though its screen is monochrome and smaller. And if you just want a general tablet for media, an iPad Air or Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE will run circles around this for less money, but they'll fry your eyes during long reading sessions.

If you've been hunting for a large-format e-ink tablet that can actually show color, the BOOX Tab XC is one of the few options that go big, literally. We're talking a 13.3-inch screen, which is massive for an ePaper device, and it's based on the latest Kaleido 3 color technology. That means you get 4,096 colors for highlighting, diagrams, and comic pages, while the black-and-white layer still delivers a crisp 300 ppi for text. If your workflow revolves around reading full-size PDFs, academic papers, or sheet music without squinting or zooming, this thing might be exactly what you need.

Under the hood, it runs Android 13 with an octa-core 2.8GHz processor and a dedicated Boox Super Refresh (BSR) chip. That's a big deal because e-ink tablets usually feel sluggish, but here, swiping through menus and loading apps is surprisingly snappy. You get 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, so app switching and document storage won't choke it. Add a pen, and you can scribble notes directly on PDFs, though the stylus is a bit of a double-edged sword, more on that later. Connectivity is standard: Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C.

The price is... weird. Some listings show it around $820, which is expensive for an e-reader but not unreasonable for a large color E Ink tablet with this kind of horsepower. Then there are inexplicable $147,640 listings, which we're going to politely ignore because they're clearly a data error. In practice, if you're comparing it to an iPad Pro or a Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, you'll be paying a premium for the eye-friendly ePaper screen and specialized note-taking focus, not for cutting-edge LCD performance.

If you plan to watch videos, play games, or use apps that demand smooth scrolling and vibrant colors, just buy an iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab instead. The screen refresh rate and color resolution aren't built for that. Writers who need a pressure-sensitive eraser tool for quick corrections will also be annoyed by the stylus limitation; a reMarkable 2 or even an older BOOX Note Air with an EMR pen would serve you better. And if you're on a tighter budget, this tablet's $820+ price tag is hard to justify when a smaller color E Ink device costs hundreds less.

The BOOX Tab XC is easy to love if you're the exact right user: a researcher, academic, or artist who works with full-page documents and wants color highlights without staring at an LCD all day. The display is a joy for PDFs, and Android flexibility opens up software that most e-readers can't touch. But it's also held back by some frustrating cost-cutting decisions, like that eraser-less stylus, and the battery life won't win any awards.

For anyone else, this tablet will feel like a very expensive, very slow monochrome-ish slab that can barely play video. If you're not married to the idea of E Ink, go get an iPad. If you want the best writing e-ink experience, get a reMarkable. But if you've been dreaming of a giant color ePaper notebook that can run your favorite Android apps, the Tab XC delivers, with a few asterisks you'll need to accept.