(Credit: Eric Zeman)
LAS VEGAS—TCL is gunning for the color e-paper notebook market with the Note A1 Nxtpaper. This combined ebook reader and stylus-powered notebook lets you read and take notes, organize ideas, and scribble away to your heart's content, but it faces fierce competition from Amazon, Onyx Boox, and Kobo.
We got an early look during CES before it reaches the market later this year.
A Slim Slate
The Note A1 Nxtpaper is a thin sliver of metal and glass. The build quality is sharp, and the materials have a great, weighty (but not heavy) feel to them. It's about the size of a standard iPad and measures just 0.22 inches thick. The aluminum framing is tight, and the screen is flush with the glass.
A wide bezel extends from the left side of the screen, providing a place for you to grip the Note A1. TCL adds a home button to this bezel that not only brings you to the home screen (one press), but also launches a new note (two presses) or starts a voice recording (long press).
(Credit: Eric Zeman)You'll find a USB-C port on the bottom edge and a power button on the top. Three small nubs are positioned in the corners of the rear panel to help the ereader stay in place when on a hard surface, such as a desk. A camera occupies the last corner, so there's no nub there. The included stylus magnetically attaches to the right side.
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The stylus, called the T-Pen Pro, is the one aspect that feels slightly cheap. It's made of plastic and has a grainy texture that could be of higher quality. A button near the writing tip lets you take secondary actions when interacting with the screen. An eraser tops the stylus off.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)Though I don't care overmuch for the stylus itself, the writing experience is really nice. TCL said it took care to improve the writing feel, and it's evident in how the stylus moves across the glass. It's super quick and feels like a ballpoint pen (but not a pencil) on paper. The eraser head is hard plastic and it feels a little strange to erase with rather than the rubber eraser of a real pencil.
The screen itself, which measures 11.5 inches, has a matte finish and is fairly bright. It easily stood up to the dark room and harsh overhead lighting of the demo space. The color of ebook content is subtle. Although the user interface is mostly black and white, the screen can display more than 16 million color hues at up to 120Hz, and TCL uses it sparingly in the UI. You're most likely to encounter color in the books or comics you read. The Note A1 is not for watching videos.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)Speaking of, even though the ereader runs Android, it does not have access to the Google Play Store. You shouldn't think of it as a typical Android device. TCL says the Note A1 is focused on providing a good note-taking experience above all else, so that's the extent of what its software does. In the brief demo I saw, the note-taking features look robust and easy to use. You can easily call up a new note, take advantage of formatting tools to clean things up, or even tap into the basic AI tools to help you summarize. I like that the software has tools for your email and calendar, and hooks into Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive for syncing your notes in the cloud.
The 256GB TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper starts at $549 and will be available in February. We look forward to testing it against the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and our current Editors' Choice, the Onyx Boox Note Air 4 C, and publishing a full review once the Note A1 Nxtpaper arrives in stores.