The Boox range of ereaders has a lot of wild and wonderful designs, from straight-up readers to… smartphones? The company’s new Boox Leaf5+ is more of a pure reading device, with a design that isn’t far off from the Kindle Oasis.
The Oasis is (or was) perhaps the best reader Amazon ever launched. It was also one of the most expensive, but there was a reason for that. The Leaf5+ sports a very similar form factor, which lends itself well to ambidextrous reading.
Oasis of Boox
Onyx, the company that makes these devices, posted about the Leaf5+ on Weibo. The gadget is only available in China for the moment, but the range tends to turn up via Amazon. That makes it relatively easy to purchase locally, something we hope will be the case for the Leaf5+. We really, really miss the Oasis.
Beyond the excellent one-handed design, the Boox Leaf5+ features a 7in Carta 3000 display. That’ll give you up to 300ppi for your reading material. Since the Leaf5+ is fully monochrome, there’s no downscaling. A Snapdragon processor (which isn’t specified), 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage give it an edge over your standard reading device. A 2,000mAh battery should keep readers going for much of a Lee Child series read-through.
Amazon’s Oasis had the company’s routinely excellent waterproofing, which isn’t present here. Keep it away from the bath, in other words. To make up for it, Onyx has included stylus support, a new lighting system (whether it’ll auto-adjust the way the Oasis does isn’t known), and microSD support for cards up to 2TB. That’s… a substantial library.
Chinese pricing pegs the Boox Leaf5+ at around R4,000 (¥1,900) — considerably cheaper than the Oasis was. If it ever makes it to Amazon, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, you can bet that we’ll be checking it out.
