BOOX Note Air 5C Unboxing & Initial Impressions

Hello everyone and welcome back to the channel. It's good to see all of you. I know it's been a little while to have a real video come out. There have been a couple of pop-up live streams and I've just got a lot of different devices that I'm testing and going through right now and you know doing this new kind of reviewer thing is a little bit different for me. But this is going to be about the Note Air 5C. So we're going to unbox that device. We're going to take a look at it. I actually have it behind me here. So it's been out of the box. This is the intro. I recorded that separately so you'll see that here in a few minutes. Interesting device. I'm going to talk a little bit about what the changes are from the Note Air 4C and also whether this is really worth an upgrade. So it's a little bit longer of a first impressions because you're going to get to see everything from unboxing the device to unboxing the cover to unboxing the new keyboard cover and a few typing tests. So without any further ado let's go ahead and jump into it. All right everyone so here we are with the Note Air 5C and I took it out of the big box. They always have a very huge box with just a really big foam piece of padding in there to protect the device. But it comes with some extra nibs and we're going to go through the process here. And here is the cover. So this is the new magnetic cover. We'll go ahead and we'll take it out first and have a look at that. Always nice packaging with books. They're very good with their packaging. Always a good time taking things out. They're very careful to use sustainable packaging for the most part. So go ahead and we'll pull this out. Try not to break the package too much. And again you're going to see the cover. It's a pretty nice cover. I mean I'm not a fan of this flap. I think we all know that by now and I think pretty much every reviewer out there has said that they really wish books would go away from this. I see why they do it I just don't agree with it. I do think that this cover is an improvement as far as the feel of it from the original one that came with the Note Air 4C. The original origami cover was very industrial feeling and it kind of had a almost a plastic like industrial is the best way to put it type feeling to it. This is very much it's still plastic but it feels like fabric. And of course they do have this cut out now so that you can charge directly in the cover which is a nice touch. And then it still does all of the origami things which we'll take a look at. It doesn't appear it's going to work the same way because the origami actually worked on both sides so that you could make almost a v-shape on the back. But we'll take a look at that here in a minute. So let's go ahead and sit it over to the side and we'll see what comes in the actual box here. See if I can use the old book stylus to get started here. All you need to do is get under that first piece of plastic and then we will rip this off and now you have your books device. Go ahead and pull this out of the case. We will go ahead and pull off the top. And a pretty familiar packaging what you see with all of their products. Very nice wax paper here on the top. And we'll go ahead and we'll pull that off. Pull this off here. We'll go ahead and pull this off. Break that seal and remove the device. Very nice looking feel. It's very much reminiscent of the Note Air 4C. But we'll sit it to the side here for a second and we'll just look at what else is in the box. I think we're going to be pretty normal as far as what we're expecting to see here. So we'll go ahead and we'll pull this open and of course you get your SD card removal tool here. You also get your USB A to C cable and you get the new stylus which we will take a look at here in just a minute. And then of course we already saw the extra nibs. On this side you get your documentation. Always in a nice little envelope here with your startup guide. And that is it for what's in the box. Let's go ahead and take a look while we're here at the stylus because I'm interested in these reviews that have already come out and some of the early impressions are not very favorable when it comes to the stylus. It looks good. I still don't understand why they do this. Maybe that's just me but the rubber stopper here has never been one of my favorite things. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to me on this pen in particular because I just don't see why you would use it that way. It is a much nicer pen to hold as far as the way it feels. It feels like a more premium stylus. Very much in line with something like the SuperNote. I mean of course not near what the Heart of Metal is but definitely in line with their push-up pen or something like that. It's got a nice feel to it. A nice grip. It's got that flat edge. You do have this little magnet here that holds your extra nibs which I think is kind of cool. So you get three nibs right there and then you do have to kind of line it up but when you do that magnet does hold it. The problem is it's not very strong and you can see how quickly I can move that. So if you tried to hang it on anything I don't see it staying very well. But there is a lot more heft to it. Not a ton more than the original book stylus as far as weight. It is a little weightier but it's also thinner if you look at the two side by side. But not a ton. I mean if you put these right up next to each other and I used to line their magnets there's not a ton of difference there. Just a little bit. I actually don't dislike this stylus at all. And let's go ahead and look at the device really quickly. So there's the pen. So if you look at the device it looks very much very similar to the Note Air 4C. You still have the very nice design all the way around. You have the colors that are very nice. One of the additions is going to be these pogo pins which are for the keyboard cover. I am supposed to be getting the keyboard cover so I will show that when I get it. You also have the addition of these volume rockers over here. So you have volume and you can also make that page up and down. You have your microphone. You have your power button. And then of course on the side here you have your power and you have your speaker grills and your SD card. So still the same nice design. They say there's a difference in the film covering. I noticed that Kit had had in his video that it was applied a little bit off. On mine it looks to be applied correctly. I'm not seeing any misapplication. It looks like it's flush with the screen all the way around. I can feel that it's a little bit sticky so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a microfiber cloth and I am going to go ahead and wipe that down before we even start this up just to see if that takes away some of that stickiness. I also have some non-alcoholic spray that I may use at some point if it continues. But let's go ahead and start this up. Like I said it's very reminiscent of the Note Air 4C but at the same time I think that there are some changes and I'm curious to see what those changes look like and how the device performs. But all we're going to do in this part of the video and then I'll come back here after using it a little bit is start it up. I'm going to write a couple of sentences just quickly on the device and then I will do a little bit more testing with it. So we will go ahead and select our language, United States, Chicago time, got our date and let's see if we can change the date. We can't so it's fine. Set time automatically and then we will go ahead auto sleep after five minutes. Power off never. I usually change that to about eight hours on the power off but we'll just set it for never now. It's going to walk me through the different menus on the gestures and I do use the gestures. We'll let this go ahead and start up and you'll see I have my nav ball there and I do leave that on so when I sync this over I will go ahead and hopefully get everything on it. But real quick I do want to test out this pen and I want to test out the writing experience so we'll go ahead to a handwritten note. I do like the 24 line so let's see if we can find that. So here is the 24 line and we will go ahead and just leave that as notebook one for now and create and then it's telling me to turn wi-fi on. I don't want to do that yet so well okay. Okay we have our wi-fi set up. It did have an update but I'm not gonna deal with that right now. Like I said we'll pop on over here in a few minutes or here in a little bit and show you a little bit more but I do want to do a quick writing test. So this is a writing test with the new pen. It is a little bit stickier but I do like it. I like the feel of it. It also feels like there's a little bit of give. Let's try a different pen and see what we've got here. See if I like that a little bit better. That I think is their calligraphy. So let's go with the fountain. Let's move it up one spot and then here is the fountain pen. Actually I like that a lot. I like the feel of this. It is a different writing experience than what was on the Note Air 4c and I do like it. It is really nice and I don't find myself knocking this off which is good for me. You know let's see if the scribble erase is on there by default. It doesn't look like it is. So let's go into AI. Got it. Go back into AI and let's go back in there and turn on all of those features which I do like. So we'll turn them on. Now we'll scribble that out and it takes it away. So yeah this is a very nice pen and I didn't dislike the other one at all. I still don't. I mean if I write on this with the other book stylus this is also a nice writing feel but I will tell you that this pen is heavier. It's weighted more on the back end which I like because it makes it rest a little bit better in your hand and so it gives you that feeling of heft which I think is really kind of a cool thing to have. So yeah this is very nice. I do want to talk about the elephant in the room, the magnets. So one thing I've been thinking about everybody's talking about the volume button getting pressed and it does look like that's going to happen no matter what you do. Well yeah see that did it. So if I come back and I make this go back I wondered when I watched the other reviews if maybe putting the magnet upside or putting the pen upside down would change that but it doesn't look like it's going to help. First I thought okay well maybe it's meant to go this way but you're still hitting that button and if you notice that every time I put that on unless I put it down here which everybody has shown is kind of the worst possible place to put it because it's just not going to stick as well. Although if you go the further you go down yeah see right here is kind of the sweet spot and it's just not a good spot to have that be in and you'll see it made a bunch of pages so we had a lot of them added in there and this is where it seems like they want you to have it which would require you to put the clip about here which is kind of out of place but let's go ahead and take a look at it really quick in the case so we'll go ahead and put it here it should snap right in which it does and then we can close it and it's still heavy it doesn't quite feel as heavy I don't think as the other one because I don't know that they've got the magnet set up exactly the same way but it's it's a very nice device and for the pen to work now you would have to go here and then you would have to put on your cover down here you'd have to be real careful with that to get it under so that just doesn't look right now I guess you could put it up here is the way the other one was since it's made to go larger but there's your problem see it pops in there so not not the most elegant solution at all and while we're in here let's look and see how the origami case works in the old one you have the ability to kind of pop this out and make a triangle with this back part of the case and I'll borrow the Air Force C bag from Trey to show that here they're making it almost like you have to use it in a different kind of configuration so to get it to stand up in portrait you have to do it kind of like this to make it work and then when you do it doesn't stand quite straight up so this is straight up which leaves a lot of room the other one allowed you to do more than that and everybody has been talking about how it's not quite flat and that's definitely true you can see here that it's just off just a little bit when you have it set like that so it's a really weird experience the way that they've set that up it's not the same viewing angle as before and then of course if you want to turn it this way again it's set at an angle which is fine and might work okay if you have that set the way you want it but again it's not quite flush you get a little bit of wobble here and I don't know if that's perceptible but it's not I just I don't know why they fixed it that way why couldn't they have left the case the same except for cutting in this hole if they had just cut this hole in and left the case the exact same way that it was with that crease here to make it stand up very nicely I think they'd have been better off so maybe that's just me it doesn't seem like it's just me from the other reviewers who are out there doing this but that's how I'm noticing there's no good way to do this to make it stand up the right way no matter how I configure it it's just not as good of an experience as the other case was yeah there's there's no good way to do that and that's too bad I really wish they had taken the time to not not solve the problem which is what it looks like they've done so it's too bad all right well let me get all set up and I will be back to talk about this here in just a little bit all right we've unboxed and shown you the keyboard case and now I'm gonna appear on the screen show you some typing examples and kind of talk through a little bit of what that means and kind of my first initial raw impressions of this actually the typing experience is decent I think the biggest issue with the keyboard case so far for me is just the size it's very small and I'm used to my hands having more room now that being said once I got used to just using my fingertips to really hit those keys and and it was very early impressions I mean I've used the keyboard case for a day so you know the big thing was as I got more comfortable I was making less and less errors what you're seeing on the screen now is me not being very comfortable so I was trying it out and I was doing some early impressions and it was difficult to get my fingers to stay on the home keys even though I'm a decent typist and I can pretty much handle most keyboard layouts but in this case it was just so compact now that being said the key travel was decent the fact that it's very much in line with the device it's very stable and it is a for me a very good viewing angle now I do think they missed by not allowing it to go just a little bit further tilting back for those who may need that especially since they took away the trackpad and they have that extra space at the top that could have been a really good way for them to add a second channel up there to be able to tilt it down just a little bit more but that's a minor thing and you know the fact that there's power pass through all of that is really good stuff with this device so I think it is a value add and on initial testing and as you can see the typing experience is pretty darn good I do have to admit that when I tried to open up the text note on the books app and the books app always disappoints me for some reason it's just not as refined as I wish it was it does back up your notes it does sync your notes but for example with the text note that I typed in that you're seeing going on the screen it didn't it shows it as a preview but when I open that on the phone you can't see it so I I can't identify what that text is so that's a small concern and maybe just a bug that they have to work out with the text notes but that doesn't take away from the fact that the typing experience on this device is pretty good both in word and in the native books text note so just some food for thought hopefully this has been a helpful component to kind of show the screen recording of me typing and you know forgive all the mistakes because again trying to use a new layout the first time is always a little confusing but let's go ahead and jump on over and I will see you here in a second all right everybody thanks for hanging in there this was a little bit of a disjointed video just because I kept getting pieces to this device but I do want to talk about the initial first impressions and the things about it that I think are interesting and that you should really take away from should this be an upgrade and I don't know yet I would say that based on first impressions this would be a solid upgrade if you don't have the note air 4c it would also be a solid upgrade if you have the tab ultra c pro because that had a keyboard case it had the pogo pin attachment and it very similar profile the difference is you're getting the note experience which if you look at the note max if you look at this device the note series tends to have better tools if you are a note taker so from that perspective I think you could see some upgrade paths now if you have the note air 4c I think it's a little bit more difficult because that works really well with a bluetooth keyboard now what do you gain at least in initial testing you gain the fact that you have pass-through charging for the keyboard case you also have the fact that it is a keyboard case you take it with you you have it with you and it works very well it's small and I think that's an interesting piece to this and what I didn't know in the video when I first unboxed it was the fact that it had that pass-through power charging and I think that's a big component of this because it truly becomes portable and it becomes something that you don't have to worry about I have to charge that separately it just works and it actually makes the pin that much more functional so it's really important I think as we go through this to think about the full use case of the device if you really need that productivity pay product if you really need that productivity piece again it makes the pin more useful because if you give that pin a little twist it holds really well on that cap and you aren't reliant on the magnet if you're using the keyboard case now is it worth the additional cost it depends and I think as I go further down this path we'll see if that bears out but I would say if you really want this to be an all-in-one if you want it to be your productivity device with a keyboard enabled tablet type feel you're going to get closer to that with this than anything else this keyboard case is so much better than what I saw on the note max from all of those reviews they've addressed every one of those problems I've also heard that the tab ultra c pro even had the problem of the key staying active if you tried to turn the device over they even fixed that by making the keys sunken a little bit so that they're not flush if you turn it over small improvements but important improvements for the way this works so we'll see thank you all for all of your support thank you for being there thank you for coming back time after time and listening to my thoughts and opinions on these devices let me know down in the comments what you think you'll see my patrons scrolling here along with my youtube insiders thank you to all of you for your support but carry on this conversation down in the comments it's very important that we keep this community active and engaged I answer every comment so I'll reply to you no matter what you say luckily I happen to have a lot of really good people who whether critical or not so critical still keep it civil and I think that's what's great about this community that we've built here and if you're not a member of the discord and you are a youtube insider or on patreon you hop in there we have some really lively conversations and I really enjoy talking to everybody but until next time thank you so much keep on moving forward and we will see you in the next one bye now