Review: Moaan InkPalm Plus is weird, cheap, small, and my kind of e-reader
It is probably not surprising that I, John Moltz, the world’s leading iPhone mini superfan would also want to use a small e-reader. That’s just science.
After spending years reading ebooks on my iPhones and iPads like an animal, I finally got a Kobo Clara HD three years ago. And I really like it. It’s reasonably small, reasonably priced, has a nice screen, and it helped me reduce my crippling dependency on Amazon.
So, why did I think I needed another e-reader? Because they started making even smaller ones.
So buttons
Last fall Jason reviewed the Boox Palma, a phone-sized e-reader that looked right up my alley. Not only would it be easy to hold with one hand, it also had physical navigation buttons, something my Kobo, like most of the smaller and more inexpensive readers, lacked. The problem is that it costs $280. I said up my alley, not up my gated community. It’s not an unreasonable amount, it was just more than I wanted to spend since I already had an e-reader. Nothing to do but wait for prices to come down, I guess.
Or maybe I didn’t have to wait. A post on Mastodon got boosted into my feed that touted the Xiaomi Moaan InkPalm 5 which sells for about $95. Now you’re talking my kind of cheap. Looking into the Moaan lineup, I then found the InkPalm Plus which features a slightly larger screen, more storage and a more up-to-date version of Android, all for as low as $124 on AliExpress.
Sold.
Caution: rough edges
So, what did I get for not that much of my money? The InkPalm Plus has 64 GB of storage, 2 GB of RAM, a 5.84-inch screen with a 1440 x 720 resolution and runs Android 11. All of the hardware specs are less than the Boox Palma but, again, see the price. And I’m reading books here, not playing Call of Duty. (Although, now that I say that I kinda want to try to play Doom on it.)
The device comes set to Chinese, but you can choose English during the setup process. Mostly. Some things, such as its version of Control Center, are just in Chinese (they do have icons, though, so it wasn’t too hard to get them sorted). Further, the apps loaded on it are in Chinese, which made figuring out which one was the browser a bit of an adventure.
You can’t really complete the setup process because it requires a Chinese phone number or an account number and password, presumably with Xiaomi. I just decided to ignore the account setup and the device seems to work fine. It will ask for the account login if you try to setup a lock screen PIN but you can cancel out of the login and still create one. I could root it and install another version of Android but that seems like a lot of work.
My first task was getting some apps I could use. Google would not let me install the Play store on this device so I installed F-Droid and the Aurora Store. I was then able to easily download several e-reading apps.
I easily logged into my Kobo account and downloaded a book. The reading experience in the Kobo app is fine, if not as nice as it is on a Kobo device, which I guess makes sense. Page turning was a little slow in the Kobo app until I turned off transitions, and it doesn’t let you configure the progress indicator at the bottom.
The InkPalm Plus comes with version 8.69 of the Kindle app which, despite having two Chinese characters added to the end of the name, works fine in English. I downloaded version 8.103 from the Aurora Store but it was unusably slow and wouldn’t recognize the system setting to use the volume buttons for page forward and back, so I stuck with the pre-installed app.
I was easily able to connect the InkPalm Plus to my Mac via Bluetooth and load several epub books. I tried a number of indie reader apps from the Aurora Store and, while Jason said he liked Moon+ the best, I found I preferred ReadEra, at least on the InkPalm Plus.
Looks aren’t everything
As is typical of e-readers, the InkPalm Plus is plastic. You wouldn’t want that for a smartphone, but you do with a reader. And you can get it in any color as long as the color is orange (just the back plate). Nothing against orange, but it’s not really my jam. While it did help me find it easily among all my black and blue devices, I broke down and got a black case for it.
The lock screen doesn’t show what book you’re reading, at least when using third-party readers (perhaps one of the pre-installed ones would but they’re in Chinese) but it does have several Chinese-themed stock images to pick from and you can add your own via Bluetooth. I’m not saying I made a Starfleet delta insignia my lock screen image but I’m not not saying I did that, either. (I totally did that.)
The screen quality is good, but like some e-readers—as Jason noted on the Boox Palma—the screen refresh is insufficient, leading to some ghosting in the E Ink. You can force a refresh by swiping down to the device’s version of Control Center and tapping the circular icon near the top. (When I translated the Chinese characters under the icon, the label is apparently “Renovate.”)
The screen is, sadly, glossy… which will certainly be a non-starter for a lot of people.
There is also a feature called “Logo control” which, it pains me to admit, took me way longer than it should have to figure out what it did. It turns out that the Moaan logo in the bottom bezel is a capacitive button. Who knew? Not me. I did not know. This button is configurable and I was able to set it so that a short press took me back to the home screen and a long press refreshed the screen.
After futzing with the settings for a bit, I could get the screen of the InkPalm Plus to be very close to the Kobo in regular light. The differences were more noticeable in lower light where it appears as more backlit. The screen of the Kobo just seems more like paper. Still, I think the Plus’s screen is pretty good and obviously way better than a regular smartphone for reading. You can adjust brightness, temperature and contrast, so maybe more futzing will produce better results.
Not Mr. Right, but Mr. Right Now
My main attraction to the Boox Palma was twofold: it was easy to palm and it had physical buttons for page turning. These two things are ultimately what make the InkPalm Plus worth the warts for me.
A few weeks back I saw this TikTok by Jen Chae and was very tempted to emulate it. Chae’s setup involved a Boox Palma and a mini Bluetooth keyboard configured for page turning. The only thing that stopped me was reading about the short battery life of those little keyboards and knowing that keeping Bluetooth on all the time would be a drain on the InkPalm’s battery.
Speaking of batteries, battery life on the InkPalm Plus seems solid, if not quite as good as the Kobo’s. With WiFi and Bluetooth off, I get days of use out of it before needing to recharge (your mileage may vary) and it having a USB-C port rather than the USB micro on my Kobo is a plus.
The glossy screen is not ideal, obviously, but almost all my reading is done inside and usually at night, so it’s rarely an issue for me. (Amazon has a few different screen protectors for the InkPalm Plus for sale but it’s not clear if any will reduce glare.) I would probably prefer to have the cover of the book on the lock screen but the app you left off in is still going when you turn it on again, so you can pick up reading immediately. [UPDATED 7/3/24 – Others have noted that theirs came with an anti-glare screen protector in the box. Mine actually had a paper sleeve that looks like it should have contained one, but only contained the warranty, a piece of paper sized way smaller than the sleeve.]
I don’t think this is the ideal device for sure, even without the language issues. I would rather have a Kobo this size with buttons because their native setup just works better. But Kobo doesn’t make such a device and, for me, the Palma tries too hard by having a camera, a microphone and an SD card slot, all at the cost of a premium price. For now, I’m sticking with the InkPalm Plus, but I hope this smaller space is a place where existing e-reader manufacturers are going to get involved.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
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