The best e-reader for the value, meet the Onyx Boox Poke Lite

We live in a world of large screen e-readers or digital note taking devices, almost every major brand is focused on these types of products. Sometimes people just want to read books and have full access to Google Play, so don’t have to be locked into one specific ecosystem. Onyx has just released the Poke 4 Lite, which might just be the best e-reader for the money. It retails from the Good e-Reader Store for $149.99 and is available in black or white.

The Onyx Boox Poke 4 Lite features a 6 inch E INK Carta HD touchscreen display with a resolution of 1024×786 and 212 PPI. The screen is not flush with the bezel and does not have a layer of glass. This is quite the interesting design decision, because it will not reflect overhead lighting in the home or office, nor reflect the sun. This is because e-paper absorbs light, but the vast majority of e-readers have glass displays, which reflect light. The only way you can get around this is via a matte screen protector and no OEMS make their own, so they are hard to find one that is optimized for a certain screen size The body of this unit is blue with a strip of black that surrounds the bezel.

This e-reader has a front-lit display system and color temperature system with a series of LED lights that project light evenly across the screen and not into your eyes. There are 64 levels of control via the slider bars, so it can be optimized for your environmental conditions.

Underneath the hood is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 2 GHZ Quad-core with Arm Cortex-A53. There is 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage for all of your books. You can transfer data via the USB-C port and also charge it, speaking of charging, it is powered by a 1500 mAh battery. There is no speaker or microphone, this is meant to keep costs low. However, it does have Bluetooth 5.0, so it is easy to use wireless headphones or earbuds to listen to audiobooks, music or podcasts.

The Poke 4 Lite is running Google Android 11 and Google Play is preinstalled on it, so you don’t have to do any janky workarounds. This will give you access to millions of free and paid apps. The default reading app is perfect if you want to load in your own books, since it supports a wide array of formats. This includes pdf, djvu, azw, azw3, doc, docm, docx, epub , fb2, fbz, html, mobi, odt, prc, rtf, sxw, trc, txt, chm, and ppt. One of the great things about Onyx, is they support every major language during setup, so it is tremendously accessible to a worldwide audience.