Welcome back to the channel.

Today we are giving a review of the Books Note Air 3C.

There's a lot of products like this hitting the market these days.

People love the idea of the Kindle, the e-ink, e-reader situation, and with a company like Remarkable who seemed to me the first to hit the market with a version of that that you could actually write on.

There's been a lot of companies bouncing around with that.

Books to me is one of the leaders and they were kind enough to send me the Note Air 3C.

I'd love to review some of their other products as well so let me know in the comments if you'd want me to do that with the Palma or maybe one of their just regular readers.

This is one specifically for taking notes and what's cool about Books and what sort of sets them apart from someone like Remarkable is they do have the whole Google Play Store.

So if there's any apps you're used to using on your laptop or maybe your iPad but you want to sort of dumb down that experience, you can get them here.

So I'm going to walk through, I've had this for a couple weeks now, I'm going to walk through sort of how I've set it up for my use cases and I know there's a lot still that I need to sort of realize and figure out and play around with this thing to get it.

But I'm in a good spot now where I feel like I know what I'm doing with it daily.

I've set it up in a way that I like and I want to talk about the good things and the bad things about it.

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So it looks like we have got a cover for the product.

We have the product itself and then what are these?

Some extra marker tips.

So I'm excited.

I do believe this comes with a stylus as well.

So let's start with the cover.

I know that's not the most fun part.

Now the cool thing about this E Ink device is it's actually colored.

So you're going to get an interesting, seems sort of dimmed down color palette but color nonetheless on E Ink and I think that's super exciting.

So here's the case.

It feels very premium.

Feels nice and silicone.

I know there's some interesting reading methods and stuff you can do here and I've heard that the magnets are really strong here too.

That's sort of a good portfolio look that hopefully will keep the thing protected.

Alright, let's check out the product itself here.

So you have my dirty knife that Ben keeps telling me to clean and I will keep ignoring him.

Alright.

I've never had a tablet quite like this that you can write on so I'm super intrigued to try out this product.

Simple packaging.

There's books right there.

Pull off the cover.

Got some nice foam there to protect the thing and here's the tablet itself.

Very thin.

Very, I wouldn't say light, but I think that's a good thing.

I think it's got a good amount of like heft to it so it's not just like flying all over the place.

So that's my first impression there.

We'll put that aside.

In this box we have the stylus itself with a rubber tip.

Really quick, I say itself so much in these reviews.

Here's the tablet itself, the stylus itself, the marker itself, the Apple Watch itself and it really bothers me.

So I'm either going to have Ben start to edit them out or I just need to get better at it, which is actually what needs to happen.

I won't put that on Ben.

Alright, what else do we have here?

This is a pen tool, I guess to get into extra storage and then the charger itself.

Alright and then over here is our various pieces of paperwork.

Let's first look at this writing tool here.

It's pretty nice, pretty light, little nib or whatever you tip, whatever you want to call that.

It does have, I don't think it has batteries, but it's magnetic and will stick to the side of the tablet, which is cool.

And then you do have the tip cover, which I think is nice as well.

Nice touch.

Alright, let's get into the actual device here and see what this is all about.

Can you just slide it out?

You surely can.

Wow, that's very interesting.

Like I said, I've never had anything quite like this, so I'm super excited to see what this is all about.

Alright, so you have on the outside here, along the, you can hold it this way and this will be the bottom, but most of the time we'll probably be using it this way, up and down.

But either way, on the side or on the bottom, you have your door here to, I guess, add some extra storage.

I don't think this has cellular data, but I could be wrong.

Ben, check me on that.

Here is USB-C charging port.

These look like some microphones and then you do have double speakers here, so I guess a stereo sound.

Around the bottom, nothing.

Side, nothing.

But this is where the pin actually can connect and, I mean, that's pretty solid on there.

That's where that sticks.

And then you do have on and off button here and then it looks like another microphone.

And then around back, no air, 3C, with a little bit of information on charging and then serial number or something.

I'm going to be honest with you, I don't like, I don't love the orange coloring, but I thought this was more orange and it's actually kind of like a pale pinkish red, salmon color.

And I actually really like that.

I don't know if that shows up well on camera or not, but that's actually more of like a salmon color, which I love way more than the orange that I thought it was.

So there's that.

Let's just see what this thing is like to boot up.

It says power off, which is cool.

So I'm pushing and holding there.

Onyx.

Nice.

So that's a good look.

That's in there too.

All right, device is starting.

Yep.

So we're in the United States.

We go ahead and hit next.

User agreement, privacy policy.

So far, I really love this.

We're not in Beijing.

Eastern time.

There we go.

Date is not 327.

You know what?

Actually, I'm going to hit cancel and I'm going to say set time automatically.

And I'm hoping when we connect to Wi-Fi, this will all right itself.

Auto sleep five minutes, auto power on 15 minutes.

Let's go ahead and just keep everything standard for now.

So let's do bottom gestures.

All right.

So we got back on the right side, back home screen in the middle, e-ink, center on the left, volume, back.

Cool.

And then over here is brightness.

I like that.

Up and down swipe gestures.

Oh, I want to turn these on.

I think those are cool.

Setup is now complete.

Cool.

All right.

Initializing the library.

So I'm going to sort of like stop it here, at least for now.

I'm going to come back to you guys in a few weeks.

You know what?

I'll do one thing.

I'll do one thing.

I'll start a new note, create a notepad, blank, create.

And I'll just write.

Do you want it to connect to Wi-Fi to activate AI recognition?

Yeah, I'm going to turn Wi-Fi on.

I don't want to miss any of that.

All right.

Let's see what it's like to write on this thing.

Oh, that's weird, man.

Let me describe this because I've wondered how this feels ever since I've watched a few reviews on these type of things.

So not only does it have a certain sound and grippiness to it, but there's also, wow.

There's also a certain, like, if I can show you with my hand, when you push, it feels, and I don't know if it's the tip of this or if it's the screen itself, but it feels like you're kind of pushing into, like, this is silly, but it feels like you're kind of pushing into, how's that for a visual effect, huh, Ben?

It feels like you're pushing into the page, like it feels like, you know when you have a stack of paper and you're writing on top instead of, like, a piece of paper on a table.

That is wild.

Okay.

Give me a couple weeks.

I'm going to just use this thing nonstop and I'll come back to you guys with my experience.

Super excited to try this out.

Thanks to Books for sending me this.

This thing is cool.

First of all, I think something that I didn't realize is I've kept it in the case.

I think this is a nice look.

It's a nice feel.

It's definitely kind of hefty.

And I think when I first opened the tablet itself, I thought it had a little bit of heft, but then I used it in the case for, like, a few days and then actually took it out of the case and I was like, oh, whoa, the case actually adds quite a bit of heft to this thing.

But it's not unmanageable.

Like, this is nice.

And in fact, I kind of like the heft.

I think it could be a bit lighter, but I know they just released their Go series or something, which is more of a competitor to the Remarkable 2, for instance, and it's lighter and thinner and all that good stuff.

But I really wanted to test out color because this tablet does have color, whereas, as you can see here, a nice color display, whereas that new device is black and white only.

And I have some thoughts about color with e-ink, but here's the device.

I've been using it, like I said, for a while.

I love the materials.

And I think I mentioned earlier, I love this salmon color, which I thought was going to be bright orange.

I definitely like the salmon better.

It's pretty thin.

You've got dual speakers here.

You've got a microphone and a slot here if you want to add extra storage.

The pen kind of does this weird thing where there's like three different places it can snap on.

I don't know why, but that's nice.

I think without the case, it's a little scary being on there.

You might lose it.

But the case kind of adds a little buffer to it, so it's not as hard to knock off even without.

See how that works.

And then this helps a lot, too.

So I do like that.

I think something with the newer tablets they've done with this is make the whole thing removable because that's kind of annoying.

But you can lock that back there, which is super nice.

So I like that.

So if you open it up here, this is completely off.

It has standby and then off time, which playing with those settings is going to help this thing last longer.

If you put it into off mode more often and let it stay in standby mode for less time, it will save more battery.

Because it is e-ink, it sticks on this image and will stay here.

I think indefinitely until the end of time, maybe.

So you can pick this.

You can pick your standby image or platform layout, whatever.

This is what I currently have.

I've played around with some photos and stuff, but ultimately I thought this was nice.

So when you first boot it up out of off mode, it does take some time to boot up because it actually is off.

So you're starting it back up.

When it's standby mode, you can just tap it and it's right back to where you left off.

But we're going to go ahead and jump in.

I'm going to go ahead and move, just for aesthetic purposes, move that off.

And I have found the different ways you can use the stand.

I think a really cool way you can use it is this way here.

So let me show you while this thing's still booting up a little bit.

So this is an interesting look and it's on their website and stuff.

Like I'm not showing you anything new here, but that's cool.

Especially like if you're reading some kind of recipe or something in your kitchen.

My wife actually said, Oh, that's cool.

Like I can do recipes on here, which is super cool.

And then you can have a version of this in landscape too.