IT'S BACK. IT'S BACK. IT'S BS.
In all seriousness, I'm very excited to
be unboxing another Boos product. How many How long has it been? A year, two
years, >> three. >> It feels like forever. Uh I was so happy
just saying their name and now they're here with the Boos Palma 2 Pro. It's a
phone asterisk. Not really. Don't worry,
I'll explain everything. Basically, it's an e- paper uh phone size device. And we
got a white and a black one. Which one should I do first? >> White
>> chess rules. Bobby Fisher. Okay. A nice
like orange. Ah, why' I do that? It's like I've never unboxed something
before. Okay, so we got the phone right there. What else is in the box? A little
paper. A little explainer.
Got a SIM card. SIM card removal tool. Oh, because this is a phone, right? No.
Stay with me. USB Ca cable. That's an
interesting choice. That's 3 and 1/2 ft. And that's it.
That's it. That's in the actual phone box. No charger, no anything because
it's like maybe that's why they gave the USBA cable cuz you can plug that into
anything. All right, let's look at the phone and we will cover that stuff in a
second. >> The device. >> Yeah, they keep calling it a phone >> cuz look at it. It looks like a phone,
but it's not a phone. And now the reason why I'll just tell you right now, uh,
the reason why it's a phone but not a phone is because it has a SIM card slot.
You can put a SIM card in there, but you can only use data. You can't use it for
phone calls or for texting via SMS or
MMS or RCS or whatever the kids are using these days. But that leads me to
ask many questions about why we have a
phonesized device that can do it can do data. You can go out there and have data
on the go like a phone. You just can't call people. And I have a theory. I have
a theory for why that is. But first, let's look at the phone itself. So, we got the 6.13 in e-aper display. On the
back, we've got this oo like a nice texture. What is going on there? It's
got like a I think that's meant to kind of like evoke paper.
It's more bumpy than paper obviously, but like at a glance it kind of looks
like paper. I like it. I don't know. It's like a I don't know what you It's
some kind of polymer. That is a 16 megapixel camera. And it, yeah, it is
very, very tiny. And I think that's to uh signal to you that you probably
shouldn't be using it. On the top, we
just have a mic. On the right side, we have the power button, which is also a
fingerprint reader. On the bottom, we have a USBC port and a speaker grill and
a mic, and the combo uh SIM card/micro
SD card slot. And on the left side, we have the volume rocker. And another
button that I would know if I looked at the quick start guide, but I didn't.
Customizable function button. Okay, we got a a light sensor on the front here
and a speaker. By all accounts, this
certainly appears to be a phone. Now, before we get too deep into actually
using this thing, as you can see, it appears to be running Android, and it is
Android 15. Real quick, there's some other things here. We've got the
Inksense Plus, which is BS's
stylus. I guess it's not. I don't know if they want me to call it a stylus or
not. And frankly, I don't care. Oh, wow. Okay, this is an interesting design.
We've got USBC port along the body of
the pen there with and and maybe an LED or a reset pin. I'm not sure. On the
other side, we've got a button and then
tips, which are replaceable, as evidenced by the box of replacement
tips. Does it work just like out of the box? Can I do stuff with it or I mean
we'll find out. I'll use that in a second. That's the Inksense Plus.
And then we got a cover. Ooh, this is
kind of a nice fancy cover. What? Oh,
interesting. It comes with Okay, so it's got a It's got a case in it that has Oh,
I like that. And it has This is magnetic. Something was sticking to it.
So, it's a plastic case with a magnet ring on it and then a cover for the
screen that wraps around the back and
connects to the front again. >> So, you would take off the flap and then
open up the main book without taking it all off. >> You do that. I don't know if I like
that. I'm trying to think if I'm like misunderstanding, but I don't think I
am. I think this is just kind of a wonky
Hey, it's original. I don't love how that looks when you
when you when you flip it around and you it's all like done up properly. I want
it to be level. It doesn't matter at
all. But, you know, as long as we're talking about nice aesthetics and like
design and stuff. And then I'm I'm guessing that this also has a magnet here. So, you could attach that to
something probably. I mean, I'll give them I'll give them originality points
for sure. And like, you know, it's like a kind of a leatherrett covering. I
don't know if it's leatherrett. It's leather something. It's meant to kind of feel like leather.
It's just like dangling. I look. Hey, BS. You know I love you. Okay, real
quick. What does the black one look like? It's probably like the same thing but black.
Oh, yep. But that Ooh, that is like nice
and sleek. I don't know. I like I like I kind of like the two-tone nature of this
one where you kind of got the lighter back and then the the sides are like a
slightly different color. That looks sleek. That is like this guy. Woo! This
guy reads a lot of books. He probably
has self-helped himself so many times.
Anyway, I'm going to stick with the white one, though. Ah, but Riley, what
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to s.com/shortcircuit. Okay. Now, I'll say that I do not have
uh experience with the previous BS Palma
devices. This is my first uh kind of go at checking out the their phone sized
things, but I hear that people like them. They're they're often put forward
as one of the pretty good options for a small e- paper, you know, e-reader type
device. I feel like this is a bit bright for you, Andrew, and I'm sensitive to
your needs. There's dual backlight control. So, this is like the strength
of the backlight. This is brightness and then this is temperature. So you can
have cool temperature or warm temperature. I like that. This is nice.
I've had there's been other devices where the two sliders are one is like a
warm backlight and the other one is a blue backlight and you have to like
choose you have to mix them and match them how you want. But I think I like
this better where I'm like, "Okay, I'm in a dark room so I know I want it a
bit." Wait, it's e- paper. It's not a regular display. Whatever. You get it.
And you'll notice that I just dragged down from the top and we got into quick
settings just like a normal Android device because this is an Android
device. It's running Android 15. Um, obviously with BS's own kind of uh skin
on here, which overall does not offend
me. I like the minimalist design. and it works well with the e-paper uh display
which is a kido3 color e-aper display
which apparently has one of its big selling points that it reduces blue
light it's less toxic for your eyes or something. Um we'll see how my eyes feel
at the end. Uh Andrew pointed out that you can see a little bit of image
retention still right there cuz the screen hasn't uh done a full refresh. Is
there a what? I forget what device it was recently that had like a dedicated
screen refresh button, which I thought was pretty handy, but at this with this
thing, it seems like I'll just have to I'm sure that there's some setting to do
that. Okay, that's some sort of quick settings floaty bubble thing. I'm sure
you can disable that, which I would very much like to do. I don't know why all of
these phone companies making software think that people want little bubbles
floating around. Surely you want quick access to our services over the other
ones. No, I don't. This is kind of an interesting configuration of icons at
the bottom. Here we got Oh, is that the screen refresh? There it is. So, there
is a screen refresh uh button. Always always accessible if I open an app.
Yeah, nice. All right. You did it, Boos. I knew you could. And then we got the
typical Android uh home button, back button, multitasking.
Is this the settings? Oh, this is a quick settings. Interesting. I think I
remember this. the the Boos tablet that I did back in the day also had this like
kind of quick settings things that could pop up. Switch refresh mode. One thing
that we're seeing a lot with these smaller e-aper devices is well and
larger tablets as well is modes that you can trade off screen quality for speed.
So here we got HD quality. Ooh, that
does look a little sharper than whatever we I think I guess we were on speed
mode. Speed mode definitely looks worse. I mean, you're not going to get like
astoundingly amazing visuals on the uh 824 by648 display. And on the 6.13 inch
screen here, that equates to about 300 PPI. In black and white mode, if you're
in color mode, as we are right now, it's only 150 PPI. Our Labs team pointed out
in their testing that it's 150 PPI in color mode. That's not the case for
devices that have the Gallery 3 display.
Now, apparently there are some other tradeoffs. Uh but you can have that uh
300 PPI PPI
pixel density while also having color. So, I don't know. I you know, I'm not
going to judge the choices they make. I mean, actually, I will. That's the whole
that's my whole job here. I guess I didn't notice here that you can kind of
switch between uh the recommended settings, the fast refresh settings, and
it'll change these settings down here. Or you can have fully custom. Suffice to
say, there's a lot of depth here. And you can play around until you find
something that like looks pretty good to you. So, I'm not going to dive too much
into the custom settings, but just know there's some color here. But it's
interesting that color e-aper devices have become a thing because part of the
whole appeal of having a device like this is that you have a worse screen so
that you are not tempted to use it for
things that you would use your normal phone for. Which is why I think that
these guys listen to me. And maybe they were working on this device before I
expressed in a video that like, you know, the solution to this whole
attention problem is not having a minimalist phone that forces you into
like this little box. You can only do some things with your devices. It's It's
up to you really. It's a self-control thing. It's not so much like, oh, the
hardware is to blame. So maybe they were working on this before I said that, but
you know, time could be nonlinear. Have you seen Arrival? If you haven't, why
not go watch it right now? I'm just kidding. After this. So, basically, I
like that these guys are saying with this device, you cannot use it as your
normal phone if you care about your normal phone having the ability to call
people and text people via traditional methods, which I think most people, even
though we barely use that anymore, most people still want that as part of their
phone. So, you're not going to use this as your phone. You're going to use it as an Android device. Like, for example,
you can use it uh for maps and it'll work. It's got GPS. In fact, it's got
assisted GPS, which uses data to help with the GPS
positioning. Funny enough, Maps is not
installed on this device. So, I'm going to install it. I'm I'm finding that some
of the taps aren't really like registering. Some of the kind of slower
responsiveness here may also be due to the fact that the chip that we're
running on here is a Snapdragon 6350,
which if you know anything about Snapdragon, you're going to know that that's not the flagship. And speaking of
performance, our Labs team ran some testing on the CPU here. And
interestingly, they could not run the standard mobile Geekbench setup that we
use, but they were able to run Ant2u, where the Boos Pomu Pro scored 212,863,
which for context seems to be around the
ballpark of a Samsung Galaxy A16 and
less than a quarter of the score of a of a Red Magic 10 Pro. That's according to
uh numbers on Ant2D2's website. So, you're not dealing with a incredibly
fast, incredibly powerful uh chip here. However, I'm in a some kind of mode
that's making the refresh less than inspiring. Although, for an e- in
display, I mean, I have used much much worse. I mean, like look at this. This
is this is like, you know, it's like using a slightly slower OLED display.
Not OLED, but you know, traditional display. I do want to just like go into
like the fat. Okay, fast refresh. What?
So, fast refresh brought more color in and more contrast.
That looks way better. And it's much more responsive. More color and more
responsive. All right, let's see what this stylus experience is like with the
Inksense Plus. Oh, stylus.
Do you want to display handwriting functions? Yeah. Oh, okay. So, now the
stylus is working like my finger. That's all I've ever wanted. Stylus fingers.
Kids mode. Free mark. What is this? So, this free mark appears to be something
where you can either enable handwriting
mode and then you can like draw on your screen and make notes and then you can
save the screenshot and then that'll be there for you to save or to send it to
somebody or you can enable using mode
and then now now it's acting more now it's just acting like your finger.
That's kind of cool. I actually like that. That might be very useful if
you're kind of going through documents or something and you want to you want to
use it. Turn pages and then oh I'm going to enter notes mode and circle
something. Save it. Goes away. Go back to using mode. That's pretty cool. Nice
one BS. So the Inksense Plus has 4,096
levels of pressure sensitivity. That's kind of the standard thing you hear.
It's got a shortcut button on top that
I'm guessing is customizable. I got to say there's something about using
Android e-aper devices especially in some apps. It seems like some apps can
really take advantage of the advances in refresh rate that have been made with
this technology and other apps like are not optimized for it. Using the settings
app where you can't scroll and see like
I can't peek at what I'm going to see under there. I scroll and then I have to
accept what's going to show up and it's like just like that. That is very
frustrating to use. So, I feel like priority number one, I don't know, maybe
don't listen to me, but if it was me, priority number one would be making it
so that I can scroll and like not have to scroll in and wait. Scroll. Wait,
scroll. Wait. I just realized when you scroll
full refresh, it it goes a whole page down. Even whether you like do a a lot
or do a or do a little, it goes one page
down. You can't like go in increments. OH. OH, change it. There's the notes
app. Okay, we're in color mode. And how
does this feel? The feel is kind of nice. It does not feel like a normal
display. There's a little bit of scratch to it. I wouldn't say it's nearly as
paperlike as uh the remarkable screen or
like something with a paper-like screen
protector. No free clout. Take that out.
Editor, leave that in, though. Whoa. Whoa. Look at that. Look at that delay.
It's processing. It's like, "Wait, where
are you going? Take me with you." No.
My question is, my question is, why can't they put like a little bit better
of a processor in there? I mean, it's probably like one of the most expensive parts, if not the most expensive, but
like that's a little frustrating. If I if I erase everything that I did, if I
erase everything I've ever done, will it still Wow, that's taking a while. It was
something about that tool. very responsive with like a more basic kind
of this is a ball point pen in green and it's gone every time I'm you expect an
eraser just to erase the part of like a like part of what you're doing. This is
a this is like seems to be a theme with these e- in devices. It's like you never
know when you go to erase. Oh, here we go. There's different modes here. Lasso
eraser. Oh, is this going to be it? Yes, there we go. So, there's a different
eraser mode where you can erase part of it. Anyway, there's a decent amount of depth here in the amount of tools that
you can you can have. It's that time. Even though it is an e-aper display, it
has a pretty good color display. Oh, look at that. Is that how a video is
going to look? I think so. We have no choice but to crab rave. So far, I'm
pretty happy with how much like a normal
Android device using this feels. Now, we are in fast refresh rate mode, so the
colors could be a little bit better than this. I'm guessing it's capable of that.
But I think if you go into that like more color high color fidelity mode,
then it's going to start flickering. I don't know if I even want to do this, guys.
Sounds like a Tamagotchi. Yeah, those speakers are not good. Uh I think I
don't know what else to tell you. You're you're not going to get a device like this for the speakers. Uh the speakers
are there. If you really need to watch a video that somebody sent you and it's
got sound, you can play the sound. You can play the
sound, but it's not going to sound good. Now, playing video is actually how our
Labs team did the battery discharge test, and uh it lasted 6 hours, which is
not very long uh for a phone. These days, you're expecting it to have more
like all day battery life. However, this display, this kind of e-aper display,
the way that it displays things is by moving physical particles around on the
display. So, it's going to take more energy to play video continuously than
uh you know, one of these other traditional displays that are geared
towards playing video. Now, brace yourself because once they discharge the
battery completely, they did a full zero to 100 uh battery charge test using our
standard 45 watt charger. However, the Boos Pom 2 Pro did not care how much
wattage uh it was being fed because it only wanted to use 10 watts. And so it
took 3 hours and 17 minutes to charge
the 3,950 mAh battery. And that's just
too long. I'm sorry. Now, that is playing video. As I said, it takes a lot
of battery. When you're doing normal e- in e- paper type stuff, uh people, you
know, who've been using this posting online about it are talking about, you
know, a week of battery life, possibly more. So, you know, you won't have to
charge it for 3 hours uh that often or
ever if you kind of like do some power sipping charging in the middle of the
day, but it is something that you will have to be aware of that like if you're like, "Oops, I forgot to charge." You
can't just like do a quick charge. Like, it's going to take a while. You're going to be there for a while. Do some
reading. Now, against all recommendations, devices like these are
putting cameras on board. Uh
I I shouldn't be sassy like that. Like I said, it's nice to have a device like
this that can do anything that a Android device could do just uh poorly. Just to
have it, you know, cuz then we have it. Say say cheese.
Got this 16 megapixel camera. And now I'm doing my my This is my standard
photo test. I don't know if you've seen me do this before, Bill. Oh, yeah. And I
won't be able to tell what those look like until uh the editor gets them. So,
uh you let me know in the comments how they look. Probably not great. It's not
It's not lagging horribly. Like, it's it's to the point where I can I can do
it and I don't feel like I'm getting sick. There's a selfie cam button, but
there's no selfie cam on this device. It's just taunting you. Like, remember
remember this is not a phone. We talked about this. I I'm happy to see that
Chrome supports kind of smooth scrolling instead of like jumping down by pages.
You know, in some ways, despite me saying that the way forward, the way to
not have brain rot is it's not a
hardware solution. Despite me saying that, using this thing, I kind of want
to use it as my phone. The minimal phone was like a very
distinct experience. It was like, listen, you have a problem. Okay, it was
Android. It ran Android, so it, you know, could do some of stuff like this,
although it had its own skin on it. you could still install apps and try to use
it like another kind of Android phone, but it was like it was still just kind
of clunky. This with the high refresh rate and the color and the familiar
settings menus and stuff instead of like minimal zone sort of like
custom skin. This feels this felt pretty
good. So, in some ways, I'm a little sad that this does not have the capability
to make phone calls or make or do text
messages, which I still sometimes do. I admit it. Now, that said, despite this
very much feeling like using a normal Android device, these companies are
still putting very weak hardware in here. It does have 128 gigs of storage
to start. Uh, and you can actually expand that up to two terabytes with the
uh, SD card combo SIM tray thingy. It's
got that weak CPU we talked about. It's only got eight gigs of RAM, uh, which is
now in 2025 not very much for a phone. And so for a daily driver, it probably
would still be frustrating. And then we're back into this whole like do you
want your phone to be frustrating? Maybe you want your phone to be frustrating so
that you use it less. But again, I don't think it's a hardware issue. I think it
is a self-control thing and I think it's also a platform thing. We need to we
need to make these platforms less brainy because I don't want to use a crappy
phone, especially for $400, which is
like you can get a pretty decent budget phone for around that ballpark these
days. So, it's $400 for the Boos Pom 2
Pro. It's $46 for the BS Inksense Plus.
Um, which I will say I liked the experience of that. You know, taking
this on the go, taking notes, annotating your screen, saving it, reading, and
I've said this on other videos, and I'm apologize to anyone who's about to hear
this, but I already read ebooks on my phone, on my regular phone uh, in dark
mode. Okay, so reading on an e uh, paper
screen this small, I'm fine with it. I'm also fine if you subscribe to Short
Circuit. Hey, uh if you are interested in watching another video, perhaps you
could consider watching a previous video hosted by me, which is the remarkable
paper uh pro move, which is $450.
Books Pomu Pro Boos Pomoo Pro. Open up
books and give it a go. When you're reading a books, everything is all fine.
Just don't get it all the way to the end of the line.