Digital books are no longer the exception but are becoming the rule: as time goes by, they are more and more people (also in Italy) who appreciated the advantages compared to paper books, including greater portability, less space occupied, lower cost.
Now the trend of ebooks is on slowly expanding to comics: both Amazon and Kobo offer a large (boundless, in the case of the Seattle giant) catalog of comics in more or less all languages, and subscriptions can also be activated in our country a Marvel Unlimited o a Crunchyroll (things?) to read American superheroes or manga. These considerations, together with the arrival of the new color Kobo Clara and Libra and the Google Pixel Tablet, pushed us to try to answer a question that many people ask: excluding the app or service chosen for the purchase of the various volumes, what is the best Android tablet for reading comics?
To answer, we have some compared 5: Kobo Clara Color, TCL NXTPaper 11, Google Pixel Tablet, Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro and Lenovo Tab P12. Let’s look at them one by one, in ascending order of screen size.
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Kobo Clara Colour
E-readers are undoubtedly the best devices for consuming digital books, with their e-ink screen that resembles paper and is kinder to the eyes than LCD or Oled panels. The new Kobo devices, on sale for a few weeks also in Italy, fill a typical gap of these devices: the lack of color. As its name suggests, the Kobo Clara Color has a 6″ color e-ink display with Kaleido 3 technologywhich is currently the best these e-readers can offer.
Il Kobo Clara Colour it costs 159 euros and in everyday use there are no slowdowns when leafing through comic pages or dragging phenomena. It works very well, but it has two undeniable and also inevitable problems: the colors cannot be as vivid as on Oled or LCD screens but above all 6″ inches seemed a bit too small to fully enjoy the designs and being able to read texts effortlessly (although there is an effective zoom). However, the device remains interesting both if you read a lot of magazines and ebooks, even to see the color covers, and has very little to envy of the various Kindles.
Strangers in Paradise sul display del TCL NXTPaper 11
TCL NXTPaper 11
In the editorial team we are big fans of the NXTPaper technology, which TCL patented a few years ago and (simplifying) uses a series of layers applied to the screen to reduce the passage of light and eye strain. On this tablet, which has an 11″ display with a resolution of up to 2K, it seemed less powerful and less central than it was on the 40 NXTPaper smartphone (proof), but still useful. To the eye and to the touch, the panel provides truly different and better sensations than practically all other tablets and even long reading sessions can be tackled without any particular problems.
The TCL NXTPaper 11 has a list price of 249 euros (but online it can easily be found below 200) and a single, major flaw: the processor is the MediaTek Helio P60T and often runs into difficulty even in the least demanding conditions of use. True: it’s absolutely not a problem if it’s about reading, be it comics or books, but imagining using the tablet for other things too, it could become one. In any case, his screen undoubtedly remains among our favorites.
Providence by Alan Moore viewed on the Google Pixel Tablet
Google Pixel Tablet
The first real tablet produced by the Mountain View company arrives in Italy one year after the presentation at the 2023 I/O event but it knows how to make amends: it has a high-performance processor and enough RAM to do more or less everything without difficulty and a display da 11” which comes in at 2.5K resolution and is a joy to hold before your eyes. Even outdoors, thanks to excellent brightness values.
Il Pixel Tablet (full test here) It doesn’t have many specific features for reading (there’s just the useful stuff Alert screenwhich keeps it active if you’re looking at it) but it pays off with a whole ecosystem of dedicated apps and care for the software that comes from being a product made by Google and with a great display. It starts from one price of 499 euroswhich go up by 100 if you also want the base that transforms it into a speaker and voice assistant: again, it has nothing to do with comics, but it serves to greatly increase the usefulness of the product.
Il Volere and Gatto Bugia, two protagonists of Saga, seen on the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro
Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro
With this tablet we enter the field of big shots, in the sense that here the screen is 12.4″, which is both an undeniable advantage and a potential flaw. It’s a bit like having a laptop in your hands but without the keyboard: all this space is really useful when you want to browse a digital comic, zoom in on the various panels, on the texts, on some details of the drawings. Actually, no: there is so much space that zooming is practically never necessary. And yet, the dimensions make the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro also bulky a little awkward to maneuverto carry around or if you read in bed or in unusual positions: it’s one thing if a 10″ tablet falls on your face (which has happened to everyone at least once in their life), another if it’s someone who does it exceeds 12″.
On sale at a price of price list starting from 699 eurosthe Xiaomi tablet also has a huge 10 thousand mAh battery and support for 120W fast charging, two very appreciable features that give it practically infinite autonomy.
A page of Twelve by Zerocalcare on the Lenovo Tab P12
Lenovo Tab P12
Lenovo’s tablet goes even further than Xiaomi’s, because the display is almost 13 inches (to be precise, 12.7”), has 3K resolution and is probably the best of the whole lot. The Lenovo Tab P12 is also the only one to have one Reading mode which makes it easier on the eyes and also turns on automatically for apps (Kindle, Marvel Unlimited, etc.) selected by the user: It’s a great featurewhich was present on old OnePlus smartphones and is being lost a bit but which more manufacturers should recover.
A pair of things we didn’t like during the test, beyond the excellent performance when reading the various comics: some problems when switching from one app to another which frankly surprised us and the fact that it is really big. Like that of Xiaomi, compared to which it costs a lot less: 449 euros list price (but online it is around 400) and even with the nib included.
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What is the best Android tablet for comics?
Having reached this point, all that remains is to answer the initial question and understand where (in our opinion) it would be more advisable to invest your money: the 3 products we liked the most, this time listed in order of price, are the TCL NXTPaper 11, the Google Pixel Tablet e il Lenovo Tab P12.
The first is the one that allows you to spend less and has a single screen that should be tried (or in any case seen live) at least once in your life: it is the right choice if you want to read digital comics and reduce the economic outlay to a minimum, assuming you are aware of the limited performance. Conversely, if you want to do things big (and perhaps you are over 40-45 years old and presbyopia is making itself felt) the advice is to focus on the Lenovo tablet: it costs over 200 euros less than the Xiaomi one despite having a larger and better quality displays.
And yet, if we had to decide for ourselves, we would probably buy Google’s Pixel Tablet, which seems to us to be the most balanced and the best all-rounder, as the Americans say: it is able to do everything effortlessly, ready, responsive, with a nice display, the right size and weight to avoid tiring and a rear finish that makes it very pleasant to handle. It also seems to us to be the most future-proof in terms of updates and support over the years.
@capoema