We spend a lot of time doing weird stuff in the woods. It's often quite nice to have some sort of rectangle while doing so, particularly for playing music. But doing so brings a surfeit of objectionable intrusions, e.g. bright screens and the clock. These are solvable problems! E-paper Android devices exist, and I assumed there was some way to entirely disable the clock. So, I got a Boox Palma 2, and this is a quick note on using it as a "being weird in the woods" buddy as I had a couple questions I couldn't find answered online.
The first question was whether it worked well as a music streamer. And yes, it runs Apple Music (and presumably Spotify) totally normally, with offline music being no problem. The Boox software allows per-app customization of quality and refresh rates, so scrolling is even *okay*.
The only hitch was that the Boox software also overwrites the built-in Android "run in the background" prefs, which wasn't super-obvious to me. So, to prevent it closing in the background, I'd just needed to use the Boox "Optimize" menu, as well as turning on "use BT while asleep" at the device level. Otherwise, great.
The second question was whether you can turn the clock off. Yes! There are quite a few menu bar tuning apps, e.g. Super Status Bar. Easy. No unwanted intrusion of timekeeping.
As a reader, it's small but totally fine. It supports using the hardware volume control as page-turn buttons in both the Kobo and Kindle apps, and other stuff (e.g. Kiwix, for offline Wikipedia) work great. Battery life is great, with maybe 8% knocked off after six hours of playing downloaded music. The back seems tough enough, although I will grab a screen protector.
It's one of those things where there was no reason it should not be fine, but it's nice that it *was* fine, especially in a circumstance where fine is wonderful. Doubtless any number of e-paper Android tablets would probably be a good outdoors rectangle, but the Boox is definitely a good outdoors rectangle.
