TCL is jumping into Amazon’s backyard on the cheap with the Note A1 Nxtpaper, a pen-first tablet constructed to feel like paper but featuring a full-color, fast-refresh screen and a bevy of AI note-taking tricks.
Aggressively priced and stuffed with storage, it suggests itself as a practical alternative to the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft — one for students, meeting-heavy professionals and anyone who likes to write by hand but values digital flexibility.
Paper-Like Display With Full-Color Speed
The Note A1 Nxtpaper’s main selling point is its 11.5-inch Nxtpaper Pure panel: an anti-glare, TÜV Rheinland–certified screen that claims to reduce eyestrain and glare while maintaining paperlike feel onscreen. Unlike e-paper, TCL’s technique offers the kind of 120Hz refresh rate and support for 16.7 million colors that means jumping through color documents, webpages or annotated slide decks can still feel fluid rather than slow and ghosty.
Weighing in at about 500 grams, with a 5.5mm edge profile and an aluminum unibody, the hardware aspires to offer the same “always ready to jot” vibe you get from top e-notes, but with the responsiveness of a modern tablet. It’s that trade-off — between LCD responsiveness and e-paper battery longevity — that informs much of the comparison with Amazon’s own latest Scribe.
A Stylus Designed For Actual Handwriting
TCL includes the T-Pen Pro, with 8,192 levels of pressure and some other specs like dual tips and sub-5 ms latency that I’ve never worried about for any pen in the past. In practice, that spec sheet should mean reliable line weight control for diagramming, math notation, or detailed sketching. The feel of the nib across that textured surface is a big part of that equation; TCL is obviously gunning for the “pencil on paper” friction that dedicated e-notes (like our Editors’ Choice, Sony’s Digital Paper DPT-RP1) popularized.
Format support is unusually broad. In addition to PDFs and Office files, the Note A1 Nxtpaper reads EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 and even CBZ/CBR for comics — a content category in which rapid color rendering has its benefits. That openness is meaningful to note-takers who get material from various sources and don’t want to fuss with conversions.
AI Tools And A Workflow That Adapts To You
Where Amazon stresses a massive bookstore and a refined reading UI, TCL stresses workflow. The Note A1 Nxtpaper also supports audio-to-text transcription for meetings and a real-time translation tool that can make inked pages more searchable and shareable. Content can be synced with Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, and when sharing your screen while presenting, you may also use mirroring for a bigger display. You can also load third-party apps (including the Kindle reading app) via USB, CloudSync, or LAN transfer: This is a note-taking tablet, not a walled garden.
Power is supplied by an 8,000-mAh battery, although TCL hasn’t released runtime information. That’s one big unknown because Amazon lists up to two weeks for the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. Look for the TCL to sacrifice some stamina for its higher refresh rate and full-color backlit screen — a basic LCD versus e-paper trade-off if ever there was one.
Price, Storage, And Availability Information
TCL undercuts Amazon where many customers feel it in the pocketbook. The Note A1 Nxtpaper costs a base price of $549 with 256 gigabytes of internal storage. The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft begins at $629.99 with 16GB, and even as cloud libraries help close the gap, local capacity still counts for offline PDFs, course packs and media. According to TCL, its product will launch in North America, Europe and APAC with early access available through Kickstarter (the company controlling supply and demand).
Kindle Scribe Colorsoft Or TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper?
If your main priorities are marathon battery life, daylight readability, and a tight bond to a big ebook ecosystem, Amazon’s Scribe Colorsoft is still interesting. A color e-paper display provides a reading experience that appears paperlike and gentle on the eyes over long reading sessions, and Amazon’s ecosystem remains the standard for purchasing, syncing and library management.
But the Note A1 Nxtpaper makes a compelling pitch for those who do more than read. It’s faster for web research and multi-document work, better at rendering complex color charts or slides and more open with files and apps. The bundled stylus is solid, the AI transcription and translation are nice time savers and a large default storage tier keeps the capacity angst away for longer.
Early Takeaway And Key Considerations For Buyers
The Note A1 Nxtpaper doesn’t attempt to dethrone the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft at e-paper’s strengths; instead, it redefines the category around speed, color and AI-enhanced workflow. For heavy annotators and note-takers on the go who are constantly juggling formats and cloud services, TCL’s take seems refreshingly pragmatic — and at an even lower starting price with a whole lot more usable storage. The real test will be battery life and the software polish, but on paper, TCL has erased a line between it and Amazon’s laptop.
