The TCL Note A1 is a kinder, gentler tablet

Without thinking, I scribbled over what I’d just written.

It’s what I would have done if I was writing with pen and paper. But I didn’t have a pen in my hand; my canvas was an LCD and the letters on my page were just pixels. Score one point to the TCL Note A1.

TCL’s Note A1 Nxtpaper tablet (its full government name) is supposed to make you forget that you’re using a tablet. It has one of the company’s signature low-glare matte displays and ships with a stylus. The pen’s haptics even mimic the scratching of a pencil on paper.

On the software side, the A1 takes a lot of cues from the Remarkable tablet. Instead of a typical Android home screen, you get a page with shortcuts to recent notes and a snapshot of the day’s calendar events. You can download any app you want from the Google Play Store, but that would spoil what I think is the A1’s nicest feature: the ability to trick you into forgetting that you’re using a gadget at all.

The Note A1 occupies the space between a full-fledged tablet and a low-distraction E-Ink device like the Remarkable Pro. It has a full color LCD screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. You can watch videos and scroll a website as you normally would — something that just doesn’t work on E-Ink tablets. But the A1 is a note-taking device first and foremost, shipping with a pressure-sensitive stylus with adjustable haptics to mimic the scratchy feeling of writing on paper. It’s not like, “I can’t believe it’s not real paper” levels of convincing, but it’s good enough that you can lose yourself in the act of writing. I did, at least, enough to forget about the “eraser” on the other end of the stylus.

Unfortunately, the Note A1 falls into the classic trap of trying to offer the best of both worlds: it ends up feeling like it’s not quite here nor there.

As a tablet, it’s just okay. Its 8GB of RAM are enough to help it chew through a media-dense web page with a little juddering. The LCD is honestly nicer than I expected, with generous viewing angles and vivid colors. But its blacks aren’t as rich as an OLED’s, and a little dimming in one corner of my review unit gives it away. The built-in speakers are fine in a pinch but sound tinny, and there are no physical volume buttons, which is a bizarre thing to omit.

As an e-reader and note-taking device, it does the job but lacks the precision of a purpose-built device like the Remarkable. The home screen looks like a generic notes app’s main screen, plus a collapsible side panel where you can access other apps and system settings. I love a minimalist home screen as much as the next overstimulated millennial, but I wish it was more customizable. You can hide the two widgets at the top of the screen, including the “Inspiration Space” (more on that later) and change how your assortment of note collections appear, but you can’t do much more than that. Neither can you create your own cover design for your note collections — you’re stuck with some bland options that have TCL branding on them.

TCL’s Max Ink Mode also would have been a nice addition here. The company’s other Nxtpaper tablets and phones offer this monochrome mode to simulate more of an e-reader experience and extend battery life by a lot. I’m surprised it’s missing.

I also had trouble while writing out a note and kept accidentally triggering the “back” navigation gesture at the side of the screen while writing this review. (Spoiler alert: I wrote my whole first draft on the tablet itself. Please applaud.) TCL doesn’t offer a way to disable this while writing, and though the notes app always saved my work before exiting, it was jarring.

Still, the A1 has some standout strengths. It comes with a massive 8,000mAh battery and will easily hold up to a couple of days of continuous use. There’s a toggle in quick settings to turn on an eye comfort mode to cut down on blue light, and you can adjust the color temperature warmth to your liking. The stylus’ pressure sensitivity feels restrained yet responsive. I had the best time with the A1 when I forgot all about its tablet-ness and just embraced it as a canvas for doodles and writings.

The A1 has a suite of AI features that all sound pretty familiar by now. With a dedicated button on the stylus you can highlight text and images to add to the “Inspiration Space,” a repository for things you might otherwise keep in a thousand idle Chrome tabs. You can group these clippings, along with your notes and doodles, into collections. Reminiscent of Pixel Screenshots, it uses AI to analyze and tag the items you add so you can cross-reference them and find it all later.

I gave it an honest try and used it to organize some information and #inspo for my endless yard project. I recorded audio of a call with our landscape designer, running the transcript on one side of the screen and hand-writing notes on the other. This is exactly the kind of scenario tech companies love to pitch for devices like this, and yeah, it was neat. The voice transcription was very good, and an AI-generated summary of the call caught all the main takeaways.

I had a harder time getting useful analysis from the AI in the Inspiration Space. I put the call transcript and all my related doodles and screenshots into a folder, thinking I’d be able to tap the ever-present “Ask AI” chip for some high-level analysis. It failed to identify the images I’d added and played dumb when I asked it questions it could have found answers to in the transcript. Bummer.

Aside from my disappointment with AI features — not for the first or last time! — I had a good time with the Note A1. I wish it came with Max Ink Mode. It’s not your best choice for a tablet-first, note-taking-second device. There’s an iPad for that. And Remarkable offers a better writing and note-keeping experience for purists. But if you’re after a decent digital writing experience and still want tablet features on the side, the A1 does the job. Certainly for a lot less money than an iPad Air or Pro with an Apple Pencil Pro — that combo will start just under $900 and only goes up from there.

I think the best endorsement I can give of the Note A1 is that I enjoyed it enough to write out my entire review on it by hand. I think it will also be the last blog I write out by hand, but it was pretty satisfying. You just don’t get the same effect with a Google Doc.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge