TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER Review

I struggle quite badly with ADHD and use a variety of tools to overcome the challenges I face. Most of these boil down to my forgetfulness and poor concentration. So I use task lists, calendars, and alarms extensively.

I loved the Plaud Note and Plaud Note Pro as they allowed me to record meetings and then have them transcribed and summarised for me, avoiding the need for me to struggle concentrating on long-winded meetings or presentations that require note-taking.

More recently, I reviewed the iFLYTEK AINOTE 2 and AINOTE Air 2 e-ink tablets, which take the features I liked from Plaud but place them into an e-ink tablet, allowing me to write notes and lists, and generally just try to keep track of everything.

While the tablets were not perfect, the live transcription features were what really sold them to me.

The TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER is a similar product, but rather than using an e-ink display, it uses TCL’s NXTPAPER display, which gives you a paper-like display.

I have not used NXTPAPER before, but on paper (sorry), you get both the benefits of e-ink and a traditional LCD display.

This has a full colour display running at 2200 x 1440 pixels and 120Hz, so it should be as responsive as a normal tablet, but with that eye-friendly matte appearance of paper.

TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER | 11.5" NXTPAPER Pure Display | 3A Crystal Shield Glass | AI Toolbox | 16.7 Million Display | Paper-like Writing | Inspiration Space

• Paper‑like, Lag‑free Display： At the foundation of the Note A1 is NXTPAPER Pure, a breakthrough developed from four generations of TCL NXTPAPER technology and specifically optimized for e‑Note scenarios. Unlike traditional e‑paper, which often suffers from slow refresh rates, ghosting, and limited color reproduction, NXTPAPER Pure delivers a high‑performance, full‑color, and fully fluid visual experience. Its advanced 3A Crystal Shield Glass—anti‑glare, anti‑reflection, and anti‑fingerprint—ensures exceptional clarity, significantly reduced reflections, and a smudge‑free surface that closely resembles real paper.
• Precision Writing Experience： Where NXTPAPER creates the canvas, the T‑Pen Pro brings writing to life. With 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity and <5ms latency, strokes appear instantaneously—fluid, precise, and highly responsive. An X‑axis linear motor provides subtle tactile feedback that mimics real paper friction, giving each stroke natural weight and intention.
• AI‑Driven Productivity： At the core of the Note A1 is a deeply integrated AI toolbox designed to amplify, rather than replace, human thinking. For professionals, AI enhances writing quality and facilitates global collaboration through real‑time transcription and translation. For students and researchers, AI solves equations on the fly, converts handwritten notes into polished text, and improves readability with handwriting beautification. For creators, AI enables precise one‑stroke shape formation and offers diverse digital brushes to accelerate visual ideation. Each feature is designed to minimize operational friction so that focus—not formatting—remains central to the workflow.
• Inspiration Space： Complementing the hardware and AI capabilities is Inspiration Space—an AI‑powered personal knowledge hub that turns scattered information into organized, contextualized insight. By simply circling content on a PDF or webpage, or by tagging key moments in meeting recordings, important text, images, and insights are instantly captured and stored. Each captured idea retains its source through one‑tap tracing, ensuring that contextual meaning is never lost. Over time, these fragments evolve into coherent knowledge structures, forming a functional “second brain” for users who work across complex, interconnected information.

£479.00

Buy on Amazon

Specification

AI Features

Like the iFLYTEK tablets, a large part of the appeal of the Note A1 is the AI functionality that TCL has built around the note-taking experience. The main features include:

• AI transcription
• AI translation
• AI summarisation
• AI assistant
• Handwriting conversion
• Handwriting enhancement
• Formula recognition
• Stroke formation
• Writing tools

The AI assistant is built into the notes app and includes templated writing tools for emails, summaries, activity plans, invitation letters, outlines and meeting notices. You can also type in your own free-form request. It is basic compared to using ChatGPT or Claude directly, but for quickly drafting a meeting notice from your notes, it does the job.

Some of these features work better than others, and I will cover the important ones in more detail below. The short version is that the transcription is very good, the summarisation is functional but limited, and the handwriting conversion is decent but not flawless.

Paper-Like vs E-Ink

It is worth being clear about what NXTPAPER actually is, because TCL’s marketing leans heavily into the e-ink aesthetic without this being an e-ink product.

E-ink displays, like those on the iFLYTEK tablets, a Kindle or a reMarkable, are reflective. They use ambient light rather than a backlight, which is why they are so comfortable to read in daylight and why battery life is measured in weeks. The trade-offs are well known: slow refresh rates, ghosting, and, until recently, limited or washed-out colour.

NXTPAPER takes the opposite approach. It is a conventional LCD panel with a multi-layer matte treatment applied on top. The etched anti-glare finish diffuses reflections, there is hardware-level blue light filtering, and the surface has a slightly textured feel under both finger and stylus. Because the underlying panel is a normal LCD, you keep full colour, a 120Hz refresh rate and zero ghosting.

In practice, this means the Note A1 behaves like a normal tablet that happens to be much easier on the eyes. Reading long documents under bright overhead lighting or near a window is noticeably more comfortable than a glossy tablet, and you stop thinking about your position relative to light sources. It is not the same as e-ink, though. The display is still emitting light at you, so it will never be quite as relaxing for marathon reading sessions, and in direct sunlight an e-ink panel remains far superior.

The way I would frame it is that e-ink is a reading display that tolerates other tasks, while NXTPAPER is a tablet display that is unusually good for reading. Which one suits you depends entirely on the balance of your usage.

Design and Build Quality

The design of the Note A1 follows the digital notepad template rather than the standard tablet one. It is impressively thin at 5.5 mm, and the aluminium chassis feels sturdy and more premium than I expected at this price. At 500 g it is light for an 11.5-inch tablet, though still noticeably heavier than a paper notepad, and you will feel it during longer handheld writing sessions.

There is a thicker bezel down one edge, which acts as a grip area for holding the tablet one-handed while reading or writing. This bezel also houses a circular home button with a built-in fingerprint sensor. A single press takes you home, a double press jumps straight into the notes app, and a long press starts a voice recording. That last shortcut is genuinely useful when a meeting starts unexpectedly.

The T-Pen Pro stylus attaches magnetically to the side of the tablet and charges wirelessly while docked. The magnetic connection is adequate but not especially strong, so I would be careful tossing the tablet into a bag without a case. The top of the pen doubles as an eraser, and there is a side button for switching tools.

The included keyboard case is good but confusing. I don’t think I have ever managed to unfold it into keyboard mode first time without getting confused about which way to fold it. It is a two-part wrap-around design, and every single time I end up folding and refolding it like a puzzle before it clicks into place. Once it is set up, the keyboard itself is pleasant to type on, with decent key travel and a dedicated row of shortcut keys for media, brightness and screenshots. It is not backlit, but on a device like this, I can live with that.

A few other hardware observations: there is no microSD slot, so you are stuck with the 256GB of internal storage (which is generous, to be fair), there is a single 13MP rear camera that is fine for scanning documents and little else, and there is no front camera, so video calls are off the menu.

Display

The 11.5-inch NXTPAPER display is the reason this tablet exists, and for the most part, it delivers.

NXTPAPER is e-ink-like, which basically means it has a soft-touch matte display. The anti-glare treatment is very effective. Reflections are diffused rather than mirrored, and text remains readable in conditions that would render a glossy tablet unusable. Colours are slightly muted compared to a standard LCD due to the matte layer, but they are perfectly acceptable for documents, comics and video.

The 3:2 aspect ratio is well suited to documents and note-taking, giving you a page shape much closer to A4 than the 16:10 panels on most Android tablets. The 2200 x 1440 resolution works out at around 225 pixels per inch, which keeps text crisp.

The 120Hz refresh rate is the headline advantage over e-ink. Scrolling, animations and app switching are completely smooth, with none of the ghosting or partial refresh artefacts you learn to tolerate on e-ink devices. Coming directly from the iFLYTEK tablets, the difference is night and day.

There are two criticisms. There is a thick bezel around the display, which is partly a deliberate design choice for grip, but it does make the tablet look a little dated next to modern slim-bezel tablets. And at 300 nits, the panel is not particularly bright. Indoors this is a non-issue, and arguably the whole point of the device is that you don’t need to crank the brightness, but outdoors on a sunny day it can struggle in a way that e-ink never does.

Applications / Set Up

Getting everything set up is much easier than the iFLYTEK tablets, as the tablet is much more responsive.

Unlike the iFLYTEK, you have 5GHz WiFi, and I didn’t have to use a dedicated 2.4GHz network. This sounds like a small thing, but anyone who has had to resurrect an old 2.4GHz SSID just to get a device online will appreciate it.

Connecting cloud drives worked immediately. I linked both OneDrive and Google Drive without any issues, and the keyboard made typing in an email much easier compared to the relatively slow onscreen keyboard on the e-ink tablets.

The UI is very much geared up towards notes, and that’s it. The home screen is the notes library, with an Inspiration AI section along the top and your files below. But you do have easy access to Android apps on the sidebar, which slides out from the left edge. In comparison, the iFLYTEK tablets were better designed for the features an e-ink tablet excels at. They had dedicated sections for tasks, calendar and reading, making them a bit more user friendly for general work productivity.

You can, of course, install things like Google Calendar and Keep, but it is not the same seamless integration, and this doesn’t support handwriting as well as the native apps on iFLYTEK.

It is worth noting that early Kickstarter units shipped without proper Google app support, and some early adopters were very vocal about the limited app selection. TCL has since addressed this through software updates, and on my unit, installing the standard Android apps I use day to day was straightforward. If you read early coverage complaining about app famine, that situation has improved considerably.

Emails on the iFLYTEK were bordering on unusable due to the slow display. With this, you have both Outlook and Gmail apps, which provide the same user experience as any other tablet. The interface is fast and responsive, and the keyboard makes it easy to respond to emails. For me, this is one of the biggest practical differences between the two approaches. The iFLYTEK tablets are note-taking devices that can technically do other things; the TCL is a proper Android tablet that happens to be built around notes.

Stylus / Handwritten Note Taking

This is an area where I think the Note A1 doesn’t quite compete with the iFLYTEK tablets with their e-ink display.

While the display is nicer to write on than a normal tablet, it doesn’t have the same feel as e-ink, and there is a small amount of lag between what you write and what is displayed on the screen. TCL quotes under 5ms of latency for the T-Pen Pro, and while it is quick, the combination of the glass surface and the way ink renders means it never quite convinces you that you are writing on paper. The matte texture provides more resistance than a glossy screen, which helps keep handwriting controlled, but anyone coming from a reMarkable or the iFLYTEK tablets will notice the difference immediately.

The pen itself is capable, with 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity, dual tips and a built-in eraser on the top end. There is a haptic motor that is supposed to simulate the sensation of writing on paper, changing its feedback depending on the selected tool. I found it more of a novelty than a genuine improvement, and I suspect most people will turn it off.

The writing toolbar is well thought out. You get five configurable tool slots, each of which can be set to a different pen type, colour and thickness, so switching between presets is quick. There are also shape recognition tools, a rotatable ruler, text boxes and a lasso selection tool.

Handwriting conversion works reasonably well, with one caveat: my handwriting is terrible. When I tested it with some deliberately scruffy cursive, it correctly picked up most of what I wrote, including faithfully reproducing my own misspelling of “gadget”, but it turned “My name is james” into “My name is values”. Neater printed handwriting converts with far fewer errors, so your results will depend heavily on how legible your writing is in the first place.

When you are finished with a note, you can export it to one of your cloud drives in either TNOTE, PDF, PNG or TXT format. The export dialogue lets you pick the destination account, and in my testing, exports to both OneDrive and Google Drive worked reliably.

Audio to Text Transcription

The audio-to-text transcription works well. You open up a note, then press the microphone icon at the top to start the recording.

Live transcription does not start automatically; you need to press Start Transcription, and this will then transcribe the audio in real time.

The accuracy of the transcription is generally excellent, but it does not separate speakers like Plaud. I tested it against a recording of an interview with Jensen Huang, and over nearly 13 minutes, the transcript was accurate enough that I could follow the entire conversation from the text alone. Punctuation and sentence breaks were mostly sensible, with only occasional garbled phrases where speech overlapped. Without speaker separation, though, an interview reads as one continuous block of dialogue with timestamps, and you need to work out yourself who said what. For meetings with multiple participants, this is a real limitation compared to Plaud, which handles speaker identification well.

One handy feature is that you can switch the microphone from being omnidirectional to directional. If you are sitting in a lecture or presentation, you can point the tablet at the speaker and reduce the amount of background chatter it picks up. With eight microphones on board, the recording quality itself is very good, and it picked up voices clearly from across a meeting room.

Live transcription works offline, while AI summarisation requires an internet connection. This is worth dwelling on, because it is a genuine advantage over Plaud, where everything routes through the cloud. If you are somewhere without connectivity, or you are dealing with content you would rather not upload anywhere, the Note A1 will still transcribe in real time on the device.

The workflow has one clunky element. The transcription shows up in the audio recording box, and you then need to hold down on the text to copy it before you can paste it into the main document. It works, but a one-tap “insert transcript into note” button feels like an obvious omission, and I hope TCL adds it in a future update.

AI Summarisation

AI summarisation works as expected, but it is not as good as Plaud. There is just one option for summarisation and no mind maps.

To give a concrete example, I ran the summarisation on that Jensen Huang interview recording. It produced a structured summary with a topic line, interview information, an executive summary and findings organised by theme. The content was accurate and usable, correctly identifying the discussion around parallel processing, CUDA and the 2012 neural network breakthrough. As a quick way of capturing the substance of a meeting without listening back, it does the job.

Where Plaud pulls ahead is flexibility. Plaud offers a range of summary templates for different scenarios, mind maps for visual thinkers, and generally more polished output. The TCL gives you one summary format, take it or leave it. As with the transcription, the summary shows up in the audio recording box, and you then need to hold down on the text to copy it and then paste it into the main document, which again feels clunkier than it needs to be.

Day-to-Day Performance

Day-to-day performance is good to excellent, depending on what you are using the tablet for.

The MediaTek Helio G100 is obviously not comparable to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 (3 nm) in the Honor MagicPad4, and this isn’t a tablet I’d use for gaming. It is a mid-range chip on an older process node, and you will notice occasional slowdowns when rendering large PDFs or running the AI features. Casual games like sudoku and card games run fine, but that is about the ceiling I would set for it.

However, in comparison to the iFLYTEK tablets, this is far more responsive. I had no issues connecting my cloud drive accounts, and moving between applications is fast. The 120Hz display does a lot of heavy lifting here, making the whole system feel snappier than the chipset alone would suggest. For the core use cases of writing notes, recording audio, reading documents and dealing with email, performance is never a concern.

One minor annoyance I hit: if you accidentally exit a note, which is easy to do when palming the screen near the thin bezel edge, it can take a few moments for that note to reappear in the library list. The first time it happened, I was convinced the note had vanished. It hadn’t; the library just takes a while to catch up.

Battery Life

Battery life is significantly less than the iFLYTEK tablets, which is to be expected due to the much more power-hungry display and more powerful chipset.

The 8,000mAh battery will comfortably get you through a full working day of mixed note-taking, transcription and reading, and with lighter use, you can stretch it to two or three days. But this is tablet battery life, not e-ink battery life. The iFLYTEK tablets and other e-ink devices are measured in weeks of standby; the TCL is measured in days. If you are used to picking up an e-reader after a fortnight in a drawer and finding it still charged, adjust your expectations accordingly.

Charging is also slower than the 33W rating suggests. In my testing, it rarely sustained anything close to the maximum, and a full charge takes a couple of hours or more. If you charge overnight, you will never notice, but a quick top-up before a meeting will not add as much as you might hope.

Living with it as someone with ADHD

As I mentioned at the start, part of the reason I keep testing this category of device is that they directly address the problems my ADHD causes me, so I want to share some thoughts on how the Note A1 performs from that perspective.

The single biggest feature for me is live transcription. In meetings and product briefings, my attention drifts, and by the time I have snapped back, I have missed something important. Trying to take notes makes this worse, because writing splits my attention further. With the Note A1 recording and transcribing everything, I can allow my focus to lapse without the anxiety of losing information, and the timestamps mean I can jump back to the exact moment in the audio if the transcript looks off. This is the same benefit I get from Plaud, but having it inside a tablet where I can also scribble the odd thought is more convenient than juggling separate devices.

The distraction side is more nuanced. E-ink tablets are brilliant for ADHD in one specific way: they are so slow and limited that doom scrolling is effectively impossible. The device physically resists distraction. The Note A1 does not have that guardrail. It is a fast, colourful Android tablet, and if you install social media apps on it, you have just bought yourself another distraction machine. What helps is that the notes-first launcher puts your work in front of you by default rather than a grid of tempting icons, and I have deliberately kept my install list to productivity apps only. The friction of the matte, muted display also makes it subtly less appealing for mindless browsing than my phone, which sounds trivial but genuinely reduces the pull.

The other ADHD win is consolidation. Forgetfulness means that notes scattered across notebooks, my phone and random scraps of paper may as well not exist. Having handwriting, typed notes, recordings, transcripts and summaries in one place, automatically synced to my cloud storage, means there is one location to check rather than five. For anyone whose executive function needs external scaffolding, that alone justifies this product category.

Price and Alternative Options

TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER | 11.5" NXTPAPER Pure Display | 3A Crystal Shield Glass | AI Toolbox | 16.7 Million Display | Paper-like Writing | Inspiration Space

• Paper‑like, Lag‑free Display： At the foundation of the Note A1 is NXTPAPER Pure, a breakthrough developed from four generations of TCL NXTPAPER technology and specifically optimized for e‑Note scenarios. Unlike traditional e‑paper, which often suffers from slow refresh rates, ghosting, and limited color reproduction, NXTPAPER Pure delivers a high‑performance, full‑color, and fully fluid visual experience. Its advanced 3A Crystal Shield Glass—anti‑glare, anti‑reflection, and anti‑fingerprint—ensures exceptional clarity, significantly reduced reflections, and a smudge‑free surface that closely resembles real paper.
• Precision Writing Experience： Where NXTPAPER creates the canvas, the T‑Pen Pro brings writing to life. With 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity and <5ms latency, strokes appear instantaneously—fluid, precise, and highly responsive. An X‑axis linear motor provides subtle tactile feedback that mimics real paper friction, giving each stroke natural weight and intention.
• AI‑Driven Productivity： At the core of the Note A1 is a deeply integrated AI toolbox designed to amplify, rather than replace, human thinking. For professionals, AI enhances writing quality and facilitates global collaboration through real‑time transcription and translation. For students and researchers, AI solves equations on the fly, converts handwritten notes into polished text, and improves readability with handwriting beautification. For creators, AI enables precise one‑stroke shape formation and offers diverse digital brushes to accelerate visual ideation. Each feature is designed to minimize operational friction so that focus—not formatting—remains central to the workflow.
• Inspiration Space： Complementing the hardware and AI capabilities is Inspiration Space—an AI‑powered personal knowledge hub that turns scattered information into organized, contextualized insight. By simply circling content on a PDF or webpage, or by tagging key moments in meeting recordings, important text, images, and insights are instantly captured and stored. Each captured idea retains its source through one‑tap tracing, ensuring that contextual meaning is never lost. Over time, these fragments evolve into coherent knowledge structures, forming a functional “second brain” for users who work across complex, interconnected information.

£479.00

Buy on Amazon

The TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER is available from Amazon UK for £515, which I think should include a keyboard case, which is a significant bonus in comparison to the iFLYTEK models.

The two e-ink tablets I reviewed from iFLYTEK are priced at:

• iFLYTEK AINOTE Air 2 – £509
• iFLYTEK AINOTE 2 – £579

Beyond those, the obvious alternatives depend on which part of the Note A1 appeals to you. If it is the writing experience, the reMarkable Paper Pro and the Amazon Kindle Scribe are the established e-ink options, though the Scribe offers a fraction of the storage and neither has the Note A1’s app flexibility or colour video playback. The Boox Note Air series gives you Android on e-ink, which is arguably the closest philosophical competitor. If it is the tablet side that appeals, a conventional Android tablet with a matte screen protector and a stylus gets you part of the way there for less money, though the screen treatment is nowhere near as effective as NXTPAPER done at the hardware level.

At £515 with the keyboard included, I think the pricing is fair rather than a bargain. You are paying about the same as the iFLYTEK AINOTE Air 2 but getting a keyboard, a faster and more capable tablet, and a colour 120Hz display in exchange for the superior writing feel and battery life of e-ink.

Overall

The TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER is a good tablet overall. I’d say it feels a bit like a jack of all trades and master of none.

The 120Hz NXTPAPER display and MediaTek Helio G100 chipset make this substantially more pleasant to use for general tasks than the e-ink tablets I have tried.

The display also makes it more viable to use for general tablet duties like media consumption.

But the NXTPAPER display is just not as good as e-ink for writing and reading, though it is far better for those things than a traditional tablet display.

The software features are good, just not always as good as competitors’. Transcription works well, but it doesn’t identify speakers like Plaud, and the AI summaries are not as good either. Transcription is about on par with iFLYTEK, and having live offline transcription is a significant advantage over Plaud.

I prefer iFLYTEK’s productivity UI, with easy access to notes, task lists, calendar, and reading, but the e-ink display’s responsiveness is frustrating when you try to do anything other than writing notes. While the iFLYTEK tablets can also install Android apps, the TCL is far better for this. The fast refresh rate colour display makes it much more pleasant to use, and the TCL is far better for emails.

Overall, I am on the fence about whether I prefer e-ink tablets like the iFLYTEK AINOTE 2 or this TCL tablet with its NXTPAPER display. I think I want to like the e-ink tablets more than I do, but the reality is that I don’t make handwritten notes enough to commit to it. The TCL provides a nice middle ground, giving me traditional tablet performance and functionality with a decent writing experience compared to normal tablets.

For both the TCL and iFLYTEK tablets, I love the live transcription, which is something that really helps me stay on top of work meetings and product pre-briefs.

Overall, I can give the TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER a strong recommendation. It is not perfect, but it is a good option for anyone interested in e-ink tablets but not ready to fully commit.

James Smythe( Owner / Editor )

I am James, a UK-based tech enthusiast and the Editor and Owner of Mighty Gadget, which I’ve proudly run since 2007. Passionate about all things technology, my expertise spans from computers and networking to mobile, wearables, and smart home devices.

As a fitness fanatic who loves running and cycling, I also have a keen interest in fitness-related technology, and I take every opportunity to cover this niche on my blog. My diverse interests allow me to bring a unique perspective to tech blogging, merging lifestyle, fitness, and the latest tech trends.

In my academic pursuits, I earned a BSc in Information Systems Design from UCLAN, before advancing my learning with a Master’s Degree in Computing.

I’m proud to share that Vuelio has consistently ranked Mighty Gadget as one of the top technology blogs in the UK. With my dedication to technology and drive to share my insights, I aim to continue providing my readers with engaging and informative content.

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