iPad is no doubt the pioneer in tablets, and while I agree that it is a capable device, it is hardly paper-like, so I could say it is not a true notepad replacement. I mean, the Retina display is bright and vibrant, but if you are looking for a productivity tool that is closer to the traditional pen-and-paper experience, then you gotta look at the TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER instead.
Billed as a notes-first tablet, it sits somewhere between a tablet and an e-note device, with a focus on the handwritten experience people have been craving, a display that feels closer to paper than to glass, while still packing the kind of features you expect in a modern tablet.
The star feature is no doubt the display, which is an 11.5-inch NXTPAPER Pure display, packing 2,200 by 1,440 pixels, bolstered by a 120 Hz refresh rate, 16.7 million color support, TÜV Rheinland eye-comfort and low-blue-light certification, and rounded up with 3A Crystal Shield Glass with anti-glare, anti-fingerprint, and anti-reflection treatment. In practice, it reads and writes more like paper, which is exactly the point.
This screen complements the included T-Pen Pro stylus, which makes writing on it feel like writing should, if you still can recall that feeling. The stylus supports 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity, dual tips, and sub-5 ms latency, which translates to strokes registering naturally and smoothly. This also means no more signatures and sketches that look like they were signed or drawn in the Minecraft universe.
Under the hood, it runs on a MediaTek G100 processor with 8 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage. Now, I am not going to paint a beautiful picture. That SoC is not going to break any speed records, but it is a mid-range chip built on a 6 nm process that stacks up to Snapdragon 6- and 7-series chips. The chip is more than capable of doing what it is designed to do: a notebook to capture your ideas and then some. And notebook it surely is.
At around 500 g and just 5.5 mm thick, it is easy to carry with you wherever you go, as a notebook should. Other technical details include a 13 MP rear camera, dual speakers, an eight-microphone array, Bluetooth 5.3, pogo-pin support for accessories such as a keyboard case, et cetera, and an 8,000 mAh battery that supports 33 W USB-C fast charging.
It is worth mentioning that the camera isn’t for capturing your memories. It is more for scanning documents, snapping reference images, or capturing whiteboard content to drop into your work.
While we said the screen is the star, what really makes this tablet shine is the software. TCL didn’t stop at making a paper-like display and a smooth stylus. It also jammed in a suite of tools that give the device a real purpose beyond being a fancy notepad. There’s real-time speech-to-text for taking meetings or lectures in stride, automated summaries that cut through the clutter, handwriting-to-text conversion so your scrawls don’t stay stuck on the page, and writing tools that help polish your prose. It can even recognize handwritten equations, which is not something you see every day on a tablet.
What makes all that work better is the Note A1’s integration with TCL’s smart ecosystem. ThinQ runs deep here, from cross-device file transfer to easy casting and multitasking. You can split the screen, rearrange your workspace, move files around wirelessly, and generally treat this more like a productivity machine than a disposable notebook.
The Note A1 NXTPAPER sits in a weird but welcome niche, more capable and flexible than a dedicated e-note device, but more focused and eye-friendly than a vanilla tablet. Want Kindle-style reading? You can do that. Need to sketch and write like you’re on paper, but in color and with apps? Check. Want AI-style tools that make notes and ideas easier to handle? It delivers.
The display tech, the pressure-sensitive T-Pen Pro, the speech and handwriting tools, the large battery, and the thin aluminum body all add up to something that feels purpose-built rather than slapped together.
TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, where it has attracted almost 2,000 backers, contributing nearly a million dollars in funding. If you are down, you can secure a unit for HK$3,403 or more (about US$437, according to Kickstarter), depending on when you pledge.
Images: TCL.