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TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper Review (2026): A Hybrid Tablet for Taking Notes and Watching Video
Tablets are secondary devices for most of us, but there's one place where they outshine laptops: digital note-taking. Attempting to bridge the gap between analog and digital, digital notebooks offer a paper-like writing experience with all the pros of digital notes.
ReMarkable devices are probably the best known in this space, and they top our digital notebook guide, but I've always wanted something a little more versatile—what if I want to stream a baseball game on the same device I take notes on? E Ink, the technology employed by digital notebooks and e-readers, isn't the best choice in that case.
TCL's Note A1 Nxtpaper tablet uses a more traditional, though still matte, tablet screen to get as close to the E Ink writing experience as possible, while still being able to display video when you want to expand beyond just taking notes. It mostly works, but it can't completely mimic the feel of writing on paper, and there are a few quirks with the user interface.
The heart of any digital notebook is the screen—how well does it mimic paper? With E Ink, the answer is pretty darn well, but this is not actually E Ink. TCL's Note A1 Nxtpaper is built around a custom 1440 x 2200-pixel matte LCD panel with a 120-Hz refresh rate. At first glance, it looks like E Ink, and indeed it reduces glare and is easier on the eye than a typical tablet. At the same time, it's still an LCD panel capable of the color rendering and responsiveness of a traditional Android tablet. (The Nxtpaper matte LCD technology is proprietary to TCL.)
It's not E Ink, but I find the Note A1 screen to be quite nice and a perfectly acceptable alternative given how much more versatile it is than an E Ink screen. However, if what you love about E Ink note-taking devices is the paperlike experience, this is not the device for you (I'll explain more in the next section). It's certainly much nicer to look at and to write on than a typical glossy Android tablet.
While it is not perfect, the Note A1's screen feels very close to the hybrid note-taking/true tablet device that I've been searching for—one part real screen, one part writing pad.
The rest of the tablet is about what you'd expect in a midrange to high-end Android tablet. There's a MediaTek G100 processor, with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. That's enough power to run all the apps I tested and power some of the AI-driven features TCL is pushing with this device, including automated meeting summaries, audio-to-text transcription, and, of course, handwriting-to-text conversion.
All this is wrapped in a solid aluminum body that's almost exactly the same size and weight as the 11-inch Kindle Scribe. The Note A1 is 5 millimeters thick and weighs 500 grams.
I have two gripes with the Note A1 hardware. The first is the keyboard case, which is unnecessarily heavy and complicated. TCL apparently hired an origami expert to design the keyboard case, which has three panels where two usually does the job. The result is a keyboard case that adds an annoying level of weight, thickness, and complexity where none of that is required. For all that though, the keyboard itself is quite nice to type on. The other problem is the lack of hardware volume buttons. Volume buttons are good, mmmkay?
Besides the screen, the bundled T-Pen Pro is the highlight of this tablet. The fact that it's bundled is somewhat unusual these days, as many manufacturers have followed Apple's lead and made their writing devices a separate purchase.