I wanted to love the latest alternative to the Boox Palma eReader, but it didn’t deliver

For people desperate for the smallest eReader possible, the Double crown is a new option. It’s a 6.13-inch phone-like device with an E Ink display that tries to differentiate itself with a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, the device feels cheap to use.

Price and availability

The Durobo Krono was first released as part of a Kickstarter project. It can still be purchased through the site for €259, or approximately $299, as listed on the site. It comes in black or white colors.

The hardware gives a bad first impression

If you’re reading this and wondering if the Krono is a Boox Palma-like device at a lower price, you’ll be disappointed. The Krono retails for about the same price, if not slightly more expensive, than the Boox Palma 2, and it doesn’t work as well. A double whammy.

I’ve now tried both products and immediately, after unboxing the Krono, it felt less premium. The rear plastic feels cheaper in the hand. Most of the time, though, the scroll wheel is a failure.

The Krono’s design is built around this Smart Dial, a rotating, scrolling dial that can be pressed and protrudes from the left side. It is integrated in such a way that the top of the device does not lie flat on a table. The Smart Dial tube runs across the entire back.

There’s no weight on the scroll wheel, so it’s a little tricky to spin freely. When you turn it, you hear and feel it rubbing against something in the housing. Maybe this device has a defect, but it doesn’t seem that way. It just feels cheap. It is clear from all the surrounding components used that some serious considerations have been made from top to bottom.

Is the plastic housing actually cheap? I accidentally dropped the eReader from about a meter high onto concrete, and there was barely a trace. I was a little surprised when I saw that result. Still, it doesn’t change how it feels to use the device on a daily basis.

Krono’s software is not much better than the hardware

The poor movement of the Smart Dial is mainly a deal breaker for me. It may not be for everyone. But if the hardware wasn’t, perhaps the software, combined with the hardware, could be. The Durobo Krono has the beginnings of an interesting interface, but leaves a lot to be desired.

For starters, Android 13 integration is missing. Google Play wanted to use biometrics after I signed into my account. The operating system tried to set up my fingerprint and told me the sensor was on the back of the device. However, there is no fingerprint sensor on the back.

I have encountered at least a few times where the device would only show a blank screen until it was restarted. It was hard to tell if it was a third party app or a first party item that was causing this.

More obvious than the one-off bugs is the home screen design. I like the minimalism, but there is no way to customize it. So the top two Reading and Music sections are completely wasted on me. These sections are not for all music and reading related items, but only for local items, manually transferred from a computer.

In 2025, no one will primarily acquire individual files and then manually move them between a computer and this eReader. It doesn’t happen. The saving grace is the availability of the Google Play Store to download apps like Kindle, Libby, Kobo and Google Books. Spotify is available for music. Why can’t I change the Reading section on the home screen to open Kindle or a folder of reading apps?

Personally, I hate the look of third-party app icons. Instead of showing the default icon like any other phone or tablet, the Krono shows two letters. So the Kindle icon is ‘Ki’, Kobo Books is ‘Ko’ and Settings is ‘Se’. It looks bad and is a bit confusing.

There is a Smart Dial section in the system settings, but that only describes the multitude of functions the steering wheel can perform. You can’t customize the long press or double tap. The killer feature, in that what kills the Smart Dial for me, is that it doesn’t work in any of those third-party reading apps.

When you run the Smart Dial in a context it doesn’t know, you’ll see a small, pointed cursor appear on the screen. It doesn’t move. It just stands still in the center of the screen, like a smudge you want to wipe away.

Is this eReader an AI device?

I thought the Krono device was a great eReader. The narrow form factor may suit everyone now, but it works. I could put it in my front pocket and use it between innings at a Little League game. The screen looked good in the sun. It also looked good at home, reading on the couch.

But maybe you don’t feel like reading at all. The other pitches for this product are that of note taker and AI assistant. It works for those things, but I’m not sold.

Spark is the note-taking app built into the Krono. You press Smart Dial to start recording and again to stop. Then you can transcribe it or just listen to it. I got bored almost immediately after trying it.

Libby AI is the artificial intelligence on the device. You can speak or type to it. It worked quickly to answer my first question about what it could do. But the results were confusing. It said it could write emails and code or summarize long articles. The problem is that Krono is kind of a silo, a lonely device with no IO or web browser.

The device has Wi-Fi, so this feature is great to use at home or at work, but it’s not something you buy to take with you and use on the go.

As a device to use with the Kindle, Kobo or Libby library app, this is a great eReader. But I know what I’m looking for is a cheaper product, more focused on the reading aspect than one with seemingly redundant AI features. The conundrum is that AI is an investment machine and a startup needs to get over the launch hump.

Should you buy the Durobo Krono?

It was only a matter of time before the Boox Palma (or Palma 2) would attract competition. The Double crown is an interesting-looking eReader, but it’s not ready for prime time yet. Compared to the Palma, it feels like a rushed imitator.

Everything about the Krono, from the fancy hardware to the fledgling software, has yet to fully realize its potential. With a second revision to the Smart Dial and a lot of work to further customize the software, this could be a serious productivity and reading device. It’s none of those things today.