Earlier in the year, Bigme launched a doomscrolling smartphone called the HiBreak Pro, which featured an eye-friendly monochrome ePaper display. After much online leaking, the company has now officially added color to the family.
Like its monochrome sibling, this Pro model features a relatively large 6.13-inch display – at least compared to the original HiBreak – but this time it's based around E Ink's Kaleido 3 color ePaper technology. This translates to a resolution of 824 x 1,648 pixels for black/white content, and 412 x 824 for color.
Let's face it, that's not going to be threatening any regular smartphones in terms of crispness and vivid colors, but scrolling through social media feeds or scanning wiki pages at length shouldn't be as punishing for the eyes. And the company's own fast refresh technology is reported to deliver 30 frames per second performance.
Again, those kind of numbers are decent for E Ink but still a fraction of the frame rates seen on modern handsets. Combine this with a color depth of just 4,096, and video watching on the move is pretty much off the menu. Something I can confirm after having tried it on the otherwise excellent PocketBook Eo last year.
For general scrolling and consuming written content, Bigme is promising a flicker-free experience with tech cooked in to minimize ghosting. And the Pro Color is no slouch in the processing department either, coming with a Mediatek Dimensity 1080 chipset with 2.6-GHz octa-core chops backed up by 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. Your on-device vault should be large enough for thousands of e-books and documents, but it doesn't look like there's microSD expansion so once it's full, that's it.
The smartphone screen is visible in direct sunlight, but night owls will appreciate a front light that can be adjusted for warm/cold temperatures across 36 levels. Snappers get a 20-megapixel rear camera for high-resolution document scanning – there's an auto OCR mode – and there's a 5-MP front camera too.
If you're looking to take photos of the world around you or capture strange objects through the lens, the previews and saved images are going to look somewhat lo-fi on the ePaper display – but they will share or print out at full resolution.
A fingerprint reader to the side adds lock/unlock security to the mix, the smartphone supports global 4G/5G mobile networks via dual-SIMs, and there's dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2 as well. Contactless payments can be made over NFC. The 4,500-mAh battery supports 18-W fast charging over USB-C. And usefully, custom shortcuts can be assigned to off-screen smart keys for improved workflow.
That's a solid list of pros and cons to feast your eyes on. The Android 14 color ePaper phone – with access to Google's Play Store for adding in favorite apps – has a list price of US$469, but can currently be ordered for $399. Shipping is penciled in for early October.
Product page: Bigme HiBreak Pro Color
