Read em and Weep – Bigme Read e-Reader Review

Bigme is a company that specializes in digital paper products. The entire offering is for users to make notes, annotate PDF files and freehand draw. Most of their lineup is black and white e-paper, but they also lead the charge with the most colour E INK products in the industry. They had the first commercial product with Gallery 3 and a number of units using Kaleido 3.
It was quite the shock when Bigme disclosed that they were developing a dedicated e-reader that had a singular purpose, to read ebooks and nothing else. The Bigme Read is their first in a future lineup of devices that have no note-taking functionality and is purely a consumer product. What makes the Read standout from the competition? Google Play is available to use right out of the box, so you can download any Android app that you want, such as Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook or Kobo. Borrow ebooks and audiobooks from the public library with Hoopla or Overdrive Libby. Listen to audiobooks via Bluetooth or the accompanied speaker from the likes of Audible or Spotify. Running out space with all of these apps, luckily it has an SD card.
The Bigme Read is a solid e-reader with lots of compelling things that separate it from the competition. However, it does have a few drawbacks. It does not have a 300 PPI display, so fonts will not good as good as reading on most other e-readers, such as the Kindle Paperwhite, Nook Glowlight 4 or the Kobo Libra 2. The Read also does not do a good job at reading comics, manga or webtoons. Turning the pages and displaying content is slow and sluggish. Sure, you can use some of the speed modes to increase performance, but it comes with the expense of image degradation. It also lacks physical page-turn buttons.
Who should buy the Bigme Read? Someone who doesn’t want to be locked into a specific ecosystem, but wants the freedom of choice to do business or download content from whoever you want. The company also supports their e-reader, issuing a number of firmware updates that fix bugs, introduce new features and quality of life improvements. The e-reader is also very affordable and you can order it today from the Good e-Reader Store for $149.99 and has full English support.
Hardware




The Bigme Read features a 6-inch E INK Carta HD e-paper display panel with a resolution of 1024×758 and 212 PPI. It has 36 warm and cool LED lights to provide a front-lit display to read in the dark. The colour scheme is black, and it has a physical home button on the bottom, right below the e-paper panel. This button can be configured to do different things in the settings menu. You can establish a function for a short press and long-press. I can see people using a single press as a page forward and a long press for page back.
Underneath the hood is a quad-core 1.8GHZ processor, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. An SD card is capable of up to 1TB of additional storage. There is WIFI for connecting to the internet, Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless headphones and dual speakers to listen to audiobooks, podcasts or music. A microphone can use voice communication apps like Teamspeak, Zoom, Chime or Discord. You can transfer your audiobooks or ebooks to the reader via USB-C, and it supports TXT, EPUB, PDF, FB2, ZIP, PRC, MOBI, RTF, OEB, Mp3 and more. The device is powered by a paltry 1,300 mAh battery, and the dimensions are 122x90x5mm and weighs 170g.
One of the main selling points of the Bigme Read is the inclusion of Google Android 11 and full access to the Google Play Store. Users will not have to sideload in their digital collections, instead millions of free and paid apps are at your fingertips. If you have an online retailer that you do business with, such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Tolino, or Scribd.
In terms of hardware and performance, this device is slow and sluggish. It does not do a great job at running apps and even clicking on settings options, navigational elements or even the UI takes a few seconds. This hardware is very unlike Bigme, which leads me to believe they did not design the hardware themselves, instead they white labelled an existing e-reader and made slight changes to the software. This is likely way their entire software experience is very unlike any of their other products and it is very bare bones with little to no customization.
Software

The main UI and menus are quite different from all of the other Bigme products and seems more user friendly, with less options. The UI is on the bottom, instead of the sides. It defaults to Shelf, which is where all of the content you have sideloaded is displayed. There is also Book Mall, Apps and Settings.  At the very top on the left-side is a soft key back button and on the right side is date/time, battery life, settings and your speed modes.
Speed modes are important on a dedicated e-reader and they have a few that are exclusively available on this e-reader. The default is HD, which makes all text look OK, but if you just intend on reading ebooks you would want HD 256 enabled, since Bigme is one of only a few brands to go beyond the standard 16 levels of grayscale and use 256 levels, so everything is razor sharp, even on a sub-300 PPI screen. There is a normal mode, which I don’t see anyone using, however, they have Extreme Mode, which significently reduces clarity for fonts and pictures to improve performance. You would only want to do this if you are browsing around for apps on Google Play, or if you are streaming songs/videos on YouTube. If you have lots of apps for audiobooks, ebooks, manga or anything else, you can change each app to launch with a dedicate speed mode, so you don’t always have to manually change it, based on what your actually doing.
There is a bookstore on this device, it looks like is powered by the iReader or iFlytek white labelled bookstore. This means it is entirely populated with Chinese titles and not very useful if you don’t speak mandarin. There is also no way to remove it from showing up on the device. There is also a number of pre-installed Android apps that are also in Chinese, these can be installed by long-pressing on them and clicking on delete. Speaking of Android, this is using Android 11.
Now let’s talk about languages; there is native support for 37 languages. These include German, Thai, Slovenian, Icelandic, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, Vietnamese, Laotian, Slovak, Dutch, Khmer, Spanish, Romanian, Norwegian, Croatian, Finnish, Greek, English, Arabic, Hindi, Danish, Malay, Catalan, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czech, French, Korean, Polish, Hebrew, Tamil, and Italian. This is more languages than any other e-note support.
There is some glaring problems with the software. Everything is slow and sluggish, unless you put it in Extreme mode, and then everything looks really crappy and low resolution. Be prepared for an exercise in patience when using the Bigme Read, you will likely do more weeping than reading.
Reading

There is a stock e-reading app that comes with the Bigme Read called X Reader, and is not very impressive, it is only really useful if you are buying and downloading Chinese titles from the Book Mail or sideloading them in yourself. Sideloading support is limited, it does not support modern formats, but really old ones. TXT, EPUB, PDF, FB2, ZIP, PRC, MOBI, RTF, OEB, it does not even support CBZ/CBR for manga and no support for DRM content, so you can’t load in books you have purchased on other bookstores.  If you have books stored on the Bigme Cloud, you can also access them on this device.
X Reader has a number of useful settings to make ebooks look a little bit better. When you open a book and click on the book settings you can change the typical things like font-type, font-size, line spacing and margins. You can also change the text contrast and image contrast from very light to very dark, with many options to find a happy medium. You can also establish bookmarks, look at the table of contents etc. This app kinda sucks.
However, the silver lining on this e-reader is Google Play, however the Bigme Read does not do very great with any app that has page-turn animations. If you are invested in the Kindle ecosystem download the Kindle Lite app, I would also search for “Lite” or “Go” apps of your favourite social media apps, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram all have Lite apps available, which were made for low spec smartphones, but do a great job on E INK screens, since all of the animations have been removed.
Manga doesn’t look terrible on the Read, since the 6-inch device is similar to your average smartphone. So if you install some proper apps, you will get some manga that looks great and text readable, without having to pinch and zoom manually, like a barbarian.
Wrap Up

The Bigme read is a stark departure from their usual lineup. To date, Bigme has an impressive repertoire of approximately 18 non-readers devices in their lineup.
This also seems to be a departure in quality, as it is fairly slow, and quite unresponsive all things considered, and is built using significantly different materials than the rest of their units. You can see their intentions; they are trying to emulate and compete with the Onyx Boox Poke 5, but they fall short. This unit is slow and sluggish on seemingly every process except for multimedia in which case it is absolutely extraordinary. The chasm between simple ebook reading and multimedia playback is drastic as video and audio flourishes on this tiny package.



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