Bigme is a brand that almost exclusively develops digital paper or e-note products. The vast majority of their products either have pure black and white screens and a fair number of them are using Kaleido 3 color e-paper displays. The only device missing from their portfolio is a pure e-reader, that reads digital content and can listen to audiobooks. Their first black and white e-reader has just come out and it is called the Bigme Read. You can order it today from the Good e-Reader Store for $149.99 and has full English support.
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.
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, you can use these apps. Bigme has various speed modes, which add additional performance to running apps, so everything will run super well on the hardware. With speakers and Bluetooth, you can listen to streaming audiobooks from Audible or even with Overdrive Libby. We have tested all of these apps during our first look at the Read, and if you are looking for a low cost e-reader that won’t break the bank and doesn’t lock you into a specific ecosystem, buy the Read today.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
