Bigme has just announced that the Galy is discontinued. This was the only Gallery 3 e-note on the market and has been sold for 18 months. The company will no longer manufacture any more units. Gallery 3 technology might be dead since the only other products displayed using this technology—the Sharp 8 and Pocketbook Viva—look like they will never come out.
E INK invested over 100 million dollars in R&D resources and budget to improve every aspect of Gallery 3. CEO Johnson Lee said at the time of the launch, “Our team across the world has worked tirelessly over the past several years and has made a product we can all be proud of.” Considering only one company brought Gallery 3 to the market, it seems like a massive waste of money and resources.
Bigme Galy
The Bigme Galy features an 8-inch Gallery 3 colour e-paper display and can display 50,000 different colours. The resolution was 300 PPI, which is achieved through a four-particle ink system: cyan, magenta, yellow and white, which allows a full-colour gamut at each pixel. A front-lit display and colour temperature system will enable you to read in the dark with white and amber LED lights and 36 total lights.
Underneath the hood is an A53 2.3 GHZ octa-core processor, 6GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. If this mind-boggling storage is unsuitable for your needs, it has an SD port capable of handling an additional 128GB of storage. It has WIFI for connecting to the internet, browsing the web or installing and using Android apps. Bluetooth 5.1 will ensure you can pair wireless headphones or earbuds to listen to audiobooks, music, podcasts and anything else your heart desires. If you don’t feel like using headphones, it does have dual stereo speakers. The USB-C port will allow you to charge Galy on your computer or a wall outlet. There is an 8MP rear camera and a 5MP front-facing camera. You can use the fingerprint sensor to unlock your device and set a passcode for more security. Four noise-cancelling mics will handle audio dictation, voice recognition or various voice communication apps. The battery is 4,000 mAh, which should be suitable for a few weeks.
The main drawing app has many excellent features. You can select your writing utensil, eraser, undo/redo, insert text, insert photos/clipart, pick one of the 40 background templates, save or create another page. There are only a few of the settings that are relevant to freehand drawing. One is the writing tools; you can select between pen and pencil; each has a slider bar to control the thickness of the lines, and the other is the colour palette. The writing latency is very low when putting the stylus on the screen. Everything appears in under 20 milliseconds.
The Bigme Galy was running Google Android 11 and shipped with Google Play preinstalled. This will give users the ability to download and purchase millions of apps. This means you won’t have to worry about all the complications of sideloading in apps. Four different speed modes give you the increased performance to take advantage of streaming audio, video, coding, looking at high-quality pictures, or just wanting to scroll quickly while browsing the web.
The Galy was a nice little e-note that received a ton of support from Bigme, but it looks like the company won’t release any further Gallery 3 devices due to the technology’s inherent latency issues.
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.