Bigme is an emerging brand out of China and all of their latest generation e-readers and e-notes have English on them, which makes them tremendously relevant for an international audience. The Bigme Carve Color is a new device that just came out and has a few major selling points. It is running the latest generation E INK Kaleido Plus e-paper, has a large 10.3 inch screen and is running Android 11.
The Bigme Carve Color has a 10.3 inch E INK Carta HD display and is using the color filter array of the E INK Kaleido Plus e-paper technology. The B&W panel has a resolution of 1872×1404 with 227 PPI. The color panel has a resolution of 936×702 and 117 PPI, it will be able to display over 5,000 different color combinations. Bigme has developed accumulated color optimization processing technology to display a wider gamut. There is an EMR layer included on the device and comes with a stylus, so you can take notes, freehand draw and edit PDF files. There is also a front-lit display to read at night.
The Carve Color is made of aluminum alloy CNC technology. It has a white bezel surrounding the e-paper screen, with a black color scheme on the left side, this makes it look like the spine of a book. This device is very slim, it is only 6.3mm thick. The e-paper display is protected by a layer of glass, so it has a flush screen and bezel design.
Underneath the hood is a quad-core A55 1.8GHZ processor, 4GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. It has an SD card, which supports an additional 128GB of storage, so you can really max this thing out. You can charge the device and transfer data via the USB-C OTG port, it also has WIFI, Bluetooth 5.1. You can unlock the Carve with a fingerprint sensor that is on the side of the unit. You will be able to listen to audiobooks, music and podcasts via the twin stereo speakers. It is powered by a giant 4,000 mAh battery, which should provide a couple weeks of usage.
One of the most exciting aspects about the Carve Color it is running Google Android 11, but it does not have access to the Play Store. You will need to install an alternative Android market to keep all of the downloads up to date. Most of the latest generation Bigme models have an English option during setup and this one is no different, you can select various Chinese options, and also English. This turns the entire UI, settings menu and everything else into English.
You will be able to take notes and draw in color. There are 16 different color combinations that can be used. They are black, dark grey, light grey, white, red, green, blue, cyan, pink, orange, brown, dark green, grapefruit, purple, and mauve. The Bigme Stylus can be used, it has an erase and highlight button on it and you can get 4,096 different levels of pressure sensativity, so the harder you press, the thicker the lines become.
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.
