The Bigme Pocketnote Color 2 is an excellent dedicated e-book reader. The E INK Kaleido 3-color e-paper display makes comics, magazines, and apps shine. It has limited note-taking functionality, mainly due to it not having a WACOM screen. Instead, the stylus that comes with the unit is capacitive. The drawing experience differs from dedicated e-notebooks from Bigme, but it is acceptable. One of the big selling points is the inclusion of Google Android 11, which has full access to all of the Google Play Services and the Google Play Store. The price is excellent, considering all of the value you are getting. It costs $299 and is available with a free case and stylus from the Good e-Reader Store.
Hardware
The Bigme Pocketnote Color 2 features a 7-inch E INK Carta 1200 e-paper display with a resolution of 1264×1680 with 300 PPI for black and white content. The colour screen provides a resolution of 632×840 with 150 PPI. You can display text in ebooks, websites and other content in black and white and get tremendous resolution. Still, if you are freehand drawing, editing PDF files, reading comics, magazines, or other content, you will gain a vibrant, colourful experience. Bigme said the display is flicker-free, always ensuring distortion-free text and images. The display also comes with 36-level adjustable warm and cold LED lights, which can be blended for an optimized screen when reading in the dark.
The display also emits the least blue light and has received German Rheinland certification with a paper-like index score of 86. Other display attributes include the automatic ghosting elimination technology, which ensures a pleasant and safe viewing pleasure of the highest order.
The colour scheme is piano black on the front and has a ledger design. On the ledger side, two manual page-turn buttons are silver. They are physical buttons, so you get a satisfying click when you press them down. There is a USB-C port and a single speaker on its side. Along the sides of the bezel is the same silver colour scheme, and on the back is a light black.
Underneath the hood is a 2.3GHz octa-core processor with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage. You also have the option to add up to 1 TB of external storage via an SD card. Connectivity options include dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0. There is a microphone for audio calls via Skype, Zoom and other voice communication apps. Power comes from a 2300 mAh battery, which should be enough to last several days on a single charge.
The Pocketnote Color 2 provides a light note-taking experience. It ships with an active capacitive type. That means the pen does not use Wacom, and the Pocketnote Color 2 also lacks a Wacom layer. That way, you are tied to using only the bundled pen. Further, the pen runs on an AAAA battery, which must be inserted via the rear and replaced periodically.
I think this device is best suited as a dedicated e-reader. The Kaleido 3 screen tech shines when reading full-colour content, like PDF files, magazines, pictures, book cover art, and Android apps. This helps offset the price; Bigmes dedicated e-notebooks are far more expensive than $299, and this product is almost on par with the Boox Palma, except you get more value with the Pocketnote Color 2.
Software
The Pocketnote Color 2 runs Google Android 11 as the core operating system, but Bigme has its skin layered on top of it, basically the same UI as they have on most of their product line. One of the strengths of this device is that it has Google Play services installed on it, as well as Google Play. You can download and install any core Google apps, such as Google Books, Chrome, and Gmail. Play also lets users download the book ecosystem of their choice from Kindle, Kobo, Libby, Scribd, or whatever webtoon, manga, digital comics or magazine apps they want. Android is the world’s most used OS, and people have their favourite reading apps, so I won’t list too many.
The main UI is on a sidebar on the home screen. It includes Storage, an App Centre, an Office, Voice Translation, a Library, Notes, a Bookstore and the Bigme Cloud; there are a few others. You can remove anything you do not want on the sidebar by visiting the customization option in the settings menu. Using this as my daily driver, I would eliminate 75% of all the stock options. Sadly, you can’t add your apps; this would have been a nice touch.
A small UI on the very top of the screen is quintessential Android. One of the big ones is the E INK Control Centre. This is where a ton of customization comes into play. You can fine-tune your overall experience. The first is the refresh rate; the default option is HD 256, which forgoes the 16 greyscale levels and supercharges to 256. This is ideal for reading an ebook where you want the text to be a true black and the background grey, in addition to offering superior anti-aliasing support. It also has HD, Regal and FAST. FAST is suitable for running apps or web browsing. There is a new anti-shake option; Bigme told me this primarily applies to streaming video content from Disney+, Prime Video or YouTube videos. I couldn’t see a big difference, but you can see for yourself in our review video.
If you want to read colour content, the control centre has new options, such as Color Mode. There are dedicated settings for comics and magazines, which you can toggle on if you tend to get this type of content. This is a super fast and extreme mode in terms of refresh technology. So, page turn speed will be out of this world, and there will be no ghosting either. Finally, some slider bars control Dark Enhancement, Vividness, and Color Brightness.
Of course, you can find many typical settings when you do a dropdown, such as WIFI, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Volume, the brightness adjustments for the front-lit display and the colour temperature system—typical Android stuff. In terms of brightness levels, this e-reader is almost on par with the Kindle Paperwhite in terms of how crystal clear and bright the screen gets when you mix and match the white and amber LED lights.
Bigme has many settings and sub-menus for every option so that things can get complex quickly. However, many people in the e-reader world want complete control over their e-reader, and the Pocketnote Color 2 has options in spades. You can choose your adventure in terms of overall customization and control over what you want in the sidebar, installing apps from Google Play and quickly removing apps you don’t want to. There are dozens of languages supported out of the box. Any language Android officially supports is available.
E-book reading
With a 7-inch 330 PPI E Ink display and 150 PPI for Colour content, this is a great e-reader. It does have a stock reading app that is perfectly acceptable for sideloaded content. It supports all major formats, so you can quickly load your collection of e-books, PDFs, manga, or other digital content. The default reading app offers a lot of functionality, which includes Font Font Size, Typesetting, Text Contrast, and Picture Contrast. The latter two make for an interesting scenario as the device views the two elements differently and will allow you to set the contrast for the text and picture independently. The device will also allow you to change settings and view the effects live in the background. It’s like sliding the Font Size option towards the max position and seeing the change take effect on the page in the background.
The above is also available in features such as double current document, double translator, and double notes. Of these, mention must be made of Double Note, which perhaps is among the most excellent features of the Pocketnote Color 2. That’s because the feature will show you the e-book on one half of the display while allowing you to take notes on the other half.
The feature essentially splits the display into two, with each half functioning independently of the other. Note that taking notes on one half won’t affect the other half’s functioning as an e-reader. It sure is a remarkable feature, but it is marred by the relatively small screen space allocated to each half, which can be smaller than what we are used to with most smartphones currently in vogue. So, while the UI is great for multitasking, there isn’t enough screen space to do it justice.
PDF files look simply fabulous. Quality and speed are top-notch, with pages turning extremely fast. Note-taking, too, is instantaneous with almost zero latency. Also, since it runs Android complete with Play Store support, you always have the option to install any PDF reading software you like. That said, the stock software that the Pocketnote 2 Color comes with does a great job, and you aren’t likely to ever have any issues with it reading PDF files.
Note-Taking
The overall note-taking functionality of the Pocketnote Color 2 is the weakest part. Bigme has over a dozen e-notebooks in their modern portfolio, in all different screen sizes, so if you want something with a better drawing experience with a WACOM screen, you might want to have a look at the Bigme S6, Bigme Color + Lite, or even the Galy. However, all of these add a few hundred dollars to the cost. The Pocketnote Color 2 is only $299, and one of the ways they can get away with these savings is subpar writing. There isn’t much pressure sensitivity to speak of; there are thin and thick lines, with little to no in-between.
The note app has a small sidebar with a few different pen and pencil types, with line thickness settings. The top UI has layers, canvas, lasso, erase, save, zoom, undo and redo. There are a few templates, about a dozen of them—college rules, sheet music, etc. There are about 16 colours to choose from when drawing. There is no colour wheel for adding your colours, but no e-notebook on the market has this feature.
I found overall, the stylus is weak. It slips slippery in your hands, as it is made of plastic and has no grip. It feels like you are drawing on a slab of glass.
Wrap up
If you use the Pocketnote Color 2, it has a dedicated e-reader for all of your digital content. This is a truly fantastic product. You get tremendous customization options to optimize your experience, and 150 PPI makes colour shine on a 7-inch screen. Google Play offers millions of free and paid apps. Audio and Bluetooth are welcome additions to audiobooks from Audible, podcasts or music. An SD card can store your sideloaded content to offset the internal storage.
Bigme Pocketnote Color 2
$299.99
Pros
- Kaleido 3 color e-paper
- 300 PPI B&W 150 PPI Color
- Google Play
- SD card
- A deadly e-book reader
Cons
- NO Wacom screen
- Stylus is terrible
- Drawing experience is lacklustre
- Battery life could be better
- Android 11
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.