The Hisense Touch Lite has an E INK screen and it is a dedicated music player. The product was designed to easily fit in your jeans pocket, just like a smartphone, since it has the exact same candy bar design. Unlike a traditional phone, the battery is large and will give you about a month, before you need to recharge it. This phone can support wired headphones via 3.5mm headphone jack, however it does have support for Bluetooth. Should you buy this? This hands on review will answer this question.
Hardware
The Hisense Touch features a 5.84 capacitive touchscreen E INK Carta HD display with a resolution of solution of 1440 x 720 with 287 PPI. It has a front-lit display and color temperature system, so you can interact with the screen in lowlight conditions. The screen is completely flush with the bezel and protected by a layer of glass. The front and back are piano black.
Underneath the hood is a Qualcomm quadcore processor, 2GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage. There is a USB-C port for charging the device and WIFI to access the internet and download apps. This device supports Bluetooth 5.1, so you can pair wireless headphones. If you want better sound quality, you can plugin a wired pair via the 3.5mm headphone jack and the sound is up to 122dB. If you don’t feel like using headphones, there are AAC dual 1216 stereo speakers and they have this neat little grill design. It is powered by a 3,000 mAh battery and the weight is 155g.
The overall design and functionality is similar to the Hisense Touch HIFI Music Player, but it is around $35 dollars cheaper and lacks the HIFI chip and is missing many of the codecs. The Touch Lite has less RAM and internal storge and does not have a camera. Many of the leading streaming platforms such as Spotify or YouTube Music do not even offer a HIFI listening experience, only Tidal does. Apple Music offers Spatial audio, and you will get a really good experience with Apple Music on the Touch Lite. However, if you are the type of person to invest in high quality sound, have expensive wired headphones and tend to listen to FLAC, you will be better served buying the Touch HIFI for $329.99 from the Good e-Reader Store. If you want to buy the Touch Lite, it retails for $299 from our store.
The retail packaging is rather plain jane. It is made of cardboard and it just says Touch with a cool looking font on the front and on the back, it lists some of the other devices that Hisense sells. Inside the box is a QuickStart guide and the device, encased in wax paper. There is no USB cable inside, maybe Hisense forgot to include it, or they figure everyone has a USB-C cable by now.
The feel of the cool aluminum when you take it out of the box, the appearance of a brand new form factor from Hisense, and the sound of some of the best speakers off of any electronic device on the market. With the Hisense touch, there is no need for external speakers as this device gives you all of the Bass and decibel range you will ever need
Software
Hisense is billing this as music player, but it also does so much more. It is running Android 11 and is using a brand new interface called Touch OS, which makes each core function have a big and bubbly square. This will launch commonly accessed features such as the music player, audio settings, screen settings, system updates etc. The main navigation is on the bottom of the page and provides shortcuts to the ebook reading app, music player, app menu and settings.
This device comes with 4 different refresh modes, that are similar to the Onyx Boox line of e-readers. The normal one is clear mode, which gives you nice looking app icons, text, and PDF image clarity, it also has the same A2 mode, which degrades image quality, and provides a slight increase to performance. The two extra modes are the speedX and X-mode which makes playing audio on Youtube or other streaming services, extremely viable.
It is important to note that the Hisense Music Player is primarily targeting the Chinese market, and has a number of pre-installed apps, as well as an app store, full of them. Hisense has always made their E INK products internationally friendly and supports up to 46 different languages, including English. This means the entire interface and UI will be in your native language, which is critical.
If you want to have greater control over the E INK experience, Hisense has you covered. There is an anti-aliasing option to make fonts razor sharp, and not blurry. There is a contrast mode to make the differences between black and white more pronounced. There are various battery saving modes, such as the standard power saving and Super power saving mode. You can get around three weeks of usage in super power saving mode, as it shuts down lots of background processes.
You can install your own app markets, or apps on an individually basis. Since there are no cameras on this product, you can’t do video chats, but can do audio ones, such as WhatsApp, Line or even do WIFI calling to your friends. The Music Player is typical Android fare, so you might want to install your own. I have installed Audible and have been listening to audiobooks while I go for long walks or when working out. I almost like audiobooks better than my dated playlist, since I can lose track of time and get immersed in a story.
Reading
This Hisense Touch goes beyond just listening to music, but also makes a handy little e-reader. The stock reading app supports all of the major formats, such as EPUB, PDF, MOBI, TXT, DOC, CBR and CBZ. You can sideload in all of your favorite books, comics and manga. You do not need to pinch and zoom to read the frames, this is also ideal for webtoons. You can increase the font size, augment the font type, change the line spacing or margins. You can use the volume keys are page turn buttons, which is handy if you don’t always want to be swiping or gesturing with the touchscreen.
If you are the sort of person that has an extensive library of DRM-Free books on your computer or hosted on cloud storage, you can get away with using the stock reading app. For everyone else, you will want to download your favorite reading app, such as Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Moon+ Reader, Scribd or audiobook providers such as Audible, Audiobooks.com, Librovox Audiobooks or just listen to them on YouTube. You will have to sideload in your own APK files, or install an alternative app market like the Good e-Reader App Store, Samsung Galaxy App Store, Amazon App Store or just download the files directly vis apkmirror with your web browser. I found that using the web browser and accessing the web sites of Webtoons and Goodreads provide a good experience, where you don’t even really need to install the apps.
You aren’t going to want to use this as a PDF reader, since the screen is too small, but the same thing goes with the vast majority of smartphones on the market. The screens are simply not going to give you a good reading experience. If you want an E INK screen to read them, you will want to go with at least a 10.3 inch reader, which are plentiful or a 13.3, which will read A4 documents.
Wrap up
If you don’t listen to HIFI music, but still want an audiobook or music player, the Hisense Touch Lite will have you covered. Most smartphones these days have abandoned the 3.5mm headphone jack and instead went with Bluetooth, which doesn’t have enough bandwidth for a HIFI listening experience anyways. This is why Hisense is getting to be a brand that does it all. They have a dedicated e-reader with the Hisense Reader, the Hisense Touch HIFI and Hisense Touch, in addition to their modern smartphone lineup such as the Hisense A9 4G. They seem to market dedicated E INK displays for all sorts of different use case scenarios and they are the only ones doing this.
I dig the Hisense brand, they make everything pocket friendly and don’t charge an arm and a leg. Their products in North America and Europe are not easily found in a retail environment, since they are mostly sold online. I think our store is the only one outside of China that sells these. The one good thing about Hisense E INK products in general is the support for almost 40 major languages, so there is tremendous value.
Hisense Touch Lite
$299.99Pros
- E INK Screen
- Long Battery Life
- Android 11 OS
- 3.5 mm headphone jack
- Dual Speakers + Bluetooth
Cons
- No SD Card
- Does not have Google Play
- Have to sideload apps
- Can only buy online
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.
