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Bigme B1051C Pro: 30-second review
Xinruizhi Technology started working with E Ink displays back in 2008, and developed a series of products under numerous brands that were primarily e-reader products.
Eventually, using its own Bigme brand, it brought a wide range of e-readers to market, with both monochrome and color E ink displays.
The Bigme B1051C Pro is a new release, combining a modern smartphone platform with a 10-inch color Kaleido 3 display to create a classic Android tablet with the power advantages of E ink.
The Kaleido3 display is a technology that, in theory, doesn’t require continual power to remain on, allowing the tablet to stay on while still maintaining excellent battery life.
Where it diverges from other E Ink designs is that this isn’t just another Kindle clone, but a full Android 14 platform with access to the Play Store and the apps on it.
That said, due to the relatively low refresh of the display and the limited palette, it’s not suitable for all applications, especially those not optimised for this technology.
However, when compared to dedicated e-readers using monochrome E Ink, the battery life is underwhelming. And, the price is on the high side.
The Bigme B1051C Pro ultimately finds itself in a slightly uncomfortable no-man’s land between conventional e-readers and pen-driven tablets or laptops. If you want a color reader, then they can be found much cheaper than this, and both Samsung and Apple make effective tablets for a similar price.
Overall, while it has some strengths, this isn’t a product that naturally suits business customers. As it’s an Android tablet, it’s challenging to include it in our best e-reader round-up though.
Bigme B1051C Pro: price and availability
- How much does it cost? From $640/£473
- When is it out? Available now globally
- Where can you get it? Direct from Bigme or from online retailers
The Bigme B1051C and B1051C Pro are available in two SKUs: one with a pen and magnetic case, and another that includes the cover, pen and keyboard cover.
The difference between the standard B1051C and the Pro model is that the basic model comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and the Pro has 8GB of memory and 256GB for data.
Direct from the makers, the Bigme B1051C without a keyboard is $639, and the keyboard bundle is $718 for US customers. In the UK, those options are £472.99 and £531.19, respectively.
The Bigme B1051C Pro reviewed here, supplied without a keyboard, is £628 in the UK and another £60 with one included. In the US, those values translate into $729 and $799.
At the time of writing, the UK pound is equivalent to approximately 74 cents, making these prices comparable. While that cost is an improvement for those in Europe, none of these options is a bargain.
A major competitor for the B1051C is the BOOX Tablet Note Air4 C, which Americans can purchase for just $529.99. It uses the same display, although it has less onboard storage.
The bigger issue here is how much cheaper an unbranded Android tablet can cost, and even the 256GB Apple iPad is more affordable than the Bigme B1051C.
Overall, the cost of this device is a major weakness.
Bigme B1051C Pro: Specs
|
Item |
Spec |
|---|---|
|
CPU: |
Mediatek Dimensity 900 |
|
GPU: |
Mali-G68 MP4 |
|
NPU: |
MediaTek APU 3.0 |
|
RAM: |
8GB |
|
Storage: |
256GB |
|
Screen: |
E ink Color |
|
Resolution: |
2480 x 1860 B&W pixels or 1240 x 930 Color |
|
SIM: |
TFT card slot (up to 2TB) |
|
Weight: |
435 grams |
|
Dimensions: |
184.4 x 236.5 x 5.5 mm |
|
Rugged Spec: |
N/A |
|
Rear cameras: |
4.9 MP |
|
Front camera: |
N/A |
|
Networking: |
WiFi 6e, Bluetooth 5.3 |
|
OS: |
Android 14 |
|
Battery: |
3700 mAh |
|
Colors: |
Gunmetal |
Bigme B1051C Pro: design
- Ultra-thin
- Lacks audio jack
- No front camera
Removing the Bigme B1051C Pro from its box, the first detail that impressed me was how thin this device is, along with a nicely made appearance. Being just 5.5mm thick and weighing only 435g, this is an easy-to-hold and carry device.
Included with the tablet are a magnetically attached cover, a stylus, a USB-A to USB-C charging cable and a few minor accessories such as the SIM tray opening tool.
What you don’t get is a charger, but any that you might have that are meant for phones should work fine.
One slightly bemusing feature is that the 10.1-inch display isn’t positioned in the middle of the tablet, but is located closer to the bottom and the right. The border that extends to the left and top implies the design was made to favour right-handed users, who might hold the tablet with their left hand. During my time using it, I never found a way to reorient the screen, so that’s how it is.
The top border features a speaker underneath, but the left side of the screen is unused space.
As for external details, the Bigme B1051C Pro has relatively few. The top right edge has a power button, and the top centre is where the USB-C port is, with the SIM tray on the top left edge.
And that’s it. There is no 3.5mm audio jack for listening to audiobooks and no volume controls. It’s possible to listen using Bluetooth headphones or to obtain a USB-C to 3.5mm audio adapter (not included) if you prefer to listen to recorded sound in private.
On the rear surface, a line of pogo pins is positioned for connecting the tablet to an accessory that Bigme has yet to release, as well as for the rear-facing camera. There is no forward-facing camera, so you can’t use this tablet for conferencing. Additionally, the rear camera is only intended for document capture.
The provided cover features a notch that allows the camera to continue taking images even with it in place, and an extended closing loop to help secure the magnetically attached stylus.
Overall, the Bigme B1051C Pro features a minimalist design, where most issues are intended to be resolved through the screen. It doesn’t do any favours for left-handed users or those who like wired headphones, but this is also true for the majority of mobile phones these days.
Design score: 4/5
Bigme B1051C Pro: hardware
- MediaTek Dimensity 900
- E ink display
- 3700 mAh battery
The Dimensity 900 was one of MediaTek’s first series of the Dimensity line, arriving in May of 2021. The makers have since released better and more power-efficient chips than the 900, but it was popular for a while and appeared in the Doogee V30, Samsung Galaxy M53 5G, Ulefone Armor 18T, among others.
The problem with this chip in this context is twofold. Firstly, this is more powerful than this device genuinely needs, and I noted that Bigme has a power-saving and a performance mode, with the power-saving option clocking the SoC down. Additionally, many of the technologies in this chip, such as the 5G modem, are not utilised. Even the GPU is unable to deliver the performance it was designed to generate, as the E Ink display can’t update rapidly enough for smooth gaming.
I assume Bigme went through the various System-on-Chip (SoC) options for this device and concluded that the Dimensity 900 was suitable for a particular reason, and that might have been due to the unit cost.
In most phones where it resides, this SoC is typically coupled with LPDDR5, but in this hardware, it uses DDR4 memory. And again, this appears to be a cost-driven choice.
What makes this device possible is the Kaleido 3 display, and that comes with some significant advantages and disadvantages.
The reason this even exists is the Amazon Kindle, which famously used a black and white E Ink display to provide exceptional battery life to that product and those that evolved from it.
What makes this display different from other LCD display technologies is that it can retain an image without needing to be powered, and it doesn’t use a power-demanding backlight. The result is a tablet that’s effectively left running, but the battery won’t go down at the rate a conventional tablet might.
However, those capabilities come at a steep cost in terms of image quality and the display’s refresh rate. While this tablet can display color, it significantly reduces the resolution when compared to using the same display in black and white mode, dropping from 2480 x 1860 pixels in monochrome to only 1240 x 930 pixels in color. If you hadn’t guessed, Kaleido 3 takes groups of four monochrome pixels and, by using filters, creates a quarter as many colored dots.
Given the limited monochrome scale of those pixels, the actual color representation is about 4096 distinct hues, significantly less than the 16.7 million that we see on LCD displays and over a billion colors that AMOLED theoretically delivers. To be realistic, most humans can only differentiate about a million colors, but 4096 is a long way short of that number.
As a result, images look oddly posterised, and some colors, like red, are extremely muted.
If you are looking to review images, this is not the display technology you would choose.
Equally, the relatively slow refresh of Kaleido 3 makes it unsuitable for video playback. The video appears to be a snowstorm of oddly colored pixels, and significant movements can create ghosting effects that obscure what’s happening in the video. Bigme has provided some control over the refresh to mitigate these issues, but Kaleido 3 isn’t a good technology for fast-moving visuals, and this, combined with the color limitations, makes it a poor replacement for a conventional Android tablet or Apple iPad in this context.
The tablet can Miracast, enabling you to use a TV or monitor with that capability, but that’s not always available.
The final part of the hardware I’d like to discuss is the battery and how a 3700 mAh battery isn’t large by any standard. As with other aspects, the size of the battery was dictated by how thin Bigme wanted to make this tablet, although it would last a long time on that capacity.
However, what’s super annoying about the battery is that it only charges at about 10W, which means it takes an inordinately long time to charge. With such a small battery, the usual advantage of them is how rapidly they charge, but this is not the case with this device.
The default memory and storage configuration is 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, although the review machine had 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage.
I don’t think the smaller memory and storage model has much of a disadvantage, mostly because the storage can be expanded by up to 2TB using a microSD card. Memory on these systems is primarily used to store applications for instant use, and 6GB on the default configuration is sufficient for the majority of users.
For those expecting me to review the camera, you will be disappointed. It features a 4.9 MP sensor designed to capture documents, while also allowing video recording through the camera app.
Nothing about this sensor is comparable to the cheapest phone camera, and with the E ink display, it’s impossible to tell if it did a good job of taking a picture.
Therefore, I’ve decided to talk about the user experience of the Bigme B1051C Pro instead.
Bigme B1051C Pro: User experience
- Not an iPad
- Google Play Store
- Not as polished as it should be
I need to be upfront and say that the user experience of this device isn’t the best, and it compares poorly with the default Android front end or that on the iPad.
The idea of icons along the left side of the interface may be popular with e-readers, but it seems decidedly old-school by current interface standards.
There is an alternative scheme provided, which is more iPad-inspired, but neither of them seems efficient, and there is no capacity for screen widgets.
What’s also less than ideal is that while it can display navigation icons along the top edge, these can disappear depending on the software being used, even when those tools are provided in the default configuration.
Using the standard e-reader software, even the home icon is removed, meaning that even if you’re not particularly interested in learning the gesture system of this product, you’re practically forced to. That is unfortunate, and occasionally, messages in Chinese when the tablet is set to English don’t convey the idea that much effort has gone into polishing this version of Android for its deployment here.
By default, the first menu icon is ‘Meeting Records’, a feature that the majority of users are unlikely to want first. It is possible to change what sub-systems are on the menu, but not the order in which they appear.
This sort of disjointed thinking is commonplace and somewhat off-putting.
Where the Bigme B1051C has some advantages over prior tablets of this type is that it has Android 14 in its corner and access to the Google Play store.
That said, just because you get access to all those applications and can download and install many of them, it says nothing about how they might look or run.
What undoubtedly colored my experience was that I didn’t get the keyboard cover with my machine, and the notion of handwriting things that are then covered into text by an AI bot seems alien to me. While I’m old enough to be from the pre-computer era, handwriting things is something I gave up doing forty years ago.
With a keyboard to input notes and data, this tablet might become decidedly more useful and less compromised.
As an e-reader, the experience is much better, and the color display does add something, even if the colors are oddly filtered. If you mainly read monochrome documents, then Bigme offers much more affordable devices that meet that requirement.
Where the E Ink display fails is in its attempts to present fast-moving images, specifically video, but also generated 3D. The level of ghosting, the approximations of shade and color, all tend to make any video content look like it was captured in a snowstorm.
If you want to watch Netflix, this is patently not the best device.
Using the settings pages, it is possible to tweak the refresh for faster updates and also the color/backlight balance. However, it’s adjusted, the E Ink display will never compare to the smooth pointer movements that even the cheapest conventional laptop provides.
However, the most surprising aspect of the Bigme B1051C is its battery life, which fails to convert the capacity it has into a long running time.
In general, these types of devices aren’t turned off after use, mostly because the display doesn’t require power, and the OS should be in a dormant state. I say “should” because putting this tablet down for a day and then activating it reveals that the battery capacity has reduced. It appears that sleep on this device isn’t what it is on other e-reader hardware, and for those wanting to extend battery life, it needs to be entirely shut down.
I’d love to tell you how much power it lost per day, or if specific apps are responsible for consuming that power, but those parts of Android 14 weren’t included in this implementation.
Compared to the polish that some brands of note-taking devices have, the Bigme B1051C needs some work. While being able to run Android applications is a massive advantage, it also exposes some of the underlying weaknesses of the technologies used in this hardware.
Bigme B1051C Pro Camera samples
Image 1 of 5
Bigme B1051C Pro: Final verdict
I’ve come to a stark conclusion about this device that is dependent on how you come to it.
Those who come from the perspective of an Android tablet are likely going to be disappointed for a number of reasons, but mostly because the display technology isn’t video-friendly or capable of displaying full-color images accurately.
Conversely, if you’ve trodden the Kindle path to this, you might be massively impressed with the ability to load Android apps and the general responsiveness of the interface and tools.
But what’s not going to enamour either potential customer is the price, which seems excessively high. And, the battery life isn’t all that I’d hoped.
To end on a positive note (handwritten, maybe), the Bigme B1051C is much closer to the Android tablet than the Amazon Kindle on this spectrum. And maybe the next model from Bigme will muddy those waters. However, the cost and limitations of this device pose hurdles that some customers may struggle to overcome.
Should I buy a Bigme B1051C Pro?
|
Attributes |
Notes |
Rating |
|---|---|---|
|
Value |
A phone with this spec would cost much less |
3.5/5 |
|
Design |
Thin, highly engineered tablet that’s nice to hold and use |
4/5 |
|
Hardware |
E Ink color display, document camera, and a phone SoC |
4/5 |
|
User experience |
Android 14 but with a low refresh and limited colors |
3.5/5 |
|
Overall |
An evolved e-reader that supports Android apps |
4/5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
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