Bigme B751C review
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| Customizable screensaver (screen light is off) |
With a lot of curiosity and doubts, I finally ended up buying the Bigme B751C. Indeed, there are quite a few negative things said about the brand's Android e-readers, and I sincerely believe I have read or heard all possible criticisms about this device. Except perhaps for its design and manufacturing, which generally receive a positive consensus. I really expected to have to return the unit and endured a little teasing from my husband for ordering it anyway.
After a good ten days of intensive use, I am as surprised as delighted to have tried the experience. While the B751C is not perfect, it is an excellent machine at a reasonable price. And it has replaced my Kobo Libra Colour without any hesitation. Despite intensive use, I have not really encountered any bugs or particular instability. The only flaw for me is that the screen rotation is unreliable, it often seems to get stuck, but it's only the display that doesn't update, just touch the screen and it's fixed.
The original applications are not really great, but they can easily be replaced by much better Android apps. And above all, it works well and much better than on Boox devices, thanks to its stellar ghosting management and an incredibly effective global direct handwriting injection mode that allows the use of any note-taking app without suffering from unbearable latency. On Boox devices, Android note-taking apps are mostly unusable.
So, I replaced the original reader with Perfect Viewer for manga and the Pocket Book reading app for novels. The note-taking app was replaced by the excellent Nebo app, which allowed me to write the entirety of this article with a stylus.
1 The price
I paid €309 on Amazon for the B751C with a stylus and case. This is a very reasonable price, especially compared to the Kobo Libra Colour, which costs the same with its stylus and offers much less powerful, less versatile, and lower-quality hardware. The Kindle Colorsoft costs almost the same price without a stylus or any note-taking function. At Boox, the 7" e-readers are not compatible with a stylus and also do not offer note-taking function.
2 The hardware
Far from the very basic built and look of the Kobo, this device offers a classy and understated design. Note that the border is not made of actual metal and its finish is sometimes imperfect. I have tiny bumps on the edge of mine. Nothing annoying. The top surface seems to be made of matte glass. It makes the device very pleasant to use and offers a more practical writing surface without raised edges.
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| Bigme B751C and Kobo Libra Colour in G2 profile |
The back is made of textured plastic with a leather style look, which is both attractive and pleasant. It is worth noting that most online reviews show a version with a smooth back that is not very nice. Therefore, there may be multiple models available.
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| The back is textured in a faux leather style |
The assembly is adequate but not exceptional, the device sometimes squeaks slightly when held, and it does not seem as rigid as the Kobo.
A well-placed POWER button, a USB C OTG port for directly connecting a USB drive, a micro SD port, and a speaker are distributed around the device. There are also 2 buttons on the front. One of my buttons clicks with a louder sound than the other. The speaker allows for trouble-free Text-to-speech audio playback but lacks bass or midrange.
3 The Screen
The screen undoubtedly remains the most important part of an e-reader. Here, we have a Kaleido 3 panel with the usual limitsof this technology, namely a screen darker than a black and white panel, and a slightly less sharp rendering. The colors also appear washed out.
What is surprising is that the panel is so close to the front glass that it looks laminated, which is very pleasant and satisfying. Sometimes it feels like the screen is just a sticker placed on the device.
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| The screen seems to be laminated to the glass and hardly casts any shadow along the edges. |
Bigme has clearly worked wonders on the ghosting. My Box Tab Mini C often suffered from a quite pronounced ghosting, which could make the device almost unusable except in the slowest display mode and still often left very ugly traces even in the highest quality mode. Here, the ghosting is much better controlled, even in the fast modes, which becomes truly usable. The panel therefore seems cleaner and more responsive than on a Boox device.
It is also slightly less greenish than the Kobo Libra Colour display, with a less cold and more neutral background color. The color rendering is also slightly different. The reddish oranges are more prominent on the Kobo, while it generally renders other colors a bit duller. These tests were conducted by setting the Libra to the G2 profile, which is the best available to date.
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| Bigme B751C and Kobo Libra Colour in G2 profile |
The B751C offers advanced color settings integrated into the device's interface. They greatly improve color rendering on a case-by-case basis. Overall, I would say that the color rendering is slightly more satisfying on the Bigme than on the Kobo. However, this should not be a decisive factor as we are comparing two screens with absolutely catastrophic color accuracy, one just seems a little less worse than the other. Just a little. This is one of the limitations of the Kaleido 3 technology.
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| The colors of Kaleido 3 are still as disappointing |
The integrated light is unfortunately not very good. It excessively washes out the dark tones, much more than on the Kobo or on the larger sister of this e-reader, the Bigme S6 Color +.
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| Bigme B751C - Kobo Libra Colour - Bigme
S6 Color + at close light level |
It also goes as low and rises to about the same level as on the Kobo. Unfortunately, it is also less convenient to adjust because instead of using a slider for brightness and another for color temperature, the B751C has 2separate sliders for the brightness of the cool LEDs and the warm LEDs. It gets some time to be used to this layout.
4 The stylus
We've heard all sorts of things about this stylus. Some have not hesitated to call it unusable. Curiously, I wrote the entire text of this article (in french) with the stylus in the excellent app Nebo, which is very practical and offers very good handwriting recognition. I used the amazing digital ink injection mode offered by the Bigme brand, which does not exist on Boox.
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| The much-criticized stylus is actually quite good |
Of course, the stylus is not as precise and responsive as what is found on a Boox with Wacom's EMR technology. But it is perfectly usable and even more practical than the Libra Colour Kobo stylus 2. It does not disconnect in the middle of writing, only after 3 minutes of inactivity. It is easy to briefly press the bottom button to turn it back on. The top button is the eraser and it also works perfectly well with third-party apps and the ink injection system.
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| I wrote this entire test on the B751C and with great pleasure |
I saw a video of a YouTuber who criticized the stylus in a very excessive manner. He found it so uncomfortable with sharp edges that writing a few pages seemed impossible to him. I assure you that I did not lose any fingers while writing this test. If you find the angle of the shape of the stylus a bit hard, you can simply turn it slightly in one direction or the other and there will be no problem, you will always have access to the button. The stylus comes with 2 spare tips that give it a natural glide with a very slight friction noise, which is much more pleasant than on the Kobo, too smooth for my taste.
Handwriting injection.
I must make a quick note about this feature that only Bigme offers and which, in my opinion, absolutely changes everything.
E-ink screens are very unresponsive, their display is very slow. There are tricks to speed it up, at the expense of display quality, and also to do a partial and localized refresh to follow the stylus trace more quickly, for example. On e-readers with stylus function, this kind of technology is integrated into the note-taking application. However, if you install a note-taking application from the Google Play store, these optimizations for electronic ink are generally not available. Writing and drawing become impossible due to an excessive latency.
Boox offers developers tools to integrate this type of optimization into their apps, but there are very few compatible apps. Bigme has chosen another approach that works with all apps.
In the control center, you can activate a global handwriting mode, with a dedicated setting for note-taking apps. It will intercept the trace of your stylus and draw it directly on the screen without any latency. Only when you make a short pause in your writing or drawing, everything you have just traced will be injected at once into your note-taking app.
Advantage: no noticeable latency.
Disadvantage: a micro-pause when you stop writing for more than 1 second. Also, the ink used by the global handwriting system may have a different appearance than that in the note-taking app you have chosen. If you set the Bigme system to a fine black line, but the brush chosen in your note-taking app is a thick red line, you will draw in fine black, and at the first pause, your drawing will be converted to thick red by the chosen app, for example. However, you can adjust the global handwriting system to a line comparable to that of your app and see little difference.
For me, the disadvantages are negligible and the advantages are incredible. This simple function relegates Boox e-readers to the status of almost unusable machines with Android note apps.
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| Screenshot of the global handwriting settings |
5 The Case
Certainly, it has the merit of existing, but leave this disgusting thing in its box, burn it, and sprinkle the ashes with holy water. Not only is it ugly, but the cover, instead of protecting the screen, will end up scratching it, and not just a little, as it moves too much on the surface because its hinge is too narrow. A hard speck of dust, a grain of sand...
I also realized that the case is slightly too tight and ends up deforming the e-reader, which becomes slightly bulged. I removed the case, and the machine had returned to a flat state in a few hours. Please, do not use this barely worthy of the trash. If only it were compostable.
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| Burn this infamous thing! |
6 Battery life
It's not easy to evaluate the battery lifeof the e-reader. Compared to my Boox Tab Mini C, it seems to be about the same. However, in practice, the battery life will vary greatly depending on usage and what you activate.If you use it as an e-reader, you can turn off the WIFI and switch to power-saving mode, and you will get an e-reader battery life of several weeks of reading at a rate of 1 hour per day. Using text to speech voice playback, the device should last for about 10 hours at a volume level of 10.
If you keep everything activated and at maximum power, you will get a small tablet autonomy of around 8-10 hours.
A full recharge takes about 2 hours.
7 The software
The software is the most frequently criticized part of the e-readers of this brand. Some do not hesitate to speak of a series of bugs making the device difficult to use.
For my part, in 10 days, I had only one bug. The voice playback got stuck once in the original book reader, Xreader. I had to force stop the application. Only once at the very beginning. That's it. It is true that there have been several updates since the release. Today, in any case, I find the system very stable. As for the French translations, not much to say either, it is improvable but there are no mistranslations, and the few awkwardness here and there are inconsequential.
However, it is time to address some huge issues.
The reading application is abysmal.
It's far inferior to the Boox reading app. No Japanese reading direction, no double-page, no good options for cropping CBZ, the font boldness option only works halfway. And to top it off, the voice playback gives me a strange accent even though I have chosen the correct language. Move along, there's nothing to see, don't waste your time with Xreader.
The note-taking application needs to be replaced.
It's really all over the place and in all directions. With icons that are too small, some of which look alike. So, I can believe that it's powerful, but important functions like handwriting recognition are completely botched. Indeed, it is very slow, but something like 20 or 30 times slower than on Nebo. And above all, it does not handle line breaks and automatic text redistribution. So, we end up with a line break every 5 or 6 words. In a long text, it's very annoying to have to remove them by hand.
Overall, the user interface of the app does not make you want to use it at all. If you want to draw and make diagrams, the original app, Xnotes, may be sufficient, but if you want to take long notes, it will not be suitable because of its ergonomics and its handwriting recognition, which has nothing to do with artificial intelligence, contrary to what the icon would have you believe.
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| The recognition creates line breaks to follow the handwritten page, and that's a problem. |
Other included applications are not good
- The music player is no better as it does not support the AAC format.
- The file explorer is not practical either because there is no indication of the progress of file copies.
- AI useless bullshit is plastered everywhere.
It's pretty much all of the apps which will need to be replaced on this Bigme. Fortunately, the Google Play Store is full of excellent apps that will work very well on the B751C.
Android 11 is no longer secure!
The biggest flaw of this device is probably the outdated version of its Android system. Android 11 is no longer supported by Google, and the latest security patch is over a year old. In concrete terms, this means that the security is poor on this machine and that several known vulnerabilities, exploited or exploitable, are there. Just by going on the web, even trusted sites can unknowingly host malicious content, and thus your device's data can be transmitted to third parties.
The machine remains perfectly usable, but you should not consider it as safe. You should not install your bank's app on it, nor even an important email account on which you can receive login credentials or confidential data. You should also not use it for online shopping. And of course, you should not take confidential notes on it, whether for your private life (grandma's credit card code) or for your work (plans for the temporal fusion engine). Even the diary of your conquests with a satisfaction index probably should not end up on a machine with such a faulty security.
But then, what is it for?
It's up to you to see if it can meet your needs and if the public revelation of your diary would not ultimately make you more famous. As long as you can limit your usage to what is reasonable, you have a great e-reader and a great notebook.
Conclusion
In the end, this machine, on which I had a lot of preconceptions, is an excellent surprise. It serves as a great Kobo Libra Color for me, more powerful, more open, with fewer bugs for note-taking, and at the same price. I can use the Kobo app and the Nebo app without any worries or loss of quality, which offers the same functionality for note-taking as the Kobo software. The user interface is less beautiful, the options are numerous, and it takes some time to tame the machine, but this is the inevitable price of versatility and freedom.
The Bigme B751C pleased me so much... that I decided to get a Bigme S6 Color + to compare and see if I could not have something better. In the end, I returned the B751C and kept the S6, which is more expensive but also much better.