Bigme B10 Review

Design and Build

The Bigme B10 is built around a 10.3-inch colour e-ink display using Kaleido 3 technology, and from the moment I first handled it, the device conveyed the impression of a tablet that is attempting to combine traditional e-ink minimalism with a rather extensive array of hardware capabilities.

Visually, the tablet adopts a bright white aesthetic. The front bezel is made from white plastic, and the rear panel uses the same material and colour, giving the device a cohesive, almost clinical appearance that stands out from the darker finishes that dominate much of the higher-end e-ink tablet market. Encircling the edges is a metallic silver trim, which adds a subtle visual contrast and lends the device a slightly more refined character. The same silver tone is used for the page-turn buttons, which are embedded into the left side of the front bezel.

Along the bottom edge, Bigme has placed a USB-C port for charging and data transfer, accompanied by a small LED indicator light that illuminates when the device is connected to power. Also located here is a combined tray for a microSD card and a micro-SIM card, allowing the tablet to expand its storage and, potentially, make use of cellular connectivity. A small tray-ejection tool is included in the box to access this slot. Four of the tablet’s eight-microphone array are also positioned along the bottom edge, with the remaining four situated on the top edge, alongside the power button (with integrated fingerprint scanner), which protrudes slightly from the chassis. I actually appreciate this design choice – the slight protrusion makes the button easy to locate by touch alone, something that is surprisingly useful when waking the device without looking directly at it.

The left edge houses a pair of stereo speakers, along with five pogo pins and two small alignment indentations used to connect the tablet to the keyboard folio accessory. Meanwhile, the right edge is almost entirely bare, aside from the magnetic area where the stylus attaches and charges wirelessly. In practice, I found the magnetic attraction here to be somewhat underwhelming. The stylus does snap into place, but the connection feels rather weak, and it detached itself more than once when the tablet was moved around or placed in a bag.

Running vertically along the left side of the display is a panel containing eight touch-sensitive shortcut buttons. These provide quick access to commonly used functions such as Home, Tasks, Settings, the E-Ink Center, Control Center, Apps, Manual Refresh, and Back. It is an unusual design decision, but one that I actually found quite practical. Having dedicated touch areas for these functions makes navigation noticeably faster, especially compared with relying solely on gesture controls – however, there were some drawbacks, which I’ll discuss later.

In terms of physical proportions, the tablet is neither the thinnest nor the lightest e-ink device currently available. However, I would describe its dimensions as fairly average for a 10.3-inch tablet, particularly one that incorporates such a broad range of hardware features (cameras, speakers, microphones, SIM support, and so forth). In that context, the weight and thickness feel entirely reasonable.

Speaking of cameras, the device includes both a front-facing and rear-facing camera. The front camera is positioned in the top-left corner of the front panel, while the rear camera sits in the top-right corner on the back. The placement of the front camera is not entirely ideal. When the tablet is used in landscape orientation with the keyboard folio, looking naturally at the screen does not align with the camera’s position. The result is that during video calls it can appear as though you are looking slightly away from the other participants rather than maintaining eye contact. It is not a deal-breaker, but it is a design quirk that becomes noticeable during extended use.

Overall, the build quality is generally very good. The materials feel solid enough, and the device gives the impression of being well assembled. However, there is one small issue that I did notice. When the tablet is shaken gently, there is a subtle rattling sound emanating from the page-turn buttons. They appear to have a very small amount of free movement within their housing. Even lightly brushing a thumb across them, without actually pressing, produces a faint rattling sound.

Now, to be clear, the buttons themselves provide excellent tactile and audible feedback when intentionally pressed, which is something I actually appreciate. Physical page-turn buttons are becoming increasingly rare, and when implemented well they are extremely satisfying to use. Unfortunately, the additional rattling noise slightly detracts from that otherwise pleasant tactile experience. That said, it is ultimately a minor gripe rather than a serious flaw, and it does little to undermine what is otherwise a thoughtfully constructed device.

Hardware specs

Under the hood, the Bigme B10 is equipped with impressively powerful hardware, particularly by the standards of the e-ink tablet market. Historically, many e-ink devices have relied on relatively modest processors and minimal memory, largely because the traditional use cases (reading and note-taking) simply did not demand enormous computational resources. The B10, however, takes a markedly different approach.

At its core is an octa-core processor combining ARM Cortex-A55 and ARM Cortex-A78 cores, clocked at up to 2.6 GHz. This is complemented by a substantial 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of internal storage, which is a very generous allocation for an e-ink device. In practical terms, this combination provides a level of responsiveness that feels considerably closer to a conventional Android tablet than many other e-ink models.

Bigme has also incorporated a dedicated hardware GPU, which works alongside the company’s proprietary xRapid display software. The purpose of this system is to improve refresh behaviour and expand the number of display configuration options available to the user. E-ink screens traditionally struggle with refresh latency and ghosting, but Bigme’s approach allows the device to operate with significantly faster refresh modes and more granular control over how the display behaves.

The real advantage of this becomes apparent when running third-party Android applications. On many e-ink tablets, non-native apps often feel sluggish or visually compromised because they were designed with LCD or OLED displays in mind. With the B10, however, these applications tend to perform noticeably more smoothly, and after a bit of experimentation with the refresh settings, the display quality can be adjusted to achieve surprisingly usable results.

That said, it is important to maintain a degree of perspective here. Despite these improvements, the B10 is still fundamentally an e-ink device. The technology has come a long way, and the gap between e-ink and conventional screens is certainly smaller than it once was, but you should not expect the same fluidity of animation or vibrancy of colour that you would see on an LCD or OLED panel.

To quantify the CPU performance, I ran a series of tests using Geekbench 6, taking the mean average of three benchmark runs. The results were extremely impressive for an e-ink tablet. The device achieved a single-core score of 947 and a multi-core score of 2481.

These figures place the B10 very close to the top of my CPU benchmarking table for e-ink tablets. It does not quite claim the number-one position – that distinction currently belongs to the Boox Tab XC, and interestingly the B10’s predecessor, the Bigme B1051C, which was launched more than a year ago, also achieved slightly higher scores.

Nevertheless, the performance here is undeniably strong, and this was reflected in my real-world testing. Third-party applications launched quickly, navigated smoothly, and (with appropriate refresh configuration) displayed with surprisingly good clarity.

In practical terms, this makes the Bigme B10 one of the most capable and powerful e-ink tablets currently available, particularly for users who intend to run a wide range of Android applications rather than relying solely on the native reading and note-taking tools that traditionally define the category.

Screen

The Bigme B10 is built around a 10.3-inch Kaleido 3 colour e-ink display, which in practical terms is roughly comparable to an A5 sheet of paper. Personally, I find this size to represent something of a sweet spot between portability and usability. It is large enough to comfortably read most PDF documents, yet still compact enough that carrying the tablet around does not feel cumbersome.

For standard documents and ebooks, the display size is perfectly adequate. When dealing with more densely formatted PDFs, there is always the option of rotating the tablet into landscape orientation and viewing half a page at a time, which provides additional magnification while maintaining readability. At the same time, the tablet remains portable enough to slip easily into a rucksack or bag. It certainly is not pocketable (nor would one expect a 10.3-inch device to be) but it strikes a very sensible balance between screen real estate and mobility.

The panel itself uses E Ink Kaleido 3, which is a colour e-ink technology with both advantages and inherent limitations. Compared with traditional monochrome e-ink displays, Kaleido 3 provides a limited but useful colour palette. This can be genuinely beneficial in several scenarios: colour-coded note-taking, viewing charts and diagrams within PDFs, displaying colour illustrations in ebooks, and even making web browsing a little more informative and engaging.

However, colour e-ink comes with a compromise. These displays are inherently darker than their monochrome counterparts. The background typically appears a few shades greyer, and as a consequence the contrast between the background and black text is slightly reduced. In isolation this is noticeable, particularly if you are accustomed to the brighter appearance of traditional monochrome e-ink screens.

Fortunately, the B10 includes an integrated front light, which does a good job of compensating for this characteristic. When activated, it brightens the background and restores much of the perceived contrast. The front light also means the screen can be used comfortably in dim or dark environments, something that purely reflective displays would otherwise struggle with. There is also an adjustable warm light mode, which adds a gentle orange-red hue to the illumination. I often prefer this setting for evening reading, as it feels noticeably softer and less harsh than a cooler white light.

It is also important to remember that while Kaleido 3 offers colour, it does not approach the colour depth or resolution of conventional displays such as LCD or OLED panels. Photographs are perfectly recognisable, but they tend to appear slightly grainy and muted rather than crisp and vibrant. That said, within the context of e-ink technology, the colour reproduction is still very respectable.

The display incorporates both a capacitive touchscreen layer and a stylus input layer. The touchscreen allows you to interact with the interface using your fingers – tapping icons, scrolling through menus, and navigating the operating system – while the stylus layer enables handwriting and drawing input.

Interestingly, the B10 uses an active stylus system rather than EMR technology. In my experience, this is generally not quite as satisfying as EMR-based pens, which tend to provide a more natural writing response. Adding to this, the screen surface itself is very smooth, lacking the subtle texture that some other e-ink tablets employ to simulate the friction of paper. As a result, writing can feel slightly slippery, though I will discuss the writing experience in more detail later in the review.

In terms of overall display quality, I found the screen to be very impressive, within the context of e-ink technology. It is never going to rival the vibrancy or sharpness of LCD or OLED screens, but among colour e-ink implementations it performs extremely well. Tasks that benefit from colour, such as browsing the web or viewing graphical content, are handled particularly competently.

One thing that does require a little experimentation is the refresh behaviour. As with most e-ink devices, there is a balance to be struck between image clarity and refresh frequency. Increasing the refresh rate keeps the display cleaner and reduces ghosting, but it also results in more frequent full-screen refreshes, which appear as visible flashes or flickers. Reducing the refresh frequency minimises those flashes, but can leave faint remnants of previous content lingering on the screen.

After some adjustment, however, I was able to find settings that worked well for most situations. Overall, I would say that the Kaleido 3 implementation on the Bigme B10 is one of the better examples of this technology currently available.

Writing feel

Handwriting is, for many people, one of the primary reasons for buying an e-ink tablet, so the writing experience is always something I examine very closely. On the Bigme B10, writing is handled using an active stylus, rather than the EMR (electromagnetic resonance) pens used by many competing devices. For several reasons, this is not my preferred approach.

In general, I find that active pens tend to be slightly less precise than EMR styluses. They can occasionally miss strokes or introduce a small amount of lag, particularly during fast handwriting. It is not something that happens constantly, but it does occur often enough to be noticeable. With EMR pens, by contrast, the input tends to feel more immediate and reliable.

Another practical difference is that active pens require their own power source, whereas EMR styluses draw power from the tablet’s screen and therefore never need to be charged. On the B10, this drawback is partially mitigated because the stylus charges wirelessly while magnetically attached to the right edge of the tablet. That is certainly more convenient than having to plug the pen in via USB, which is still the case with some other active stylus implementations.

However, there is a small catch. The magnetic attachment is not particularly strong, and the stylus can detach rather easily. If this happens and the tablet is left unused for a while, you may return to find that the pen has run out of charge and needs to recharge before it can be used. It is not a catastrophic issue, but it is slightly inconvenient.

There is also the matter of power-saving behaviour. Like many active styluses, the pen enters a sleep mode when it has not been used for a period of time. When you start writing again, the first stroke or two can sometimes be delayed or fail to register, as the stylus takes a brief moment to wake up. This is a minor irritation, but one that I have personally encountered on numerous occasions.

The tactile writing experience itself is also affected by the extremely smooth surface of the display. Both the screen and the stylus nib offer very little friction. As a result, the pen tends to glide across the surface rather freely, which can make the writing feel somewhat slippery. Personally, I find that this lack of resistance makes it harder to control my handwriting, and my strokes often become a little messier than they would on a device with a more textured screen.

In fact, the sensation is somewhat comparable to writing on a whiteboard with a marker rather than writing on paper. For users with a very light writing touch, this may not be a major drawback, and some people might even appreciate the ability to create smooth, flowing strokes and decorative flourishes with ease. But for those who prefer a more paper-like feel, the experience may feel slightly unnatural.

One positive aspect of the stylus, however, is the soft nib. Because it is not a hard rigid plastic tip, it avoids the loud tapping sound that some active pens produce when they strike the screen. That harsh clicking noise can become quite irritating during long writing sessions, so I do appreciate the quieter behaviour here. In fact, this is probably one of the reasons why I find Bigme’s active pen more agreeable than many other active styluses I have used.

Even so, if given the choice, I would still prefer an EMR-based pen system.

All things considered, writing on the Bigme B10 is perfectly serviceable. You can take notes, annotate documents, and sketch ideas without any serious difficulty. But when compared to some of the best writing-focused e-ink tablets currently available, the overall tactile experience feels, in my opinion, below average.

Hardware features

Beyond the display and internal specifications that I discussed earlier, the Bigme B10 includes an extensive array of hardware features that significantly broaden the scope of what the device can do. In many respects, Bigme appears to have taken the philosophy that if an Android tablet normally includes a piece of hardware, then an e-ink tablet should probably have it too.

One of the more notable inclusions is the eight-microphone array, with four microphones located on the top edge and four on the bottom edge of the device. This setup allows the tablet to capture audio from multiple directions and works well for voice notes, meeting recordings, and general audio capture.

Complementing this is a pair of speakers located along the left edge. These allow the tablet to play back music, podcasts, audiobooks, or recorded voice notes without requiring external accessories. Naturally, you can also connect Bluetooth headphones if you prefer to listen privately, or even pair Bluetooth speakers for improved audio quality.

Bluetooth connectivity is also useful for peripherals. If you are not using Bigme’s keyboard folio, you can connect external keyboards or a mouse instead. I tested the tablet with my own Bluetooth mouse and found that it worked perfectly well, although I did have to adjust the refresh settings slightly to make the cursor movement feel a bit smoother on the e-ink display.

The tablet also features two physical page-turn buttons on the left side of the front panel. These are primarily intended for navigating between pages when reading, but they can also be customised to perform other functions. The buttons themselves feel good to press and provide a pleasant tactile click, which gives reassuring haptic feedback. As mentioned earlier, however, they do have a slight rattling movement within the casing, which I personally find a little bothersome.

Inside the device there is also a G-Sensor, which automatically rotates the screen between portrait and landscape modes when you turn the tablet. The USB-C port on the bottom edge handles both charging and data transfer. Interestingly, unlike some other Bigme tablets I have reviewed recently, the B10 allowed me to browse the Android file system directly from my laptop over a USB connection. Some of the smaller devices in Bigme’s range have had issues with this, so it was good to see proper functionality here.

Storage expansion is handled through the microSD card slot, which is located in the same tray as the micro-SIM slot. The inclusion of a SIM card slot means the tablet can connect directly to the internet via 4G mobile data. Personally, I rarely find this necessary, because if I have my tablet with me then I almost certainly have my phone as well, and it is usually easier to simply enable a Wi-Fi hotspot on the phone. That said, there are undoubtedly situations where built-in cellular connectivity will be useful for some users.

The power button, located on the top edge, also integrates a fingerprint scanner. This can be configured so that the device can only be unlocked using a fingerprint, passcode, or pattern, adding an additional layer of security. I personally do not tend to use biometric unlocking on my e-ink devices, but it is a useful option for those who prefer it.

The B10 also incorporates two cameras: a 5-megapixel front-facing camera and a 20-megapixel rear camera. Both function perfectly well, but again, this needs to be considered within the context of e-ink display technology. Because the screen has lower colour resolution and slower refresh behaviour than conventional displays, images from the camera appear somewhat grainy and slightly delayed when viewed directly on the tablet. When pointing the camera at something, there is roughly half a second of delay before the image appears on the screen, which can feel a little unnatural.

It is worth noting that this limitation comes from the display rather than the camera itself. If you capture a photo or video and then view it on another device with an LCD or OLED screen, it will look perfectly normal. It is simply the e-ink screen that makes the preview appear less refined.

I did experiment with the rear camera for scanning QR codes, and it was able to do so eventually, although it required a bit of repositioning before the code was recognised. Where the camera proved far more useful was document scanning. You can photograph a paper document and then use Bigme’s software to extract the text using OCR. The results are not absolutely perfect, but they are surprisingly accurate overall.

As mentioned earlier in the design section, there is also a vertical bank of eight touch-sensitive shortcut buttons along the left side of the display. These provide quick access to frequently used functions:

• Home returns you to the main home screen.
• Task Switcher displays all currently open applications so you can switch between them.
• Settings opens the system settings menu.
• E-Ink Center allows you to adjust refresh behaviour on a per-application basis.
• Control Center opens the same quick settings panel that appears when swiping down from the top right corner.
• Apps shows the full list of installed applications.
• Manual Refresh forces a full screen refresh to clear ghosting.
• Back returns to the previous screen.

For the most part, I found these shortcut areas extremely convenient for navigating the system quickly. However, they do come with a small downside. Because they are touch-sensitive rather than physical buttons, they can occasionally be triggered accidentally.

For example, when holding the tablet to read a book, my thumb sometimes rested close to the Back button, which occasionally caused the reader app to exit unexpectedly. Similarly, when writing near the left edge of the screen in the note-taking app, the stylus would sometimes drift slightly over the boundary – partly due to the smooth screen surface – and inadvertently activate one of the shortcuts, taking me out of the app. It is not a major problem, but it did happen often enough to be mildly frustrating.

When taken as a whole, the hardware feature set of the Bigme B10 is remarkably comprehensive. Few e-ink tablets offer this level of functionality. In terms of sheer versatility, it is arguably one of the most feature-rich e-ink devices currently available, and Bigme’s products in general tend to push the boundaries of what an e-ink tablet can include.

That said, the limitations of e-ink technology inevitably place some constraints on how these features can be used. Technically, you can conduct video calls on the tablet, for example, but the slight delay and graininess of the display make the experience less comfortable than on a conventional tablet.

This is not really a criticism of Bigme’s implementation. In fact, they have clearly gone to considerable lengths to bring a full Android-tablet feature set to an e-ink device. The reality is simply that e-ink screens were never originally designed for some of these multimedia tasks.

Nevertheless, there is definitely a subset of users who actively want an Android tablet with a colour e-ink display, and who are perfectly happy to accept those compromises in exchange for the benefits that e-ink provides. For that audience, the Bigme B10 offers an unusually broad and capable hardware platform.

Battery

The Bigme B10 has a 6900mAh battery, which is a comparatively large battery for an e-ink tablet.

The table below shows how much battery is depleted by performing certain operations for an hour.

Test (1hr)	Bigme B10 (% battery used)
Note-taking	3%
Reading	2%
Wifi On	+1%
Frontlight On (medium)	+2%
Frontlight On (full)	+4%

Bigme B10 Battery Test

So, you could expect to drain about 3% of the battery per hour when note-taking, and 2% per hour when reading. Having Wifi turned on uses around 1% extra per hour. With the frontlight turned on to a medium setting, add an additional 2% per hour, and on full, add an additional 2% per hour.

I calculate typical battery life from these figures by assuming 3 hours of note-taking and 3 hours of reading each day. If the frontlight is not used, you could expect to use up about 15% of the battery per day, which would give you about 6.6 days of usage. If the frontlight is turned on to a medium setting for the duration, the percentage of battery used increases to around 30% per day, and you could expect it to last around 3.7 days before recharging. Because it uses a colour Kaleido 3 screen, which is darker than monochrome screens (as discussed above) it is likely that you will need to have the frontlight turned on at least a little for most of the time.

This is a significant improvement on previous Bigme devices, and places the B10 a little better than average in terms of battery life (see how it compares to other e-ink tablets here). It appears that Bigme have been quietly working on optimising their software to improve battery usage – one thing I noticed is that the highest brightness for the frontlight is a little less intense than it was on previous models – I have expressed in other reviews that the top setting was too bright and would rarely need to be used in practice!

Accessories

Alongside the Bigme B10 tablet itself, Bigme also supplied three accessories: the stylus, a protective folio cover, and a keyboard folio. Each of these plays a different role in how the device is used, and my experience with them was somewhat mixed.

Stylus

The included stylus has a mostly cylindrical body, with one side slightly flattened so that it can sit flush against the flat right edge of the tablet, where it attaches magnetically and charges wirelessly. As mentioned earlier in the review, however, the magnetic connection is not particularly strong, and the stylus can detach rather easily when the tablet is moved around.

In terms of design, the stylus is quite lightweight but nicely balanced, and it has a metallic silver finish that gives it a slightly more premium appearance, even though the body itself is made from plastic. The top of the pen is dome-shaped and features a black button that functions as an eraser, along with a small red LED indicator that lights up when the stylus is magnetically attached to the tablet and charging.

Build quality is generally fairly solid. The pen does not creak under pressure, and although there is a very slight amount of movement in the eraser button, the resulting rattle is extremely subtle.

As discussed in the writing section, the stylus uses an active pen system rather than EMR technology, which in my opinion makes the overall writing experience slightly less satisfying and slightly less practical. That said, compared with many other active styluses I have used, the Bigme pen is actually one of the better examples.

One reason for this is the nib design. The tip is thinner and softer than many active stylus nibs I have encountered. Some devices (including those from reMarkable, Boox, and Kobo) use thicker, harder cone-shaped nibs that feel less precise and produce a rather loud tapping noise when they contact the screen.

The Bigme stylus, by contrast, feels more pen-like. The softer nib reduces that tapping sound considerably and allows for slightly more precise strokes. In comparison, those thicker cone-shaped nibs often feel more like writing with a crayon than with a pen.

Overall, the stylus is perfectly usable for note-taking, writing, and sketching, and for an active pen it performs quite well. Nevertheless, it still does not come close to the natural feel of the best EMR pens I have used.

Protective Folio Cover

The standard protective folio included with the tablet is rather different from other Bigme covers I have seen in the past. It consists of rigid panels separated by folding joints, allowing it to be configured as a stand.

The cover itself is made from a polymer material, although the outer surface has a faux leather texture that gives it a more traditional folio appearance. There is a cut-out on the rear panel for the camera, and on the interior there is a small indentation to accommodate the page-turn buttons, which protrude slightly from the front of the tablet.

One particularly interesting design choice is that the folio includes an internal recess for the stylus. Normally, tablet folios simply cover the tablet while leaving the stylus attached to the exterior magnetic edge. Some offer a magnetic flap to hold it in place. And others disregard magnetism completely and use a physical pen loop (which is my personal preference). In this case, however, the stylus sits inside the folio itself, and the magnetic connection is considerably stronger when housed there. In fact, once it was placed inside the folio I was unable to dislodge the stylus even when shaking the device vigorously, which effectively resolves the problem of the stylus falling off the tablet.

The tablet itself attaches to the rear interior panel via magnets, and the connection is reasonably strong. However, the folding structure of the folio introduces a significant issue. Because the rear panel contains multiple fold points, holding the folio in certain places can cause it to bend backwards, which in turn allows the tablet to tilt and potentially fall out.

There is a small metal block in the lower-right corner of the rear panel, which I suspect is intended to help align the tablet correctly. However, if you pick up the folio with your thumb resting on that metal block and your fingers wrapped around the rear panel, the fold can collapse and the tablet may slip out.

Unfortunately, this actually happened to me twice (see the video at the foot of this section for a demonstration). On one occasion the tablet fell onto my desk, and on another it dropped onto the floor. Fortunately the B10 proved remarkably resilient, and the screen survived both incidents without damage.

The folding structure does allow the cover to be configured as a stand at roughly a 75-degree angle, which is useful for viewing content on a desk. However, the stand configuration is not particularly stable. It does not collapse entirely, but tapping the screen causes the tablet to rock backwards slightly and wobble, which makes it unsuitable for writing or drawing tasks. It is more appropriate for passive viewing, such as reading or watching content.

Overall, the folio is acceptable in principle, but in practice I found it somewhat problematic. Ironically, the only times the tablet came close to being damaged were when it was inside the protective cover itself. Personally, I would probably prefer a simpler folio design without folding joints, as that would eliminate the risk of the tablet slipping out unexpectedly.

That said, the stylus storage inside the folio is an excellent idea, and the stronger magnetic retention inside the cover effectively solves the stylus detachment problem.

Because of the incidents I experienced, however, I found myself somewhat reluctant to continue using this folio, as I was always worried about picking it up incorrectly and sending the tablet flying again.

Keyboard Folio

Fortunately, Bigme also provided a keyboard folio, which meant I was not forced to rely on the standard protective cover.

Externally, the keyboard folio has a similar faux leather texture, although the unit I received was bright orange on the outside with a black interior. Inside, it contains both a full QWERTY keyboard and a trackpad.

The keyboard uses a US layout, which is fairly common for devices manufactured in China since manufacturers rarely produce multiple regional keyboard variants. As someone based in the UK, I am more accustomed to the UK layout, although the system can be configured to use UK key mapping. The only downside is that the printed characters on the keys will not always match the characters that appear on screen.

The tablet attaches magnetically and also slots into a bar along the interior spine of the folio, where small plastic guides align with the two holes on the right edge of the tablet to ensure the pogo pins make proper contact.

Like the standard folio, the keyboard version can also fold into a stand configuration, although the viewing angle here is closer to 60 degrees. Unfortunately, the stability issues remain. Tapping the screen causes the tablet to tilt backwards slightly and wobble, and if you try to drag the keyboard closer toward you on a desk, the entire stand structure tends to collapse.

Build quality is also somewhat questionable. Applying a little pressure to the edge of the keyboard causes the trackpad area to lift slightly (see video below), and when the folio is closed the keyboard rests directly against the screen. I have seen this behaviour on several keyboard folios produced by Chinese manufacturers, and it is never particularly reassuring.

To Bigme’s credit, the keyboard itself is relatively lightweight, so the impact when closing the folio is less severe than on some heavier designs. Nevertheless, having a hard keyboard surface in direct contact with the screen is not ideal.

There is also a small amount of movement when the folio is closed, meaning that if the device is inside a backpack it is likely that the keyboard and screen will rub against each other during movement, which again is not particularly comforting.

Unlike the regular folio, the keyboard version does not include a recess for the stylus, which means the pen must remain attached to the magnetic edge of the tablet. Given the weak magnetic connection, the stylus almost always fell off inside my bag, and I frequently had to retrieve it from the bottom of the backpack.

In terms of functionality, however, the keyboard and trackpad themselves work very well. Typing latency was essentially negligible, and characters appeared on screen almost immediately. The function keys and shortcuts all worked properly, and the trackpad responded reliably.

The keyboard is not backlit, and there is no LED indicator for Caps Lock, but these are features that many users may not consider essential on an e-ink device.

So while the keyboard itself performs perfectly well, the folio that houses it leaves something to be desired. In terms of overall design, both reMarkable and iFlytek currently offer more refined keyboard folio designs. The Bigme implementation feels very similar to the keyboard folios used by Boox, and unfortunately it inherits many of the same shortcomings.

I demonstrate a few of the issues with the folios in the quick video below:

Software

My review of this tablet should be read in conjunction with my review of the current firmware (see table below), which includes aspects such as the Operating System, User Interface, and Native Apps.

The hardware and software reviews have been separated because the firmware used at the time that this review was written may not be the same firmware being used currently. This could result in the review quickly becoming outdated. Also, as several tablets may use the same firmware, this would mean going back and updating every single tablet review from a particular manufacturer to account for the new firmware. By splitting them up, if there is a firmware update, I am able to make the updates on a single page.

Current versions of this brand’s firmware are shown in the table below, along with the tablets running them.

My rating	Firmware version	Tablets using this firmware
	4.6 (current version) Aug 2025	Bigme B1051C Bigme B10 Bigme B7 Pro Bigme B7 Bigme B751C
Older Bigme firmware versions may be found here

Brand

For some people, it is also worth considering the brand as whole, including aspects like customer service, ecosystem, values, and criticisms.

My full overview of the Bigme brand can be found here, but I have provided a summary below.

Final Verdict

After spending around a week with the Bigme B10, my overall impression is that it is one of the most powerful and feature-rich e-ink tablets currently available.

From a hardware perspective, it is genuinely impressive. The device performed extremely well in my CPU benchmark testing, with results sitting very close to the top of my benchmarking table. When you combine that processing power with 8 GB of RAM, generous storage, a dedicated GPU, and Bigme’s proprietary xRapid display optimisation software, the B10 becomes one of the most technically capable e-ink devices on the market.

Beyond raw processing power, the tablet also includes a remarkably broad set of hardware features. The microphone array, stereo speakers, front and rear cameras, G-sensor, fingerprint scanner, keyboard folio support, colour e-ink screen, Android operating system, and access to third-party applications via the Google Play Store all contribute to a device that feels far closer to a full Android tablet than most traditional e-ink readers. In terms of sheer flexibility and scope, the B10 is arguably among the most versatile e-ink tablets currently available.

However, as is often the case with Bigme devices, the primary drawback lies in the software rather than the hardware, particularly the native apps.

Bigme consistently produces tablets with excellent specifications, but the native applications can feel clunky, inconsistent, and occasionally buggy. During my testing, the reading app crashed twice, and the note-taking app exhibited several frustrating quirks.

For example, if you are writing on a page in portrait orientation and the tablet accidentally rotates into landscape, returning it to portrait sometimes leaves a large blank margin on the right side of the page. When this happens, attempting to swipe to the next page simply pans the page sideways instead of turning it, making navigation awkward. Intermittently (and somewhat inexplicably) the blank space disappears and the page behaves normally again.

There are also some design choices that I personally find irritating. The floating toolbars in the note-taking app, for instance, make the interface look cluttered. Although they can be minimised, they cannot be locked neatly to the edge of the screen, which would make them far less intrusive.

The stroke eraser tool is another example. When you erase something, it briefly draws a temporary line across the screen before performing the actual erase, which is visually confusing and somewhat distracting. Additionally, shapes that you have drawn cannot be erased using the eraser tool – instead, you must select them with the lasso selection tool and then delete them manually.

These are relatively small issues individually, but they accumulate. And unfortunately, they are not isolated incidents. Anyone who reads through my previous reviews of Bigme tablets – or my analysis of Bigme’s firmware – will find numerous similar examples of odd behaviours and unintuitive design choices within the native apps.

To be clear, the software is not so broken that the device becomes unusable. But it does often feel as though something behaves slightly differently from what you would reasonably expect. Over time, those little inconsistencies can become mentally exhausting, and they do detract from the otherwise impressive hardware.

The writing experience also sits somewhere in the middle of the pack. It is perfectly usable, but it is not among the most satisfying writing experiences available. The combination of a smooth screen surface and the active stylus system makes the experience feel somewhat slippery compared with the more natural feel offered by devices that use EMR pens and textured screens.

Similarly, while the design and build quality of the tablet itself are very good, the folio and keyboard folio accessories do not quite match that standard, with some questionable design choices and structural weaknesses.

For those reasons, I would personally rate the hardware of the Bigme B10 quite highly, but the overall rating inevitably drops because of the firmware.

Interestingly, though, most of my criticisms are directed specifically at the native reading and note-taking apps, which historically have been the primary use cases for e-ink tablets. Increasingly, however, I am starting to feel that the wider Android environment on the device is actually quite capable, particularly given the display optimisation features that Bigme provides for third-party applications.

Because of that, I have begun experimenting with a different approach: using the Bigme B10 primarily as an e-ink productivity machine rather than as a reading and note-taking device.

In fact, I am typing this review on the B10 itself right now, using the keyboard folio and third-party applications. My early impressions suggest that the tablet may actually perform surprisingly well in this role, but I need to conduct further testing before drawing any firm conclusions.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to explore the viability of using the Bigme B10 as a kind of “e-ink laptop” – particularly for users who want to perform general productivity tasks on an e-ink display. This could be especially interesting for people who experience eye strain, headaches, or fatigue from prolonged use of traditional LCD or OLED screens, but still need to be able to carry out computing tasks.

Once those tests are complete, I will publish a separate article examining whether the Bigme B10 can realistically function as an alternative to a conventional laptop, and I will add a link to that article here when it is available.

Buying options

The Bigme B10 can be purchased from:

• The Bigme Store*
• Some Amazon Stores*
  

Technical Specs