Bigme B7 Pro Review

The Bigme B7 Pro is an incremental upgrade to the Bigme B7, which I reviewed here. There have been a few upgrades, but the two devices are extremely similar.

Consequently, much of this review is identical to that of the B7.

Design and Build

I should start by saying that the B7 Pro has almost the same design and build as the B7 – but there are a few differences and I will highlight them as they are explored.

The Bigme B7 Pro is a small 7″ e-ink tablet, which means that it is light and portable. Although the surface of the rear of the tablet is quite smooth, it is not as slippery as it looks, and it is comfortable to hold for long periods whilst reading.

It has a dark-silver metal chassis, and a glass screen. Upon close inspection, it appears to be well-machined with no visible imperfections. There is no audible creaking, and it appears to be robust and durable. When shook, there is a slight rattle coming from page-turn buttons, but it is very subtle and not overly concerning.

The edges are flat and the corners are rounded. On the left edge is the USB port (for charging/data transfer) and the speaker. On the top edge is the power button (slightly raised) and a microphone. The right edge is bare, but the stylus can be magnetically snapped here. And the bottom edge has a microphone and a tray to hold a sim card and MicroSD card.

On the left side of front panel are two physical page-turn buttons. The buttons have a nice tactile and audible ‘click‘ when pressed, however (as previously mentioned), the buttons have a little free movement in their housing. In contrast, the B7 buttons felt firm and solid, and protruded out a little further, so I’m not sure why Bigme have made a change that (in my opinion) is detrimental. There is a gap between each button, which makes it easy to identify which-is-which when reading in the dark.

In the top-right corner of the underside is a 5Mp camera, and it is completely flush with the rear panel. It is really well integrated into the chassis, and allows the unit to lie flat (unlike some other e-ink tablets like the Boox Tab Ultra C Pro, which have the camera lens protruding out a millimetre or two).

Whereas the B7 had a black/dark grey chassis and bezel, the B7 Pro is in white. In addition, there is a touch-sensitive strip down the left side of the screen, offering a array of buttons to perform various system functions.

Overall, I feel the design and build of the Bigme B7 Pro is exceedingly good. It is small, lightweight, and comfortable to hold, and appears to be robust and durable.

Hardware specs

Under the bonnet, the Bigme B7 Pro is powered by an 8-core CPU (ARM Cortex A55/ARM Cortex-A78) processor, and a clock speed of 2.6GHz. The older B7 had a MediaTek Helio P35 (2.3GHz), so there is a big improvement there with both clock speed and CPU architecture.

It has 8Gb of RAM, and 256Gb of storage capacity (although I do believe different memory/storage configurations are available).

In addition, there is an internal GPU and it uses Bigme’s xRapid technology, which allows for faster refresh rates in third-party apps (often at the cost of battery life).

In my benchmarking tests, it scored 1703 in the multi-core test, and 767 in the single-core test (the mean average of three tests). This is very high for a 7″ e-ink tablet, and is comparable in performance to the Boox Go 7/Go Color 7, and Boox Palma 2 Pro. which are similarly-sized e-ink tablets. Of course, there are other e-ink devices that can perform better, but they are typically larger-screened powerhouses (you check out my benchmarks table for several e-ink tablets here).

And, in general use, I found it to be very quick and snappy (in the context of e-ink technology).

Screen

The screen is 7″ in size, which is fair bit smaller than more conventional ~10″ screens and this has both advantages and disadvantages.

On the plus side, it is small, compact, and lightweight, which makes it very portable and comfortable to hold. On the negative side, it can be uncomfortable to read some PDFs (although there are software options to improve comfort, such as viewing half-a-page per screen in landscape mode), and you have a smaller canvas for writing on. In my eyes, this form factor works really well for reading ebooks, particularly as it has physical page-turn buttons, but is not so convenient for writing tasks, unless you are just jotting down quick ad-hoc notes.

The Bigme B7 Pro has a Kaleido 3 (colour) screen, which is particularly useful when web browsing, reading color ebooks/comic books, or color-coding your notes. However, please note that all color e-ink screens are not as bright or vibrant as conventional LCD/OLED screens – colors have a pixel density of 150 DPI, and black-and-white is 300DPI. And when compared with monochrome e-ink tablets, the overall screen contrast (without a frontlight) is a few shades darker – this means that you usually need to turn on the frontlight more frequently with color e-ink than with a monochrome equivalent (which drains more battery – see my battery tests below).

There’s a frontlight, with both warm and cold settings, and it illuminates the screen really well. The extra layer of the frontlight often creates a small gap between where the stylus nib touches the screen and where the strokes appear, almost as if you are writing underneath the screen. But on the B7 Pro, this was very tiny and almost indiscernible (which was a good thing).

Overall the screen is very good.

Writing feel

I noted in my review of the Boox Go Color 7 that I inadvertently used the Bigme stylus with it, and doing so improved the tactile writing feel. This is because the nib of the Bigme stylus is thinner, rougher, and softer than that of the original Boox InkSense stylus, which means that it feels more precise, has a bit more friction, and doesn’t produce a harsh tapping sound every time the nib hits the screen. I should mention that since my review of the GC7, Boox have released a new version of their InkSense stylus which is far better.

However, both Boox’s InkSpire, and the Bigme stylus use Active Pen technology for stylus input, as opposed to the more conventional Wacom-EMR tech. I write about the differences here, but the upshot is that, for me, EMR provides a much more fluid and natural writing experience. I’m guessing the reason is to bring down the overall cost of the device, because licencing from Wacom may not be financially viable for these smaller, more affordable e-ink tablets.

Having said that, the Bigme B7 stylus is perhaps the best I’ve used on a non-EMR e-ink tablet. But, when compared to those tablets that do use Wacom EMR, it doesn’t quite shape up. The pen glides across the screen a bit too slickly, producing more of a marker-on-whiteboard feel than pen-on-paper. Occasionally, I would experience missed strokes, leaving gaps in my handwriting, and when writing quickly, I experienced a small amount of latency, with the strokes lagging behind the pen nib a little – although this was infrequent, it was often enough to mention here. It also suffered from what I dub ‘wake-up time‘. Because, unlike an EMR stylus, it has an internal battery, if you don’t use it for a few minutes it powers off. Then when you come to write, there is a delay for your first strokes to appear as it turns back on.

Despite the occasional lag, writing did feel quite precise, and I was surprised to see that there did not seem to be too much of a gap between the surface of the screen and where the strokes appear. Often, on e-ink tablets that have a frontlight, there is a discernible space between the surface and the ink, almost as if you are writing beneath the screen. This gap is not so apparent on the B7 Pro. However, when sketching, which requires more precision, I found the accuracy to be slightly off.

Overall, the writing feel is okay, but personally I prefer the tactile feel and precision of Wacom styluses. However, as far as non-Wacom styluses go, this is probably one of the better options. It is perfectly usable for quick note-taking tasks, but I wouldn’t want to be using this as my primary writing tablet.

Hardware features

As standard for most e-ink tablets, there’s support for both Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity. As well as connecting headphones, Bluetooth can also be used to connect other peripherals, such as third-party keyboards, or a mouse.

For further connectivity, the single USB-C port, however, when I connected it up to my laptop, I was unable to browse the files/folders on the B7. My laptop recognised the tablet as a mass storage device but no files or folders were displayed. This actually highlighted a more general issue with the software, which I will discuss in my final verdict.

As previously mentioned, there are physical page-turn buttons. There’s a G-Sensor for automatically reorienting the screen between landscape/portrait when you rotate it physically. This means that you can have the physical page-turn buttons on the left or right side depending on your preference (or even at the bottom when viewing ebooks in landscape).

And there’s also speakers and microphone. The microphone can be used for recording voice notes or for recording a meeting – Bigme also provide software for transcribing and translating voice. As well as system sounds (such as notification alerts), the speakers can be used for listening to music/videos. However, don’t expect too much from the onboard speakers and mic – they’re very basic additions that are great for simple everyday use, but are not going to produce anything of production quality. In addition, there is also an internal vibration motor that provides haptic feedback during certain operations – personally, I found this annoying and turned it off!

For additional storage, there’s a MicroSD card slot/tray. Also accessible via the tray is a compartment for a Sim card (NanoSim form factor). This means that the B7 Pro offers something that very few other e-ink tablets offer – the ability to connect over 4G mobile networks. Not only is this useful for data transfers when no local wifi networks are available, but it also means that the B7 Pro can (technically) be used as an Android phone. Obviously, it wouldn’t be as convenient as a smartphone for calls – you’re not going to hold it up to your ear in a comfortable fashion – but laying it flat on a table and using speakerphone is an option. You can also use it for tasks such as SMS messaging, as well as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger etc.

As noted earlier, the left bezel of the screen has a vertical row of touch-sensitive shortcut buttons. They are:

• Home
• Task Manager
• Settings
• E-Ink Center
• Apps
• Control Center
• Manual screen refresh
• Back

At first, I wasn’t to sure about them, but as I became more familiar with them, I actually found them to be quite useful for navigation around the system. In addition, I found them to be more responsive than the regular swiping gestures that they replace – sometimes swipes don’t register if you don’t get the start-point and direction exactly right, but there is no such trouble with a button that just requires a simple tap.

However, I also encountered a slight inconvenience with them. Occasionally, when reading, I would inadvertently trigger one of the buttons, due to how I was holding the device, and my fingers being close to the buttons. Most often, this was the lower-most ‘Back‘ button, so it would close down my book and go back to the homescreen, which was somewhat irritating. There is an option to re-map the buttons to various other functions in the software settings (but, obviously, you can’t change the icon pictures on the buttons themselves, which plays havoc with my brain when the function doesn’t align properly with the picture – but that’s probably just me lol!)

Finally, the B7 Pro includes a rear-facing camera – another rare feature for any e-ink tablet, and the only one of its kind that I know of in the 7″ form factor (unless you include the smart-phone-sized Boox Palma 2 Pro). It is 5Mp and has a flash (which, incidentally, can also double up as a flashlight). The camera can be used for taking low-quality photos, but the most powerful use for it is document scanning. If you have a paper document, you can use Bigme’s Document Scanner tool to take a picture of it and convert it into text. A wi-fi connection is needed for the conversion, but I was quite surprised at how well it worked – it didn’t get my test document 100% correct, but it was pretty close! Considering my document had a lot of mathematical notation in it, the B7 Pro did a decent job of converting it (see images below) The scanned document can then be exported as either PDF or TXT.

Overall, the Bigme B7 Pro has a plethora of hardware features, some of which you wouldn’t usually expect on an e-ink tablet, particularly a 7″ model. This means that it is versatile and can potentially be used for a wider variety of tasks than is usually expected from this type of device.

Battery

The B7 Pro has a 3000mAh battery, which is a decent-sized battery for a small e-ink tablet, and it performed moderately well in my tests

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

Test (1hr)	Bigme B7 Pro (% battery used)
Note-taking	4%
Reading	2%
Wifi On	+2%
Frontlight On (medium)	+2%
Frontlight On (full)	+8%

Bigme B7 Pro Battery Test

So, you could expect to drain about 4% of the battery per hour when note-taking, and 2% per hour when reading. Having Wifi turned on uses around 2% extra per hour. With the frontlight turned on to a medium setting, add an additional 2% per hour, and on full, add an additional 8% 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 18% of the battery per day, which would give you about 5.6 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 3.3 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.

The older B7 (without the ‘Pro‘), had one of the poorest battery performances of all the e-ink tablets I’ve tested, so it is good to see that Bigme have addressed the shortcomings of its predecessor. And whilst the B7 Pro still does not have the absolute best battery life, it is now perfectly respectable, particularly considering that it has a high-performance CPU and GPU under the bonnet.

I also want to make a quick note with regards the 8% per hour drainage when the frontlight is on full intensity. The highest setting is extremely bright, so I feel that for all practical purposes, there is no reason to set it that high – I found the medium setting to be more than sufficient for pretty much all situations.

So, overall, battery life on the B7 is good – the higher side of average.

Accessories

Along with the B7 itself, Bigme also shipped a folio and stylus.

Folio

The folio that is shipped with the Bigme B7 Pro is good. Not amazing or full of design innovation but perfectly adequate for the core functions of holding the stylus and protecting the screen.

Unlike Bigme’s older B751C, the spine is joined to the front and rear panels along the whole of the edge, which means that the two panels no longer move independently of one another. It is also thin and lightweight.

It is made from a polymer material, with a kind-of leathery texture on the exterior and a slightly softer texture on the interior. The front panel is divided into three slightly thicker rectangular sections both to protect the screen and to fold up to convert the folio into a stand (landscape mode). In the stand, the tablet doesn’t feel all that stable, but it is usable.

There’s a magnetic flap on the right side that acts as a clasp to keep the folio closed and hold the stylus in place. Personally I don’t like these flaps because they just sort of flop around when the folio is open. You can magnetically snap it to the rear panel, but then the folio doesn’t lie flat on the desk, so it just becomes a little bothersome trying to manage the flap in day-to-day use. However, this is true for a lot of e-ink tablets – the only one I can say that has resolved this issue adequately is the reMarkable Paper Pro, which has an magnetic indent on the rear of the folio that the flap fits perfectly into when the folio is open.

On the interior of the B7 Pro folio, adjacent to the spine and centralised, is a small indent for the physical page-turn buttons. As I mentioned earlier, I prefer the buttons to be on the right, but this is not possible when the tablet is in the folio because they will only magnetically connect with the buttons on the left. Again, not a massive issue for me because I tend to only use the folio for protection during transportation, detaching the tablet when I want to use it (which is easy to do because it is only held with magnets). I find most small 7″ e-ink tablets to be more comfortable to hold without the folio, not only because they are lighter, but also because the edges of the tablet are softer and more rounded than the edges of the folio, and there are less moving parts (such as the flap, or front panel).

One issue that I had with the B7 (the earlier version) was that it wasn’t possible to charge the device whilst the folio was closed because the spine blocked the USB-C port. This has been resolved with the Bigme B7 Pro folio – there is a hole punched out to access the port. However, it still means that you cannot open and close the folio whilst the charger is plugged in (I’ve said many many times before that the left edge is the absolute worst location for the USB-C port because the folio prevents easy-access, but still many manufacturers make the decision to put it there!)

There’s also a small ellipse-shaped cut-out on the rear panel for the camera, however, if the front panel is open and folded behind the rear panel, this blocks the camera lens, so (again) I found it more convenient to remove the tablet from the folio when using the camera, rather than having the front panel swinging around when trying to take a photo.

Overall the folio is good. There’s a few irksome design issues with it, but these are related to using the tablet whilst it is inside the folio. They become non-issues if you detach the tablet from the folio prior to using it.

Stylus

The Bigme stylus is mostly cylindrical with one flattened edge so that it snaps flush to the right edge of the tablet via magnetism. Incidentally, the stylus (being non-Wacom and having an internal battery) charges wirelessly when attached to the tablet, so you don;t have to worry about charging it separately..

The top of the stylus is dome-shaped and has a small push button on the top that acts as a selection eraser (you do have to make sure it is pressed in for it to work). I couldn’t find any way to customize this button – the Stylus section in settings only provides the calibration tool I discussed about.

As I noted in the Writing Feel section above, the nib is quite thin and precise for an Active Pen. The material it is made from also has quite a soft and ‘rubbery‘ texture, which means the sound of the tip hitting the screen is quite muted and there is some resistance when making pen strokes (although not quite enough friction for my liking). And it actually feels quite pleasant to write with (although not as good as pretty much all Wacom equivalents I’ve used).

It is quite light, but fairly well balanced. However, it does rattle when shaken, which I, personally, find to bit a bit irksome.

Overall, the stylus is okay. As Active Pens go, it probably has the nicest writing feel, but that is in the context of being the best of (in my opinion) a second-tier technology. I find pretty much all Wacom (first-tier) styluses to be much nicer to use.

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.

At the time of writing this review, Bigme had just released a new firmware version, which I haven’t yet reviewed – although, if you’re reading this a few weeks hence, it will probably have been reviewed.

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

I’ve now reviewed enough Bigme E-Ink tablets to build a kind-of general picture of the brand, and the Bigme B7 Pro falls into the same mold; well-designed, well-manufactured, and powerful hardware that is let down by sub-standard software.

I have a lot of positive things to say about the Bigme hardware. Performance is generally great, and the GPU and super-refresh technology allows many third-party apps to be much more usable than on other e-ink devices. It looks and feels solid and robust. And it has such a wide array of hardware features (frontlight, speakers, microphone, camera, MiscroSD slot, MicroSIM slot, page-turn buttons, shortcut buttons etc.) that makes it one of the most (potentially) versatile e-ink devices available.

In addition, Bigme have addressed the two main hardware issues that I had with its predecessor (the B7); namely relatively poor CPU performance and battery life.

And I’m not saying that the software is completely unusable – on the contrary, for the most part it works adequately.

It’s just that almost every single session I have with a Bigme device, I find something new in the software that is either buggy or bothersome to me.

You can read my historical firmware reviews to see a myriad of examples of the eccentricities of the Bigme software.

More recently (with the B7 Pro), I discovered that transferring files to and from the tablet was not quite as easy as it should be if you don’t want to use either the Bigme Cloud, or a third-party alternative. My task was to transfer my custom eWritable sleep-screen (a PNG image) to the B7 Pro and transfer screenshots of the CPU info and Geekbench benchmarks (see above) from the tablet. First, I tried a USB cable, but as I already mentioned, the folders were not shown. Then I looked for a local wifi transfer app, but I wasn’t able to find one. You can import e-books and PDFs over local wifi from the Library app, but there’s no way to move files to other devices, or do transfers externally to the Bigme Library. There are alternatives (such as Bigme Cloud, Google Drive, etc.) but these require third-party apps and data transmission across the Internet, which not everyboady is comfortable with. Most other brands provide some way of transferring files over local wifi.

In the end I used the only option that was left – Bluetooth – which was okay for this particular task, but would be extremely slow if I were transferring bigger files.

Another example was a third-party app not loading (tapping the app icon made the screen go blank and then return to the homescreen). This was resolved by tapping the power button and putting the device into sleep mode, then turning the device back on again.

The first time I tried out the note-taking app, my palm inadvertently triggered a scrolling of the page, and it didn’t auto refresh, leaving behind horrible ghosting. A manual refresh resolved this – and to be fair you occasionally get these ‘after-images’ with pretty much all tablets that have an e-ink screen – but it felt more frequent and more noticeable on the Bigme.

In the native reading app, I found that the default font was putting multiple spaces after each apostrophe (resolved by changing the font) and for some reason you can’t highlight a word with a long-press if it is on the first (top-most) line of a page.

Taken individually, the odd nuance can quickly be dismissed. And none of them are catastrophic. But when added together, and you are encountering new and unexpected ‘hiccups‘ on a frequent basis, you lose faith in the ability to use a device productively.

And this is exactly how I feel when I’m using the Bigme B7 Pro (or any Bigme device). 90% of the time it will work brilliantly, but the other 10% throws up an inconvenience. And when you get this on the regular, you spend the ‘good‘ 90% anticipating the next inevitable issue instead of focusing on what you’re supposed to be doing.

When you look at the wider e-ink tablet market, there are really only two manufacturers that offer high-performance, colour, Android tablets; Boox and Bigme. On the hardware side, Bigme tablets are on par with Boox, and in certain areas are actually slightly better. But the Boox firmware is far better-developed than Bigme’s offering, in terms of software features, user interface, and overall stability. That’s not to say Boox devices are perfect (they have their fair share of areas that could be improved). And it’s not to say that Bigme devices are terrible (as I said, for the most part, they are totally usable). But given the choice between the two, the overall benefits always favour Boox.

In fact, one could argue that the Boox are Bigme’s primary competitive obstacle – if Boox didn’t exist, I’m sure that Bigme would would get far more accolades because there isn’t really any other brand that fits into this particular niche (powerful, colour, Android e-ink tablets).

If Bigme were to price their tablets below that of their main competitor, you could perhaps justify the clunkier firmware – it could be classed as a more affordable alternative to Boox. But in reality, Bigme tablets tend to actually cost more than Boox equivalents, leaving very little contest for a prospective buyer. Yes, there are some areas where Bigme tablets are slightly better than Boox (e.g. the stylus on the B7 is a little nicer than that of the Boox Go 7, they tend to use more up-to-date versions of Android, the hardware is a little faster etc.) but these are small things that have only a minor positive impact to the end user.

If Bigme could make their software as robust and refined as their hardware (or alternatively undercut their main competitor), I feel they could earn a greater market share. But as it stands, other than in fringe use cases, there is little reason to choose Bigme over Boox.

Buying options

The Bigme B7 Pro can be purchased from:

• The Bigme Store*
• Some Amazon Stores*
  

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