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Over the past few years, the Chinese-made Boox Palma e-reader has gained a cult following in the U.S. for its phone-like form factor, Android compatibility, and less-addictive grayscale screen—I’ve personally credited it with helping me spend more time reading and less time scrolling on my iPhone. But as much as I love it, I do still always need to carry my phone with me, because the Palma—even the newer Palma 2 Pro with mobile data—just isn’t a good match for many of the tasks I use my phone for, including navigation and tap-to-pay.
Soon, though, there may be a dual-purpose device that will serve both masters. Bigme, another Chinese tech company best known for its e-ink devices like e-readers and digital notebooks, has announced plans to produce a smartphone with two displays—an LCD screen on one side, and a color e-ink screen on the other.
The “world’s first” color e-ink/LCD smartphone
This new phone doesn’t yet have a price tag or a release date, but it does have a placeholder product page on the Bigme website, which promises the “Hibreak Dual” will be the “world’s first color e-ink + LCD = dual-screen smartphone.” The company has also posted cryptic comments on Reddit, encouraging you to “reserve your front-row seat” by signing up for more information about the device when it becomes available.
While the tech sounds intriguing, I have some reservations. It’s true that Bigme has a track record with e-ink smartphones—it has made a few of them, including the Hibreak Pro, which is generally recognized as the best e-ink smartphone in a (very) niche market. But I’ve tried it, and it has the same problem that plagues Bigme’s e-readers: absolutely horrendous software. I imagine the “Hibreak Dual” will use a similar OS, with the added technical hurdle that it will have to be optimized for two display formats. So my interest is piqued, but I’m skeptical the user experience will be good enough to actually make me consider ditching iOS.
Though there are no indication of what it might cost, the Hibreak Dual is likely to be on par with the entry level iPhone 17e at the very least—the existing Hibreak Pro costs between $400 and $430, depending on the model and the current promotions Bigme is offering.
What do you think so far?
Not truly the first dual-screen device
While Bigme may be technically correct that the Hibreak Dual would be the first phone with both an LCD screen and color e-ink, it’s not quite the innovation it seems: Yota, a now-defunct Russian mobile phone manufacturer, debuted the “Yotaphone” way back in 2012. That device had a 4.2-inch LCD screen on the front and a black-and-white e-ink display on the back. Though a few different models were introduced over the years, it was never widely available internationally, however, and Yota went out of business in 2019.