Review: Bigme B10 e-paper tablet with 4G

Review unit provided by Bigme

The Bigme B10 e-paper tablet was released in early 2026. This tablet comes with a 10.3-inch display, 4G celluar, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, Android 14 and Google Play Store.

The price at the time of review is USD 594 which includes a cover, or USD 669 which includes a keyboard cover.

Specifications

Things included

• Tablet
• Cover
• USB-C charging cable
• Pen
• Replacement pen tip
• User guide

The cover is well made and the exterior has leather-like texture. There's auto-wake and sleep feature.

Tablet can be propped up by the cover.

Design

Design of the Bigme B10 looks good. The bezels are white. The bezel on the left is bigger and has a 5MP at the top, two side buttons, and sufficient space for thumb grip.

The back is also white and has a smooth matte surface. The 20MP rear camera and flash are flushed to the surface. The camera is likely to scratch if you're using this tablet without a case. I find the front and back surfaces quite susceptible to fingerprints.

The tablet can be detached from the case easily, and isn't too heavy.

The power button has a built-in fingerprint scanner. Just below the power button is the front camera. The camera operation is quite slow, and takes seconds to switch from one to back camera and back.

The two side buttons default to adjusting volume, and work as page flip buttons depending on which e-reader app used. In addition to the two physical buttons, there are eight softkey shortcuts for:

• Home
• Task switcher
• Settings
• E-ink settings
• Control panel
• Apps
• Refresh page
• Back

Having those softkey shortcuts is very convenient.

The tablet is quite thin. The tablet supports a keyboard case and the connectors are located by the side of the tablet. There are two speakers and the audio sounds hollow, which isn't surprising.

The keyboard for a tablet with a 10-inch screen is gonna be small, so the typing experience isn't going to be ideal.

The tablet supports 4G cellular and there's a microSD card slot.

Display

The 10.3-inch display size is big enough for reading comics and PDFs.

The display uses Kaleido 3 technology and the gray of the e-paper canvas is darker compared to BW-only e-readers. So having the front light enabled will improve contrast and visual quality noticeably.

Here's how Kaleido 3 displays look with and without front light. The difference is obvious.

Resolution of BW is 2480×1860 (300 PPI) and colour is 1404×1872 (227 PPI).

Text quality looks good.

The display is almost laminated so the visuals are almost on the surface and look great. Viewing angle is terrific.

There are 32 levels of cool light and warm light. Front lighting looks quite even to me without the uneven glow at the edges.

Shown below is how a colour wheel looks with various display or refresh modes.

Default. There seems to be some issues with displaying green. Violets, mauves, mauve pinks, pinks are difficult to differentiate from one another. Lighter red, orange, yellows, yellow greens are difficult to differentiate from one another.

Comics. Colours are more saturated, but colours are easier to differentiate from one another.

Magazine. Colours are more saturated, but certain colours can be difficult to differentiate from one another due to being similar colour and similar value.

Video. Colours almost look like default settings, but on close look there's grain in the colours.

This is how comics look with Default mode. Colours may not be as saturated but there's minimal ghosting. Pages also flip fast.

This is Comic mode and there's some ghosting and pages flip with flickering. Colours are more saturated.

Ghosting or image retention is quite obvious with Magazine mode, more obvious compared to Comic mode. Pages will flip with flickering. Due to ghosting, you almost always need to do a page refresh manually.

The difference between the different display modes would be the refresh speed which will vary from fast to slow. There will be a compromise between visual quality and refresh speed. Which to choose is just personal preference. I would go with the default mode most of the time, but may switch to comic mode when I want better colours.

Performance

The tablet uses the Dimensity 1080 processor, has 8GB RAM and 256GB internal storage. Overall performance is small for an e-reader, limited only by the speed of the display.

Web browsing is best used with Default mode because Comics and Magazine modes have noticeable ghosting and page flicker.

OS and software

Bigme has their own UI running on top of Android 14. Features are quite basic and I don't expect much.

There is Google Play Store so you can install whatever apps you need.

There are several Bigme apps included and no bloatware unless you consider the Bigme apps or WPS Office are bloatware.

Pen

Bigme advertises a "wireless charging stylus" so it seems like this pen may have an internal battery. The pen has a cylindrical design except for a flat side that attaches magnetically to the side of the tablet.

There's an eraser at the back, but no side button.

Pen tip is quite firm, and one replacement pen tip is provided. The pen performance looks like USI pen performance. The pen supports 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity and palm rejection. Writing works fine, but there's noticeable latency. I'll talk more on note taking later.

The pen charges by attaching it magnetically by the side of the tablet. The magnet isn't that strong so be careful not to hit the pen off.

Battery capacity inside such pens is small and battery can be damaged when left in discharged state for long periods of time. So make sure you always keep the pen charged at all times.

Note taking

The best app to use for note taking is the Bigme Notes app, but even so the note taking experience is not good due to latency and bugs (firmware v1.5.0).

Third party note taking apps have even more noticeable latency.

If you really have to use third party apps, there's this feature called Global Handwriting that works with wps, OneNote and Evernote. When enabled, there will be a tool bar that appears with some writing tools and colours.

When writing with Global Handwriting, the line will appear on screen faster, but you get a thin line before it will update to show you the actual line width and colour selected in the note taking app. This is just a workaround to achieve better latency but there's still slightly latency with this feature.

The most common bug I encountered is when you open a previously saved note, some lines will disappear. This obviously is a deal breaker. And the OCR text conversion does not work well.

Battery life

Battery life is around 18 hours with front light and Wifi enabled. Battery life is really good.

Conclusion

The Bigme B10 may be a versatile tablet but you'll probably get the best user experience if you use this solely for reading.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Clean simple design
+ Big enough for reading comics, PDFs
+ Decent build quality
+ Many useful softkeys
+ Comes with case and pen
+ Pen can charge magnetically
+ Has fingerprint unlock
+ Reasonable speed for e-ink tablet
+ Has Google Play Store
+ 18 hours battery life with front light
- Physical buttons not customisable yet
- Note taking has latency and bugs
- Colour e-ink canvas is darker than BW e-ink canvas
- Text has grain due to colour e-ink canvas. Minor issue though
- Speaker sounds hollow

Availability