Review: Bigme B6 colour e-ink reader

Review unit provided by Bigme

The Bigme B6 is a 6-inch colour e-ink tablet running on Android 14. This was released in August 2025 and priced at USD 159. You can think of this as the smaller alternative to the USD 299 Bigme B7 which I reviewed two months ago.

Bottom line

The Bigme B6 is a decent compact portable e-ink tablet.

The tablet is more suited for reading text than comics due to the limited 6-inch display size. Overall performance is smooth enough for an e-ink reader.

Quality for text and colour looks alright. More on that later as there are various colour modes with different performance.

Main downside would be the dark e-ink canvas which means front light has to be enabled most of the time. And there's no face or fingerprint unlock.

Battery life is about 6 - 8 hours depending on usage.

Specifications

Things included

• Tablet
• Magnetic flip case
• USB-A to USB-C charging cable
• SIM ejector tool

Mine's a review unit that did not come with the flip case.

Design

Bigme B6 is a compact portable tablet that weighs just 176g without the case. It's a small tablet and for reading text, a small display is sufficient.

The Bigme B6 may be a better option than the Bigme B7 for reading text since it's much cheaper.

Body has rounded corners and bezels are quite thin. There are no physical page-flip buttons.

There's a red power button at the top. This tablet does not have face or fingerprint unlock.

The speaker is located on the other side and sound hollow but is not too bad, still usable. There's no 3.5mm audio jack or volume buttons.

Bottom has the USB-C charging port with USB 2 transfer speed. The microSD card slot is by the side.

The back is matte textured and is quite susceptible to fingerprints which are difficult to wipe off.

Overall build quality feels good enough even though the body is made with plastic.

Display

The display has an anti-glare matte textured surface. I find the anti-glare to be quite glaring if there's strong light source but is not an issue when using the tablet indoors.

This tablet has no pen support.

Resolution of the 6-inch display is 1072×1448. Pixel density for colour is 150 PPI and for black and white is 300 PPI. Pixelation is not noticeable but text quality will vary depending on the refresh mode used.

The colour e-ink canvas has a texture or grain which is noticeable if you look near enough.

One downside of this colour e-ink canvas is it's quite dark so the front light has to be enabled most of the time, even in a bright room environment.

There are 36 levels of adjustment for cool and warm light, and you can adjust using the Control Panel or using customised gestures from the settings.

Here's a close up of text quality with default refresh mode. Text has rough edges but is not really an issue for reading.

This is text with Magazine refresh mode. Text looks sharper and edges are smoother with no rough edges. Downside is there's more latency with page refresh or redraw.

Shown below are how colours look with different refresh modes. The colour quality is similar to what you get with the Bigme B7, so the screen technology is probably Kaleido 3.

Here's a normal sRGB colour wheel.

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.

Magazine. Colours are more saturated. Colours are easier to differentiate from one another. Green is obvious. Value range is limited to mostly mid and dark.

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

Video. Colours look like default settings.

Due to limited the limited number of colours that can be shown, some information may be lost. For example, certain elements may not show up in Google Maps, and in many apps the text boxes are difficult to see.

While the tablet can be used to watch videos, the video watching experience is not ideal on an e-ink tablet, obviously.

One good thing about the tablet is with normal refresh mode, there's minimal ghosting or image retention.

Performance

The tablet uses the MediaTek Helio P35 processor and there's 4GB of RAM. Responsiveness is not as instantaneous compared to normal Android tablets but for an e-ink tablet the performance is smooth and good enough.

Apps can take a second or two to launch, but once the apps are running you can expect smooth operation. Generally speaking, when you're reading, you won't be switching apps that often.

While I don't usually use all 4GB of RAM, I find that switching to an inactive app in memory is likely to reload the app.

OS and software

The tablet runs on Android 14 and there's Google Play Store. There's no guarantee that for future Android OS updates which is not a big issue as it does not mean your old apps will stop running.

Having Google Play Store means you can install whatever ebook apps you use to access whatever ebooks you may already have.

Bigme UI has very basic features. First thing I recommend is to mute the volume because there are no physical volume buttons.

When you swipe down from top right to reveal the control panel, you can customise the refresh mode under App Configuration (e-ink centre). There are also lighting presets to choose from.

One of the more useful features is the floating ball which can expand to show 9 shortcuts which are customisable.

The firmware I'm using is 1.5.0 and I did not notice any bugs that are worth mentioning.

The tablet has a permanent tool bar at the bottom which is not part of the display, and hence cannot be disabled.

The five shortcuts on the tool bar are:

• Bookshelf: Shows the ebooks on the tablet
• Bigme AI: Has ChatGPT and DeepSeek which are not very useful as they are not connected to the internet
• File browser
• Home screen
• Settings

There's unfortunately no way to customise those five shortcuts. The AI features are not useful so it's better to just install your favourite AI app from the Google Play Store instead.

Battery life

Battery life is around 6 - 8 hours depending on usage, and front light.

Overnight battery drain is not an issue. When tablet goes to sleep, wifi and Bluetooth are disabled.

Conclusion

This is a decent e-ink tablet for text reading. Overall performance is smooth enough. Having Google Play Store makes the tablet quite versatile.

Downside would be the dark e-ink canvas which means you have to enable front light, which means battery would drain faster. Battery life is 6- 8 hours which is alright.

Right now, the tech for colour e-ink displays is still quite limited. Colour is nice to have but it's not that necessary if you're just reading text.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Clean and simple design
+ Good build quality
+ Comes with case
+ Case has auto wake and sleep
+ Lightweight, compact, portable for one-hand usage
+ Reasonable speed for e-ink tablet
+ Colours look alright, but have to adjust settings for best look
+ Minimal ghosting and image retention with normal refresh mode
+ Has Google Play Store
+ Brightness sliders are easy to use
+ Battery life is good for just reading
+ Reasonable price
- Colour e-ink canvas is darker than BW e-ink canvas
- Text has grain due to colour e-ink canvas. Minor issue though.
- 6-inch is not ideal for comics and PDFs
- No fingerprint or face unlock
- Speaker is loud enough but sounds hollow
- Back can attract fingerprints easily
- Bottom tool bar is not necessary and takes up space

Availability

The Bigme B6 is available for purchase from Bigme online store