Review: Bigme HiBreak S e-ink phone (5.8-inch Android 14)

Review unit provided by Bigme

The Bigme HiBreak S is an 5.8-inch Android 14 phone released in Oct 2025 and comes with an e-ink display.

The price is USD 249 for the BW display and USD 279 for the colour display. Phone body is only available in white.

This phone is just a minor update to the original Bigme HiBreak released in mid 2024 by upgrading to Android 14 (from 11) and offering a colour e-ink display option.

At the time of review, the company has also just released the Bigme HiBreak Pro Color selling at USD 469 (early bird price USD 399). The Bigme HiBreak Pro Color is more expensive but is also the much better phone in many ways as you can see in the comparison table below.

Specifications

Things included

• Phone
• SIM ejector
• Quick start guide
• Warranty card

Design

Here's how the Bigme HiBreak S (right) looks besides the HiBreak Pro. The size difference between 5.8 vs 6.1-inch isn't that obvious. Both phones are very compact and lightweight, 170g vs 193g.

And here's how the Hibreak BW, HiBreak Color and HiBreak S compares. The Kaleido 3 display on the HiBreak Color and HiBreak S is noticeably darker than BW e-ink display.

Even though the HiBreak Color and HiBreak S both use Kaleido 3 displays, colours on the HiBreak Color look more vibrant (across all refresh modes).

Back of the phone is plastic and has a very textured but smooth (non-abrasive) surface. The rear camera is 13MP and there's a flash.

Taking photos with the camera is not easy and it's difficult to check for sharpness on the e-ink display, and there's no optical image stabilisation for the lens. Shown below are the photos taken from the camera. Click for a larger view.

On the left is a SIM tray that can hold one microSD card and a nano SIM together. Only 4G LTE is supported, not 5G.

There's also a customisable button (Custom key) and shortcuts can be assigned to a single press, double press and long press.

Shortcuts available are:

• None
• Home screen
• Back
• Recording transcription
• Screenshot
• Multitasking switcher
• Clear cache
• Full refresh
• Eink Center
• Previous page
• Next page
• Light switch
• Flash light
• Volume +
• Volume -
• Take photos
• Answer a call
• DPAD left
• DPAD right

On the right are the power button and volume control.

Bottom has a USB-C charging port with USB 2 transfer speed. There's a mic, or two, beside. There's no speaker at the bottom.

The top has a 5MP camera and speaker. This phone does not support face or fingerprint unlock, so it's quite inconvenient to always have to type the pin for unlock.

Audio quality from the speaker is alright, loud and clear enough. Audio does not sound too hollow so the speakers are usable.

Since this phone only has one speaker, you can't get true stereo effect so the overall audio experience isn't good. And when watching shows in landscape orientation, it feels weird with sound coming only from one side.

Display

Kaleido 3 colour e-ink display has a much darker canvas compared to BW e-ink displays.

Front light almost always have to be enabled to improve the contrast unless you're using the phone under direct sunlight.

This is how the HiBreak Pro Color and HiBreak S looks with maximum cool light brightness. The HiBreak Pro Color has this magenta tint while the HiBreak S looks more neutral.

This is with both cool and warm light at maximum level (36/36). HiBreak Pro definitely has more magenta, and HiBreak S warm light is more subtle.

Kaleido 3 produce 16 levels of gray and 4000 over colours. The display is almost laminated so all the visuals look like they are almost on the surface which looks great. The e-ink display has fantastic viewing angles.

Surface of the display is matte textured and I'm not sure if it's actually a matte screen protector. When facing strong or big light source, the diffused reflections can be quite glaring. Avoid having strong light source on the display and you will get fantastic visual quality.

A 5.8-inch is kinda small for reading comics so this phone is mostly suited for reading text. And if you're just reading text, having a colour display is actually not necessary. You can save USD 30 by getting the BW model instead.

The colour of the gray e-ink canvas of the HiBreak Pro Color and HiBreak S looks slightly different. Or it could be an illusion created by the black and white bezels.

Text quality on the HiBreak S looks good. Text is quite sharp. You'll have to enable front light to get better contrast though.

Although both HiBreak Pro Color and HiBreak S use Kaleido 3, for some reason colours appear more vibrant on the HiBreak Pro Color. That could be due to the colour pixel density difference of 150 PPI vs 96 PPI which is quite significant. There are fewer pixels to show colours.

Here are the settings available to the E-ink Center. The main presets are Default, Magazine, Comic, Video and Custom.

Other adjustments possible are

• Anti-shake
• Auto-clean
• Color reproduction
• Refresh mode
• Color adjust (contrast, vividness, brightness)
• Full refresh frequency

For finer colour adjustment, you can adjust contrast, vividness and brightness under Color Adjust.

For the colour wheels below, you can click for a larger view.

This is with Default mode. Colours are quite grainy. Colours can be differentiated from one another. Different values (lightness and saturation) can be differentiated.

Magazine mode has more vibrant colours and the grain is gone. Colours can differentiated from one another, but the extra vibrance added to the colours also make some colours look more alike.

This refresh mode has noticeable flashing when page redraws.

Comic mode also has more vibrant colours and no grain. Many colours now look alike and are difficult to differentiate from one another. The value/saturation graduation isn't smooth, and some have noticeable difference in contrast.

This refresh mode has noticeable flashing when page redraws.

Video mode has noticeable grain. Colours can be differentiated from one another quite easily. The value/saturation graduation looks smooth.

Video mode has the fastest page redraw and is best used if you want fast animation, e.g. watching videos.

While watching videos is possible on this phone, the user experience isn't good due to the display with limited colours, refresh rate and the one-sided audio source.

Due to the limited number of colours that Kaleido 3 displays can show, certain colour information will be lost. For example with Google Maps, it is difficult to see the shapes or outlines of buildings.

Adjusting the colour settings to make the buildings more obvious will also affect other colours (e.g. road that shows traffic information).

Another issue I face often is text boxes in apps or webpages can be difficult to see because the outline of textboxes is barely visible.

Performance

The phone uses the MediaTek Helio P35 processor which is an entry level processor, the same one used in the original Bigme HiBreak. Overall performance is quite responsive. This phone isn't going to be used for heavy workload or even multi-tasking so the Helio P35 is still sufficient, and for the price point I wasn't expecting much.

6GB RAM is sufficient. One bug that I discovered which may be RAM related is, when I open an old app from the app switcher, sometimes the app would crash, or some random app would open instead.

OS and software

There's no bloatware that I can see except for the apps provided by Bigme. A Bigme account is not needed to use the phone.

Bigme's UI is quite simple and there aren't many features. If you need more features, you can find an app from Google Play Store to give you that feature.

The phone runs on Android 14 and chances are there won't be any OS updates. The original Bigme HiBreak from 2024 is practically the same phone as the HiBreak S and that phone's Android 11 did not get updated to Android 14 via firmware and instead with have a new phone.

It is possible to set an Always-on display. My favourite is to put the clock and calendar. Update frequency of the clock is 1, 5, 10, 30 minutes. The calendar does not sync with Google Calendar.

The phone has backup feature but I'm not sure how much of the phone will be backed up so it's always good to backup files yourself, or have your important data synced to the cloud.

There's this NaviBall feature which is quite useful as it can provide 9 customisable shortcuts. The downside is when the NaviBall is minimised it can be quite difficult to see where it is.

Battery life

Battery capacity is 3300 mAh. I was able to get around 12 hours of battery life with front light enabled most of the time.

Conclusion

The Biome HiBreak S is an affordable e-ink phone for people with tight budget. It's a budget phone so it doesn't have as many features as the more expensive Bigme HiBreak Pro Color. If you want to save money, you'll have to live with the inconveniences and the biggest one is the lack of biometric unlock. Not having NFC is still alright.

This phone is for people who may want an e-ink display for reading, or for those who want to stay away from social media. For reading, you're pretty much limited to reading text as comic pages or PDFs will have really small text sizes on the 5.8-inch display.

Having colours is nice but I don't feel like having colours is that necessary. I still prefer BW e-ink displays because you get better contrast. Colour e-ink technology currently limited by the number of colours it can show and the darker e-ink canvas. A BW e-ink display with good contrast still looks better than a colour display with limited colours and contrast.

I don't have any issues with the processor. Overall performance feels smooth and responsive.

To conclude, if you want a simple e-ink phone, you can consider the Bigme HiBreak S. But if you can stretch your budget, the Bigme HiBreak Pro is so much better.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Design looks good
+ Decent build quality
+ Comes with a case
+ Excellent legibility under direct sunlight
+ Customisable side button
+ MicroSD card support
+ Responsive performance for an e-ink phone
+ Audio quality is okay
+ Customisable NaviBall provides many shortcuts
+ Day long battery life
- Dark e-ink canvas means front light has to be enabled most of the time
- Noticeable front light leak from the frame of the phone
- No face or fingerprint unlock
- Limited number of display colours limits colour info
- Only one speaker
- No NFC
- No auto-brightness for the front light
- Charging speed is slow
- No Android OS updates expected

Availability

The Bigme HiBreak S is available from Bigme online store.