Bigme’s dual-screen phone has color E Ink on one side, LCD on the other

Bigme is a company that sells a range of devices with E Ink screens, including eBook readers, E Ink tablets, and even smartphones. But now the company is teasing an upcoming smartphone that’s a little different.

The upcoming Bigme HiBreak Dual is a dual-screen smartphone that has a color E Ink display on one side and an LCD screen on the other. That means you can interact with a high-contrast, low-power screen when you want a simpler experience, but flip the phone around when you want richer colors and a higher screen refresh rate.

Bigme is positioning this as the “world’s first dual-screen color E Ink + LCD smartphone,” and I think that may be true. But that’s only because it’s the first to use a color E Ink display.

A handful of companies including YotaPhone and Hisense have made dual-screen phones with greyscale E Ink screens on one side. But to the best of my knowledge, no phone maker has launched a dual-screen model since E Ink started making color displays.

Bigme hasn’t provided many details about its first dual screen phone yet – the company is asking users to guess what size it will be, what processor it will use, how much memory and storage it has, and even what version of Android it will ship with. But the basic idea of the phone is pretty simple: it’s a phone with an E Ink display that doesn’t have all the limitations that normally come with E Ink.

E Ink offers a paper-like viewing experience. While many modern E ink devices have front lights that make the screens easier to view in the dark, they don’t require illumination – you can view an E Ink display using nothing but ambient light. And that means there’s no light shining from the device toward your eyes. They also feature wide viewing angles and low power consumption. In fact, E Ink can display a static image indefinitely – if you bring up a boarding pass or event ticket on the screen before your battery dies, it’ll stay there even when your phone is powered down.

But E Ink screens also have much lower refresh rates than LCD or OLED displays. While many device makers push those refresh rates to higher levels for devices like phones and tablets, the only way to do that is to increase power consumption and reduce image quality. So these screens aren’t particularly good for watching videos, playing games, or smooth scrolling through apps or web pages.

The E Ink Kaleido 3 display technology that’s most often used in color E Ink devices like this is also limited to 4096 colors, has a lower pixel density for color content than it does for black and white material, and generally has a more muted look than LCD or OLED, appearing more like a faded newspaper than a glossy magazine.

So there’s something appealing about the idea of a device that has E Ink on one side, allowing you to read books or even check your messages in a more distraction-free environment, but a full color screen with a 60 Hz or higher refresh rate on the other side, allowing you to do all the other things you’d want with a phone.

It’d be sort of like carrying a Minimal Phone and a Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy phone at the same time… except without the need to actually carry two phones.

At least that’s the idea. How well it actually works in practice will depend on a variety of factors. For one thing, Bigme may need to put a better processor, a bigger battery, and more memory and storage in this phone than it’s used for its E Ink-only smartphones in order to ensure a smoother experience. For another, the company may need to improve its software experience if it wants to convince skeptical users that it’s serious about smartphones.

Still, at a time when most smartphones are basically glass rectangles, it’s always interesting to see a company try something different.