A color E-Ink phone with an LCD backup sounds perfect on paper, and one company may be making it

If you've ever wished your phone could double as a Kindle without actually being one, a small Chinese company might be about to make that happen. According to a new report, Bigme is teasing the "HiBreak Dual," which it claims is the world's first smartphone to combine a color E-Ink display with a traditional LCD screen in one device.

A phone with two very different screens

The concept is pretty simple: one side of the phone has a standard LCD for everything you'd normally do on a smartphone, like watching videos, scrolling social media, and playing games. Flip it over, and you get a color E-Ink panel built for reading, checking notifications, and generally being way easier on your eyes.

E-Ink (or E Ink), if you're not familiar, is the same screen technology used in Kindle e-readers. It looks like actual paper, sips battery power instead of gulping it, and is far more comfortable to stare at for long stretches than any OLED or LCD. The downside? E-Ink screens refresh slowly, which makes them awful for video or anything with fast movement on screen.

The color part is what makes this different

Dual-screen phones with E-Ink aren't a brand-new idea. The YotaPhone tried this back in 2013, and Hisense has made several phones with a monochrome E-Ink display on the back. But those older attempts used black-and-white E-Ink panels, which limited what you could realistically do with them beyond reading plain text.

Bigme's spin on it is that the HiBreak Dual uses a color E-Ink panel, likely based on E-Ink's Kaleido 3 technology. That means it could handle things like comics, magazine layouts, color-coded notifications, and web pages in a way that actually looks presentable. It's still not going to compete with your phone's main screen for vibrancy, but it's a real step forward from what we've seen before.

Don't expect this at your local carrier anytime soon

Here's where I'd pump the brakes. Bigme hasn't shared any specs, pricing, or a release date for the HiBreak Dual. The company is literally asking people to guess what processor and Android version it'll ship with, which doesn't exactly scream confidence.

Bigme's track record raises some flags too. The company makes solid E-Ink hardware, but its software has been consistently called out as clunky and unreliable.

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