Hisense A9 E INK Dual-SIM Smartphone | Full Review

They have a whopping 13 devices using e paper screens were one of the first to do color and they have both their own standalone, hi, fi, music player and dedicated ebook reader Music. More impressive is the fact that they have more e ink smartphones than all other companies in the world combined topping the charts at nine different models and the a9 adds to that number. This is an absolutely beautiful smartphone, with every modern convenience in the books. Dual sim headphone jack cameras on the front and back and its own proprietary e ink button exclusive to high sense and high sense alone other than the fact that this is running an e paper display. This is a fully functional smartphone from head to toe, with a fingerprint sensor on the side and a beautifully tooled equalizer esque, speaker grille, so lets dive into this beautiful smartphone, starting with the ui. This ui is laid out very nicely and its got a little bit of an overall polished feel from the last gen, its called ink os, which is the name of the operating system. If you swipe to the left, you still can take advantage of all the high smart services, where youre going to have all of your stuff when it comes to shortcuts screen time data, etc. You can add and remove these cards as you see fit in the middle. This is where youre going to find your main screen, and it is where all of your things are going to be like your widgets and every time you press home effectively.

This is dedicated for your home menu. If you swipe to the right youre going to see more pages, so the widgets – you add, you can add your apps itself, desktop weather, etc. We have a widget of the jd reader store, which ill show you in a little bit and everything youve installed, either from the app store on the device or side loaded will show up here you can see we have amazon kindle these are going to be your Quick keys, like camera, your messages, your calling, and if you do the swipe down from the top, you get your five quick keys as well as well as your glow light capabilities. Now, if you swipe down even further, you get an entire grid of 20 different things. This is going to be everything from power saving mode all the way to screen record pretty much everything that a smartphone is meant to have were going to be saying that a lot, because a lot of you guys dont really realize this is a fully fledged smartphone. It just doesnt have an lcd led screen. It has an e paper screen. This is where youll also control your glow light. This is useful for managing your automatic modes of your glow light and, more importantly, your speed modes. You have four speed modes: clear, balanced, smooth and speed. Well get into this when we do the video portion of this, but that is very, very useful. It is extremely useful and does make or break the usability of these devices clicking on the bottom.

Here will take you to e ink settings. We have an entire video dedicated to this. If you click the video at the top of the video, you see right now, therell be a card. There go ahead and click on that because we cover everything in here: bleaching, app input, method, dynamic, refresh front anti aliasing. It is a lot to cover theres a lot of different things you can do here, but it is worth checking out the video, theres good and bad news to the onboard services. Well say the good news is that they have them. Bad news is that theyre all in chinese, so whether you go to the jd store or any other chinese bookstore on here, it is going to be only in chinese, so we recommend you utilize things like the barnes, noble, app, the kobo, app, the amazon, app, etc. The reading experience on this is very, very good reason, being you can install any app so really its only going to be as good as the app. But how can you go wrong with the amazon kindle app and because this is a phone, you can turn the pages with one hand, so whether youre, right handed with your thumb or left handed with your fingertips, you can actually turn the pages left and right utilizing. The volume controls which is really cool because it makes it kind of in the realm of a micro, handheld e reader, even though its over a six inch screen.

Also, this is bigger than a kindle screen for the most part, but it just doesnt look like it because the screen is measured. Diagonally 6.1, whereas if you put something into the frame like a six inch, youll see that it actually looks significantly smaller, even though it isnt. This basically does everything the kindle app will do because well its the kindle app and also if you want to speed things up and you dont want to have any issues with refresh. You can obviously choose your speed modes. Click on something and the thing just kind of whizzes by speed mode is going to be what you live and die by on this phone reason being when you get into this phone youre gon na have that level of speed. That is to be expected because thats, what youre transitioning from when you have an lcd phone speed mode, certainly does make that transition much easier Music, although this is a fairly small screen to be running manga on its a great experience, reason being its a smaller condensed Screen with 300 ppi, so when youre reading manga on something large like a 10 inch or something like that, sometimes those devices fall within the realm of 227 212 ppi. At times when you read manga and anything really on a smaller screen, it is more condensed so you dont see the shortcomings of the resolution quite as much, and this is no exception. This looks very, very nice.

This already, naturally has a high resolution. Add that, with an amazing contrast and overall just high performance screen, it is a joy to read on and if anything gets too difficult to read, simply pinch and zoom. Look how fluid that is. That is absolutely perfect. Theres, almost no ghosting or artifacting of any kind. You can see right beside the characters head in question: theres, almost nothing left behind after you zoomed in the image. This is one of the cleanest navigatable devices weve seen in a long time. High sense is absolutely killing it and leave it to them to have a dedicated e ink button. This thing is really cool. What you do is it is a button on the side that does protrude. Unlike the power button, which is flush which is kind of cool. You press it once to have it do whatever you set it to double click or long press to do all three things respectively, and you can change these to a lot of different things. A single press you can assign to anything reverse the page turn off and on night mode play your music to keep it simple. We have it at screen refresh. So if i press it once its going to refresh the screen, which i do highly recommend, if you have a double click, you can do the same amount of choices. Double click is very nice to have the backlight off and on respectively, so itll actually turn off and on without you having to go here, slide them on, etc.

So thats really cool. If you get lost in all this and need a refresher, they have you covered with the e ink button introduction you click on that, and it tells you everything you need to know about the e ink button. It really is them going above and beyond with their delivery, we cant review a smartphone or a device with a camera and e ink without showing you the camera. This is a full camera and surprisingly, it is doing the best job of a camera. Weve ever seen on an e ink device period now granted there arent many theres, only one pocketbook, a couple, no name aliexpress specials and the rest of the devices are all hisense. So really, these are the only guys in the modern age doing cameras. It is really nice, though its really fast and it obviously defaults into speed mode. It will not let you go into any other mode, obviously, because that is just not possible and it wont work. You have a bunch of ways to change things too. In fact, you can isolate and associate the volume buttons to being your zoom, which is really cool, because that allows you now to be able to zoom with the touch of your fingers. You have a bunch of other things too. You can actually turn on the light like so, in which case your light is running full blast or you can turn on the flash as well. So when you take the picture, itll be that respective picture theres also a bunch of settings you have here now.

Unfortunately, no it doesnt shoot in 4k, the maximum is 1080p, but that is really nice because it is still technically hd, even though its not what were all used to with 4k. You have different aspect ratios too 4×3, one by one 16×9 and full screen. You also have assistive grid where you can do thirds, tic, tac, toes, etc. Starting off in clear mode. Navigating around is pretty good, even in the most beautiful mode, which can be considered the base mode or hd. If you want something a little bit more balanced, i would choose balance or smooth it. Isnt really necessary to go into any sort of maximum speed mode. When it comes to navigating around websites, you can itll just keep getting better and better. You can see the carousels. All also is just super smooth under smooth mode, thats kind of what its for the extreme circumstances for video, etc. Speed mode would be the one you get that inertia effect. You get everything just very, very snappy. There really is no compromise under speed mode when it comes to basically anything. The only downside is that you get a little bit of ghosting from the background, but even then this is handling it better than almost anyone else in the business Music, foreign, Music Applause, Music. Applause, Music, after consistent releases of e ink phones by hisense, you have to wonder: when are people going to start switching over to e ink phones as their primary? Well with the a9? Its never been easier? This is without a doubt, the closest we have ever come to being able to make the switch, although were not quite there.

Yet. What are we missing? Color highsense definitely does have a trend of releasing a black and white model first and then cannibalizing it with a color model. Although there is no color model announcement as per the date of this video, you can rest assured that you wont be disappointed with this phone. For goodyreader.