Earlier in the week we were talking about how phones with E Ink screens and E Ink cases haven’t really caught on very well.
The Yotaphone is the most popular E Ink phone crossover device, with the 3rd generation model expected later this year.
There have been some other smartphones that incorporate E Ink screens but you never really hear much about them.
The Siam 7X is a dual screen phone that sells for $249 on Amazon.
It has a 5-inch IPS screen on the front side of the phone and a 4.7-inch E Ink screen on the back.
The Siam 7X was released about a year ago now but I’ve never come across a single in-depth review of it, and it would be interesting to hear how it works from E Ink reading perspective.
There are a few YouTube videos from a year ago, but most of them were uploaded by Siam and they aren’t very informative.
A couple of the videos show the E Ink screen having a glossy layer, and apparently the E Ink side is entirely dependent on an app like the Oaxis Inkcase and it can’t mirror the front screen like the Yotaphone, so that severely limits the usefulness of the E Ink screen.
Has anyone tried the Siam 7X phone?
I haven’t heard of a single hands-on report of anyone using it since it was released a year ago.
I own a YotaPhone2, which I used for a month until the device was accidentally placed in a cup filled with only an inch of coffee … where the LCD screen then stopped working. In that time, I came to the conclusion that having an eink phone “is not worth it”. 4.7″ is too small to read text from, unless you very-much increase the font size, where I’d have scroll every few seconds … which became a nuisance to my eyes and to my fingers. Eink has a fairly low contrast in ordinary light scenarios, which made it difficult to see what’s on the tiny 4.7″ screen a lot of the time. NOW, when the device is out in the sunlight, it has a high contrast & I can certainly make out most everything, but I’m hardly using the phone during the direct sunlight above me. Even in direct sunlight, greens-and-reds have pretty much the same grey-scale color, so on the “often enough” times where i’ll use an app, or visit a webpage with these different-colors = similar grey-scales (on an eink screen) scenarios … it is difficult to see things.
When my YP2 died, I went out and got an IPhone7+ … which although it’s not e-ink, I am quite happy with it overall (although it does cause eye strain after extended use)
I found this less-than enthusiastic early release review:
https://www.cnet.com/news/hands-on-with-the-siam-7x-dual-screen-smartphone/
Probably not really a big miss…
That they don’t work on the 4G network in the US is a big reason I don’t get one.
I own the hisense a2 and I am very, very happy with it. It has a much bigger e-ink screen and a very reasonable price tag.
I want an e-ink ONLY phone. I understand this means a reduced set of smart phone features (or perhaps a different approach for some existing features), and I’m ok with that. I’m not going to bye some hybrid garbage though.
ugh… buy, not bye.
I was going to buy one of their phones but the manufacturer never returned my emails… not exactly a vote of confidence in their own products.