You wanted to see the big me again, but versus what?

The Palma.

And for this, we got to crack open a new one.

You guys can refer to the very beginning of the video or the description down below if you want to see the specs.

We're not going to talk about any of that.

We're just going to give you guys a side-by-side look as best we can.

And for both of these, we are keeping them on the E Ink Center.

We are going to have HD mode on both of these HD 256 so that they are equal until we get into speed modes, in which case we are going to be using ultra fast and extreme only.

We're not going to go down every single one.

The reason being is because we already have reviews on both of these units.

So let's just dive in.

Let's look at the build of the Palma first.

The build of the Palma is much nicer and features a lot more character.

You have a very flat flash package with camera bump.

It's not nearly as pronounced as the big me.

It does have a little bit of shake when you press it because it is off center.

It's on to the left.

And you have a very nice rounded build.

Everything's nice and round and bulbousy.

It looks like you have two speakers down below, but you actually only have one.

This is a microphone.

They just have a dual grill cutout.

You have USB-C, e-ink button, and you have an SD card.

It is not a SIM card.

I was going to say SIM card, but that we can save for the big me because this is a phone.

And if you didn't get that right out of the gates, this is not a phone.

It just looks like one.

The big me is an actual cell phone.

And that's pretty much it.

The front is white.

It offers this kind of nice dual bezel design with a little bit of a clay there.

You get an earpiece up top, and that's basically it.

The back has this very nice truck bed liner material, super high grip, doesn't leave any fingerprints.

The big me is a little bit more vanilla on the front, has a little bit of character at the back.

We'll get to that in a sec.

So the front features a front facing camera with a earpiece.

Now there is a huge problem with this unit in that there's no audio outside of the earpiece.

So there's no speakers.

That plays to its detriment because that means anything you play is going to come through there.

The audio is the weakest link in this whole operation.

It's pretty bad.

You have a power button, volume up and down, and you do have that e-ink button as well, which can be a key map to do different things.

This is where your SIM card is, and you can actually put a SIM card in and use full data cellular communication.

So there's no problem with that.

The back features a nice fake leather backing with a pretty pronounced camera bump and flash package.

So when you put it on the table, it actually just kind of slaps around.

So it's not the best design overall.

To be honest, there's no reason to have a huge camera bump on an e-paper smartphone.

You're not proprietizing cameras on here.

There shouldn't be any priority for having this so pronounced, but that's what it is.

Now let's look at them side by side.

When you see them side by side, if you drop the top down on both of them, they both kind of go their different ways of showing you everything.

The big me gives you a little bit of a different approach with everything being symbolic.

Everything's just symbols.

You have the light, you have rotate, you have location services, et cetera.

On the Onyx, it's just a lot more kind of self-explanatory because they have all of, it's just so much easier to understand.

Everything's labeled.

There's nothing labeled on here.

So you have to know what each of these are.

They kind of identify themselves, but not a hundred percent.

So you will be faced with a little bit of a learning curve on the big me.

Now also there is a stark difference between the PPI because this is 300 and this isn't.

It is also affected by the fact that this is a color device as well.

And we don't have the black and white one right now, but either way, this is much lower resolution and you can see how crisp this is in comparison to this.

But despite the fact that the Onyx looks significantly better, there is a huge gap with the bezel and the screen.

The drop shadow is enormous.

It literally is millimeters away from the surface.

And I'm not sure what the culprit is.

That screen is situated very far down compared to the big me.

The big me seems so much closer to the surface.

If we show you the same drop shadow, it is less pronounced.

It is very, very thin compared to the Onyx, even though the big me utilizes physically more layers, including the color array filter.

So we're not sure what happened with the EPD, the electronic paper display stacking process, but something is awry because it shouldn't be that far away.

And this isn't a defect.

This is a proper final product unit.

Now we're going to show you the thing that really just puts these completely in different categories because they are.

If we go to settings, this will not have any mobile communication because it doesn't have it.

This is a smartphone.

You can put a SIM card in there.

You can use wireless.

You can do hotspot.

You can do location services.

You can do GPS.

It is a full smartphone for all intents and purposes.

No different than if you were to use Sony Xperia or a Samsung device or even an iPhone.

This is a smartphone and it has all the capabilities of such.

You can go out in the world and download things from Google Play and just do whatever you want.

They both do have Google Play on board.

Google Play is right here and it's on the bottom of the Onyx.

We've used these pretty extensively and honestly neither of these really excel over the other when it comes to movability, when it comes to interacting with the units.

They both respond very well.

They're both very fluid.

They both have a good amount of inertia when you swipe things and they slow down.

They're basically on point with each other.

In fact, the Big Me actually has more settings because of the secondary and tertiary modes that this has.

They also have anti-shake and auto-clean.

Anti-shake helps with videos.

We showed you that in the full review.

You have refresh frequency and you have color adjust which allows you to do contrast settings, vivid enhancement, color brightness, device wide.

The Onyx is a little bit less customizable in that regard.

You do have refresh modes and you can go to the settings menu and choose a couple different things when it comes to app management but there's just less ways to change your overall experience and we understand that this doesn't have color so you don't need that but you do have some DPI setting things in the back end here and this is just kind of like for the overall UI of how big things are to display on screen but overall the Big Me gives you just a little bit more customizability and control over your viewing experience despite the fact that the Onyx looks significantly better at any given time.

If you can get over the fact that this screen is further away it's honestly it's a non-issue.

Now let's go look at some books because at their cores these are e-book readers so they need to read books so let's download a sample and show you both manga and e-books.

For both of these we have HD 256 and we have glow lights off.

This is way darker and this is the problem with color e-paper.

No matter what you should have your glow light on a little bit.

It takes the edge off and it gives it a fighting chance of looking halfway decent and this is because of the inherent way that color works and it's not Big Me's problem Onyx faces the same problem on their GoColor 7 so it's the way it is.

So resolution wise it's way off.

This is a little bit more blurry than that.

If we just pinch and zoom to the top right we will see the stark difference between the overall resolution count and mathematically speaking that is something you have to abide by and if something is 300 PPI and then the other thing is not it's going to look worse and that's just the way it is.

Both of these are incredibly slow in their HD 256 or their best looking mode so you can mitigate that by using speed modes but overall these are the experience as they are laid out neither of them are big devices they're both pretty much the exact same size all things considered and honestly it's really small when it comes to manga it shouldn't be that small of course Google Play Books allows you to expand the speech bubbles and things like that but you have the ability to pinch and zoom and you can really get in there on the individual cells and stuff like that so it's not the end of the world but for manga it is a little bit small on both of these units so maybe just keep that in mind if your primary reason is your manga collection you might want to look somewhere else.

Ebooks is where these two start to kind of run away from each other the Onyx just looks better and although it's a bigger harder to hold device it is nicer to hold the materials are a lot better the backing is a lot better and yes you can use the physical page trim buttons aka the volume keys to change pages it looks so good there's really no gripes on this all the gripes come from the big me side of things because this is not a color piece of content there's no reason to buy the color unit it comes at a detriment to it when you have to stray away from color content because if I want to read this well it just doesn't look as crisp and clear now we're picking we're splitting hairs obviously it looks fine you can see very clearly that there's not going to be anything wrong but if you compare it against the Onyx this is just far more pixelated it's way darker you can see almost the the array filter just trying to change the colors and create white rather than just have the absence of color so that is the negative about having a color unit but the positive being that when you do things like colored highlights and stuff like that won't it shows up because it has the ability to show color so it's a double edged sword honestly although this is a much more slender hold the Onyx is just overall a better feel in the hand and just an overall better e-reading experience it's not a big thing but it bears some mentioning the Onyx light is absolutely blinding and the big me light is almost useless it's very very small you can just see the difference in lumens

I mean this barely touches the table and this one's lighting up the room so not a big thing but it needs to be considered when you buy these before we go into cameras the one last thing we'll mention is that again both of these have Google Play so there's not going to be anything that the other one can't do all things considered in fact this is more capable because it satisfies the prerequisites for more apps than the Onyx would this has a SIM card slot this has GPS and location services and hotspot icons so when it comes down to downloading something Google Play will have certain levels of prerequisites before you can list the app that will look for different things like accelerometers and gyroscopes and whatnot and this will have more of a chance at it functioning without a hitch because it has more features than the Onyx so please keep in mind that if one of these devices as is doesn't have something on it you can just download it for example leading into our next segment the camera big me gives you a camera it's called camera but Onyx doesn't give you one it's called DocuScan even if you go to tools there's no camera so you'd have to download a dedicated camera application from Google Play in order of course there's various ways you can change the experience by toying with the contrast and the refresh and stuff like that but at both of their highest speed modes the big me was actually smoother and more consistent with far more detail and the Onyx just seems to be flickery and just have a lot more artifacting and inconsistencies so when put it against each other the big me actually not only displays color in this particular circumstance of it being a color unit but actually is smoother and just more of a well-rounded video experience than the Onyx of both of these at full blast funnily enough when it comes to the HD 256 side of things you can at least see what's going on on the Onyx the big me is horrible the entire thing flashes the top and bottom elements not just the screen you wouldn't be watching video in HD 256 but it just shows you that Onyx has a better handle on the inherent refresh they just need to kind of fine-tune their speed mode just a little bit more from an audio perspective the big me is horrid it shares with an earpiece there's no dedicated speakers it's an absolute awful audio experience and this is that full blast you can download maybe an equalizer that peaks it past its decibel range but it's just gonna sound awful the Onyx is very loud and proud this thing sounds amazing I would have liked to hear it kind of like with an Xperia where it does the top audio as it's kind of fake stereo but all the audio just comes out of the bottom none of it comes out of the top speaker but either way way different and much more of a dedicated audio playback on the Onyx in closing these devices are very similar but so different at their core because this is a phone and honestly speaking if this didn't have a SIM card slot it would be trailing behind the Palma quite heavily it just doesn't have enough to it it is a little bit lacking in features there's no audio it just doesn't have a whole lot of character to it all things considered the backing is feels a little bit cheap I remember it is a cheaper unit all things considered than the Palma it also has color on it so I would say that the fact that this does have a SIM card slot really does change absolutely everything if the Palma had a SIM card slot and a color variant they would be a pretty gangster force to be reckoned with and big me would have to do something extraordinary to catch up because remember at its base level these both have Google Play so if there's something that one of them doesn't have you just download it and that just puts it on there but you can't buy more DPI PPI if you don't have it and conversely on the Onyx you can't buy a SIM card slot if it doesn't have it this doesn't have cellular communication you might say you can hotspot it to your phone and use Wi-Fi well yeah you can do that on this but this has a dedicated slot for cellular data communication and that is what makes it completely different than the Palma in that in and of itself so this is the differences between the two you have to know what you're spending your money on if you want a smartphone you can only buy this the Hisense doesn't even exist anymore they closed down their mobile division and haven't released anything in a year and a half so if you wanted an e-ink smartphone color or not you don't have a choice you have to buy the high break but if you wanted a palm sized reader I would not buy the big me and I would buy this because this just looks better it feels better it's bigger it's it's bigger without being too thick as well it's still very wieldy and it has everything you would ever need under the Sun except the ability to make phone calls