Asian manufacturers have been releasing numerous note-taking and productivity tools in recent years. The Bigme InkNote S is no exception to the rule, and seems to follow a familiar recipe without much innovation. And yet, there’s an interesting twist!

In addition to the market leaders Kobo Elipsa 2E, Kindle Scribe and ReMarkable, there are many other productivity devices on the market that use an e-ink screen in conjunction with note-taking software and a stylus.

All these machines have one ambition: to make you forget pen and paper. Their aim is to use these devices as digital note-taking tools on which you can work.

The Bigme InkNote S follows in this tradition, with its 10.3" diagonal e-ink screen, stylus and Android 11 operating system.

While there’s nothing original about the hardware, there are some innovative additions to the software.

Of course, there’s also a tool that converts your handwritten notes into typed text. But there’s also a system that lets you dictate text (as you can already do with more mainstream tools such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs).

Better still, Bigme is announcing integration with ChatGPT via an application to be downloaded from its "App Center" (which is a kind of Google Play for Bigme-branded devices).

This chatbot uses artificial intelligence to provide answers to your questions. While it’s hard to know exactly what benefits there are to having ChatGPT on your e-reader, Bigme suggests these usecases:

• You can have ChatGPT rewrite your texts.
• You can ask ChatGPT to summarize your documents
• You can ask ChatGPT to take meeting minutes for you.

There’s no mention of whether you need a subscription to ChatGPT+ to use it with this Bigme InkNote S e-reader, but it’s an interesting new use that brings additional features that seem useful (for once).

If the handwriting recognition functions work with ChatGPT, we can imagine that this machine will be able to produce very correct texts quickly and effortlessly.

To complete this presentation, here are the technical specifications of the Bigme InkNote S:

• 10.3-inch (227 PPI) black and white e-ink display
• 2.3 GHz octa-core processor
• 4 GB RAM memory
• 64 GB storage
• USB-C
• Stylus with wireless charging (A5)
• 8MP camera (rear)
• 5MP camera (front)
• 2.4G/5G WiFi
• Bluetooth 5.0
• 4000mAh battery
• Android 11

With a price tag of around $399, we have what appears to be an interesting alternative to the leaders in the field. It’s enough to seriously worry ReMarkable, which has been struggling to come up with interesting new features for the past year or two…

You can find out more by visiting Bigme’s ereaders at Amazon.com (click here).

KOReader is a free software package that installs on your e-reader to provide additional functionality. In this article, we’ll look at how to install KOReader on a Kobo e-reader.