The Hisense A9 phone came out early last year, but the company has upgraded a few of the internals and software. The RAM has been upgraded 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of internal storage. The last generation only had two RAM options, 4GB or 6GB, storage was capped out at 128GB. If you are in the market for an E INK smartphone that is running a modern version of Android, this does have flagship specs. If you live in North America or Europe, it supports a myriad of languages, including English.

Hardware

The A9 series are basically the only phones on the market with the latest generation Carta 1200 e-paper display. This gives users upgraded performance across the board. Navigation, app performance and the entire reading experience is better on the Pro, than most other dedicated ebook readers.

The A9 Pro features a 6.1-inch E Ink display with a resolution of 824×1648 with 300 PPI. It has an impressive 84% screen-to-body ratio. The screen flush with the bezel and protected by a layer of glass. The color scheme of the phone is black and the backplate is also black, however it has glitter sand texture, which makes it a joy to touch and hold. There is a rear facing camera with a slight bump on the screen it is 13 MP and LED flash, it can record at 1920×1080. The front facing camera is 5MP and has a resolution of 2592×1944. It is rare that any E INK devices have cameras, and these ones are mighty impressive. There are volume rockers on the right side an E INK button on the left and power button on the top. You can read and use the A9 during the night, thanks to the front-lit display and color temperature system. There is a total of 27 white and amber LED lights.

Underneath the hood is a Snapdragon 662 octa-core 2.0 GHz with Adreno 610 GPU. If you are a big fan of high quality sound, the A9. Pro is utilizing the ES9318 chip which allows for HiFi quality sound output while having integrated support for the LDAC, AAC, SBC, and APTX Bluetooth audio codecs. This makes the new A9 great for not only listening to audiobooks but HIFI music from Tidal and Apple Music. For the best sound possible, you will want to plug in wired headphones via the 3.4mm headphone jack. There is also a small speaker on the bottom and also a microphone. There is a grill on the top so you can hear in HD.

The A9 Pro has 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of internal storage. If this is not enough storage, there is a dual SIM card tray, capable of housing an addition 128GB of storage.  There is an USB-C port for transferring data and also charging. It is powered by a 4,000 mAh battery.  You can keep your phone secure with the face unlock, fingerprint sensor or a passcode. The dimensions are 159.00 x 79.50 x 7.80 mm and weighs 183 g.

If you are going to use the A9 Pro as your daily driver, it does support many 4G bands in North America and Europe. It is compatible with AT&T, T-Mobile, Rogers and Orange. It supports a number of bands and does not support 5G.

2G: GSM B2/B3/B5/B8,850/900/1800/1900

3G: WCDMA B1/B2/B5/B8,TD-SCDMA B34/B39

4G: LTE FDD B1/B3/B5/B7/B8,TD LTE B38/B39/B40/B41/B34

Hisense is the only consistent brand in the world that releases pocket friendly E INK products. The company is going beyond smartphones and releasing a myriad of E INK devices, with different functionality. I am a huge fan of the Hisense Touch HIFI Music and the HI reader. The A9 Pro is a fully featured flagship Android 11 smartphone. I believe that the Hisense A9 might be the best one on the market and can easily be your primary phone.

Software

The Hisense A9 is running Google Android 11, which is a very modern OS for e-paper phones. This OS provides a myriad of security features that are updated automatically by Google. Hisense also pushes their own updates, which introduces new features, addresses bugs and stability. This is a typical Android phone. You can do everything you normally would on any other phone, the big exception it that it is running E INK, so it has lots of optimization features devoted towards this type of display. For example you can take screenshots, not by pressing a combination of buttons, but simply dragging three fingers down form the top of the screen, to the bottom.

Let’s talk about what this phone does, that is very unique, that most other Android phones don’t have.  It  comes with 4 different refresh modes, that are similar to the Onyx Boox line of e-readers. The normal one is clear mode, which gives you nice looking app icons, text, and PDF image clarity, it also has balanced mode, which is similar to A2 mode, which degrades image quality, and provides a slight increase to performance.  The two extra modes are the Smooth and Speed mode which makes playing videos, or light gaming a very real possibility.

Hisense has their own launcher that replaces the default vanilla Android experience. There is a default widget that shows the time and date, but you can install anything else you want via apps, such as a weather widget. In the top right corner is the WIFI symbol and time, the top left is where your notifications are. If you drag your finger down from the top center of the screen, downwards, there are a bunch of customization settings. You can turn auto rotate on/off, flashlight, WIFI network, data connection, ringer on/off, establish a hotspot, engage in power saver mode, take a screenshot, location and engage Bluetooth for wireless accessories, such headphones. This screen is also where you can adjust the front-lit display. This phone has white LED lights on the bottom of the screen and project light upwards, evenly illuminating the screen and not shining in your eyes. If you scroll your page to the left, you get a very unique Hisense experience. There is all sorts of RSS news publications you can subscribe to, gives you a breakdown of how many hours you have been using the phone on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. There is a bunch of micro-widgets that give other information.

One of the best things this phone does, is give you the option to automatically assign different speed modes to, on an app by app basis. For example, you might want to have YouTube or the internet browser on Speed Mode, so navigation and watching videos can be a thing. The e-reading app might want to be in clear mode, whenever it starts, so you can read at high resolution.

If you want to have greater control over the E INK experience, Hisense has you covered. There is an anti-aliasing option to make fonts razor sharp, and not blurry. There is a contrast mode to make the differences between black and white more pronounced. There are various battery saving modes, such as the standard power saving and Super power saving mode. You can get around two weeks of usage in super power saving mode, as it shuts down lots of background processes.

The only downside of this phone, is that it is not certified by Google, so you will not get Google Play and any app that requires Google Play Framework will not work properly. This sucks for major apps. The Hisense App Store has all sorts of apps available, but since this phone is primarily marketed in China, most of the apps are in Chinese. On the positive side the system language can be set to English and hundreds of other languages.  If installing apps is important, you can download alternative app stores, or sideload in your own apps. I would recommend the Amazon App Store if your country supports it, it doesn’t work in Canada. The Samsung Galaxy Store is also a viable alternative, else you can check out the Good e-Reader App Store. I think it is important to download a app market, instead of sideloading apps. This is because frequently Android apps stop working when a new version comes out and it is hard to find a new version to sideload, whereas an app market will automatically keep them updated. It is possible to install the open source Gapps alternative to Google Play, we will be filming a future video on how to do this, but you can visit the site here.  All you need to do to get started is select ARM64, and Android 10 and the Super package, which includes all Google apps.  There is a detailed instruction guide for Hisense Phones HERE, but it is very technical.

Reading

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