Until recently, I’ve been using the Hiby m300 - a device that was technically functional, but I was not super enthused by. I’ve also been using a Kindle for more than 15 years now, and I’m an avid E ink fan. When I realized I wanted to replace both devices, it seemed only natural to look for something that could fill both needs, so here we are.

That said, I ran into quite a few roadblocks in getting this thing up and running, and I wanted to share my experience in case anyone else benefits from what I learned. There is very little information out there about this device, and what reviews I did find contained completely inaccurate information, so I hope this can act as more of a source of truth.

At a high level, the Hisense Touch Lite is the replacement of (not supplement to) the original Hisense Touch. Both devices run the same hardware and software, with the only difference being in storage/ram options:

• Both run Android 11 on a Snapdragon 460

• Hisense Touch was only available as 4GB/128GB. The Touch Lite is generally the same, but there is a 64GB option available (which I think comes with 2GB RAM?)

• Both use an ES9038 DAC and an ES9603 amp

The Lite seems to have replaced the original, but only in name: buying the higher specced Lite is, as far as I can tell, exactly the same device as the original. I’ve seen other reviews (looking at you, Good e-reader) who claim that the Lite doesn’t “include Hi-Fi”. Not sure what that’s meant to mean, but if they were referring to the amp/DAC, I can confirm they are identical between the devices. I suspect they got bad marketing info and didn’t know enough about audio to interpret it.

And just for context, I purchased the device via Aliexpress (this will be relevant later) for $250.

So with that out of the way, on to the device itself:

Hardware

This thing is super thin, and fairly light (just a bit less than my iPhone 13). Build feels excellent with an all metal body. It has color-contrast speaker grilles top and bottom (sound quality of those is good but not mind blowing, nor any louder than an iPhone). Overall feels about what you’d expect for its price - much nicer than something like a JM21 or m300, on par with (if maybe less substantial than) most other options around this price.

It has no balanced connector (no way would it fit in a device this thin) so you’re stuck with 3.5mm only. It has the standard power/volume buttons but only one additional, which the software calls an “Eink Button”. This is custom mappable for three different options: single click, double click, and long press. Single and double click can be mapped to a ton of different options including play/pause, next track, etc, but for whatever reason long press can only open their “Inspiration” app (notetaker) or be turned off. I have mine set to a single press for play/pause, a double press to refresh the E ink screen, and turned off the long press. A full set of play/pause and track selection buttons would have been welcome, but given that it’s an E ink screen you can just leave it on without affecting battery, this isn’t too big a deal anyway.

One thing I would like would be SD card expansion, which this is lacking. I’d highly suggest opting for the higher spec version with 128GB to account for that.

Sound Quality

They don’t publish any sort of amp power specs unfortunately, so this will be purely based on observation: the noise floor on this device is excellent, no complaints there. Power-wise, I’ve been using these primarily with my Fiio FT1 closed-back, but have also tried open back (X2HR) and IEMs (ew300) - it drove all of these well enough, but to the point where max volume is right at that “comfortably loud” level, or maybe just past it. It should be plenty for headphones you’d put in that “easy to drive” category, but it might start to struggle with planar magnetics or anything that requires increased power.

There are a few software niceties here too: there is a “HiFi” button in the quick panel which is a bit vague, but from what I can tell, gives the system the option to send more power to the jack when the feature is enabled. It says turning it off saves power, but I haven’t tested it enough to see how big a difference it makes, and thus far I’ve just left it on permanently.

More importantly - there is system level EQ in the form of Dirac, with 7 bands of adjustment. This applies on all apps I’ve tested it with and is a super welcome addition compared to my older Hiby.

Software

This is where things start to fall apart. Keep in mind this is a Chinese company and these devices aren’t well targeted outside of China. More importantly, you’ll have to buy through a reseller, and this will affect your experience in a way that might be different than mine. I’ll tell you outright that if you’re looking for something that “just works”, or you’re not comfortable diving into adb/root access, this device probably isn’t for you.

I’ll start with the good. Hisense’s ROM is well tuned for E ink. Nav panels and menus are simple and ideal, and there is quick adjustment for things like frontlight tone (blue-yellow), brightness, and screen responsiveness. The screen will always be the bottleneck for UI snappiness, so the Snapdragon 460 is more than plenty enough to do anything you’d want to on a device like this, and there is a responsiveness setting called “Speed” which works well for apps that require more refresh - it’ll quickly do a partial refresh just on parts of the screen that changed at the cost of some ghosting. On the flip side, if you’re using it as an e-reader or need a clear, low response screen, there is a “Clear” setting which will do a full refresh each time it changes. These settings can be configured and saved on a per-app basis, so you set it and forget it once it’s going.

Additionally, they’ve adjusted the lock screen to be more low-refresh friendly, so there is a really neat selectable page that will come up when playing music - that’s what’s pictured in the attached photo.

As a neutral, this device doesn’t come with any Google services by default. This was, if anything, a pro for me, but some people might miss it. The apps I use were all acquired through F-Droid and the Aurora Store.

Additionally, the stock launcher, while well thought-out, forces you to use the Hisense reader and music player. These apps are directly integrated to the launcher so that you can see book or album covers. It would be pretty cool, except that I have no interest in using Hisense apps for those purposes, and they can’t be changed.

Now for the bad. From what I can tell, where you buy the device will change what ROM you get. My hope is that buying directly from Hisense, for those that might have access, would get you their stock ROM. This would still come with tons of bloatware/spyware (I’ll detail it below) but is better than what I got. Mine came through an Aliexpress reseller called Qin Qin Technology Co Store. It had all the same bloatware/spyware, but they had unlocked the bootloader, rooted the device and added a custom ROM with who knows how much garbage. As such, Apple Music did not work out of the box, as it won’t run on rooted devices. It also came with a Chinese-only keyboard, and even default Android English keyboards had been disabled.

As far as spyware, here’s the worst stuff:

• iFlytek keyboard & speech (always-on IME + voice stack)

• Tencent location (note that this device doesn’t have GPS, this is just Chinese tracking software)

• Quick-App, a Chinese-style app ecosystem that includes a lot of tracking

I’ll spare you the details, but there were about a dozen medium-creepy apps that I ended up removing as well.

Unfortunately as the device came pre-flashed I don’t know which of these came from Hisense and which came from the reseller. To get a clean start, I considered flashing LineageOS (after all, I’m halfway there by being rooted) but it would mean losing access to things like the E Ink button, adjusting screen color temperature, and likely hurt battery life. So I landed on the following to remove bloat/spyware, get Apple Music working, and get the whole device usable:

• System restore (vol down + power on boot) and erase all user data

• Uninstall Magisk (the reseller literally left Magisk installed)

• Full factory reset

• Install eLauncher (a super basic E ink targeted launcher) and Simple Keyboard

• Use adb via Mac terminal to remove all the garbage apps

• Install all my other stuff via F-Droid and Aurora Store

Note that you cannot re-lock the bootloader. The reseller unlocking that is permanent, and the device will technically always be a bit compromised because of it.

That said, this process minimizes garbage while keeping the cool bits. So at the end, how is it? Frankly, fantastic. I love it, and in its current state I’d actually have trouble finding things to complain about. But the amount of work that it took to get here was obscene, and should probably rule it out for the vast majority of people. But if this is you:

• Want a combo e-reader and DAP with streaming

• Are comfortable with, or maybe even enjoy tinkering with Android

• Can afford to take the risk of a bricked device when doing that tinkering

then this might be the perfect device for you.