So, recently I got myself an Eink phone. Specifically it is a Hisense A9. I was following it since it was announced and it really seemed like a pretty decent phone. Granted it is black and white, as well as pretty slow refresh rate but what more can you expect, right? Hisense also makes color eink phones like A5CC, A7CC and apparently the rumored A9CC (dont think that one is happening though), but they all offer dimmer screens and I think its mostly a gimmick for now. I believe that kind of tech is gonna evolve throughout the years but it’s not there yet.

The phone itself spec wise is pretty mid if not low-end. It has a Snapdragon 662 paired with 4/6/8 gigs of ram and 64/128/256 GB of storage. I picked the 6/128 one as using a 4GB RAM phone in 2023 is probably not smart (I am writing this on a base 4gb ram surface tho lol). Most of the apps nowadays can get pretty hungry but I also like keeping them in my background when switching around, so more ram definetly helps. 8GB is probably overkill as its an Eink device so its not like you’re gonna play games on it. It uses Android 11 (branded INKOS) and is currently not rootable sadly. The screen on it is 824 x 1648.

Specs out of the way, lets move on to impressions and usability from my point of view. When I first booted I noticed some stuff was already set up. That was probably the seller messing around (even though I didnt pick that option). I decided to wipe it and do a factory reset. After going through that, the phone still had some chinese bloat, stuff like Baidu, various readers and appstores, chinese specific weather apps, a weird clock in widget (i have no idea what that does lol), a usable browser (way more usable than EinkBro imo) and some other services. Most of these I uninstalled, as they’re chinese anyway. I then got myself Fdroid and installed Aurora. Aurora is horrible btw and keeps rate limiting me (probably google battling 3rd party apps). I haven’t noticed it so far after adding a throwaway google account but its still there if you go anonymus and something to keep in mind. Through Aurora I installed my banking app (not sure how safe this is but whatever, it fetches things from GP anyway), Viber (more on that later), Twitter (didnt use it yet), Telegram FOSS (through aurora), Discord, Spotify (I hate it), Reddit, Kuroba (4chan client), Neko (mangadex reader), Geometric weather, and EinkBro. Setting up fingerprint and password unlock was a piece of cake, and I noticed a couple of other settings. I’m not sure if these are available on other phones but I’ve seen them on chinese phones in videos. It has focus mode and student mode to minimize distractions. Those are cool ideas but I doubt anyone will use them. For typing I chose AnySoftKeyboard (as I do on every phone) and the typing experience is pretty decent. Apps work fine too, a bit garbage when they have animations but thankfully those can be disabled in most apps. Apps with Dark Mode only theme will make you suffer more than getting your arm cut off. Almost unusable. The only app I ran into with forced dark mode is Spotify. Sometimes the notification for it will appear as black sometimes white, but the app itself is dark and sometimes a bit hard to see. Most apps you can actually use on balanced though apps with lots of scrolling (like 4chan, twitter) I’d suggest using smooth (on web maybe even speed) and you’ll be satisfied. The phone also let me set a cute anime picture as my screen off picture and it looks absolutely beautiful. I havent tried any reading apps, however I’ve demoed Neko and manga reading is pretty good. You’ll get pretty bad picture if you’re using anything other than clear so disabling animations is encouraged.

It was only after setting everything up that I started running into some issues. For example, by default VoLTE will be enables, as the phone supports it. In the case of my carrier CallerID completely breaks and all your phone calls will be shown as Unknown with the number of -1. Disabling VoLTE makes it work as intended. It’s not gonna pick up local businesses and the like but I never really cared about those things anyway (beware if you care). RCS is also something this phone does not support as it doesn’t use google services so you will be stuck at the mercy of SMS/MMS and people actually sending you messages in those formats. Notifications will also not show up unless you install MicroG core (from Fdroid, not elsewhere), I’ll link a tutorial at the end of this post if you’re interested. However, when setting up Viber even without VoLTE im still stuck at Hidden/Unknown number and just can’t activate it. Support just sent me an SMS code but it lacks an option to activate with SMS (facepalm) so I’m still stuck with that. Viber is pretty important for my work after all so I have to keep my other phone with me and connect it to WiFi. I was able to activate Telegram just fine, and various service SMS’s still come through so I really don’t know what is the reason behind that. I will write a followup blog post in case I get a reply.

Now the ugly. Like, the screen is beautiful. I love staring at it. I loved staring at my kindle too. But oh my god does it get really bad when an app uses color or some weird shade of gray sometimes in toolbars and window names. It can look ugly. Very very dithered. Kindle handles those really really well so I really dont know where they messed up. I’m going to leave a comparison picture in the list later. The battery life is not very good. I expedct it to drain in use (as I religiously use mobile data) but it drains even in standby. Overnight it lost around 10% (which according to the battery drain stats was used by APK Pure which I since uninstalled). I hace no idea how much its gonna use now but it does last a bit longer. I’d say the battery life isn’t as good as the Xiaomi I had (5000mAh), but is better than my Huawei P30 (3650mAh) and the Hisense A9 is 4000mAh. It has pretty aggressive app killing so my only guess is the radio is using it up alot since the signal is pretty bad. The phone only supports bands 1 and 3 (and maybe 8?) from my provider, and my provider widely uses b20 so I get nice reception in city but not so much outside. It’s probably noisy though, I haven’t checked. The next issue I have (it’s not big but im lazy) is that the phone will not automatically recognize if you get called by your contacts unless you put your country dial code or whatever its called. It will just show the number. Funnily enough, manually calling those numbers without the country code WILL recognize them as your contact. Really strange stuff that I’ll have to keep in mind.

I will have to write a followup anyway at some point to see if I run into more issues or its pretty usable as a main phone (which is what I intend to use it for). Otherwise I’ll keep two phones on me.

The overall impressions are still positive. The phone has a DAC but I don’t have good enough equipment to notice the difference. It pairs with bluetooth stuff pretty well too. Calls sound good, arrive in timely matter as well as SMS. I think its a great phone if you can afford some time to tinker with it first. I forgot I never mentioned the camera in the post but I’ll say here that its serviceable and I’ll keep a sample around in the picture list.

Thanks for reading this far and I hope you have a good day.

TLDR:

  • Decent Phone
  • Dark mode apps suck
  • Need MicroG for notifications
  • CallerID is borked (at least for my carrier)
  • No RCS
  • Weird battery draining
  • Takes time getting used to typing on
  • Nice sounding speaker, though preferred with headphones (has 3.5mm)
  • No SDCard slot, 2 SIM instead

Links:

MicroG Tutorial
Store I bought it at

Pictures:
Lockscreen
Home
Spotify
Spotify Notification
Kuroba
Night Picture without flash
Night Picture with flash
Indoors pic 1
Indoors pic 2
Window pic

Kindle vs Hisense A9 for Solanin cover

Video:

Whynot