E-ink phones nail exactly two things: reading comfort and battery life that laughs at your charging cable. Color is where they faceplant. Hisense apparently got tired of that trade-off. The A10, set for a China launch on August 28, 2024, pairs a 6.13-inch E Ink primary display with a detachable magnetic color LCD that clicks on when you want it and vanishes when you don’t. Real-life images recently shared by a Hisense official on Weibo show the thing in action — and it looks less like a smart gadgets gimmick than you’d expect.
How You Toggle Between Two Display Realities
The A10 gives you a physical key and two software shortcuts to flip between e-ink and color modes without digging through a settings menu.
Switching isn’t buried in some submenu. You get three options: a dedicated physical Ink Smart Key on the body, a toggle in quick settings, and a button in the quick ball interface. The main E Ink panel runs through a T2000 TCON chip managing refresh behavior, which reportedly keeps the paper-like experience consistent rather than janky. You’re not adjusting brightness sliders — you’re choosing which screen runs the show.
Here’s what’s confirmed so far:
- 6.13-inch E Ink primary display
- Detachable magnetic color LCD (reportedly sold separately, not included by default)
- Qualcomm QCM6690 (Dragonwing Q-6690) chipset
- 5G support (Android version unconfirmed at time of reporting)
- Estimated price: ~CNY 4,000 / $590 without the LCD add-on
- China launch August 28, 2024; no confirmed global availability
Real-life images suggest the detachable LCD delivers “decent brightness and color output” when attached, according to reporting on materials shared by a Hisense official.
The Trade-Off You’re Signing Up For
Midrange specs and several missing details mean buying the A10 is a bet on display philosophy, not raw processing power.
The QCM6690 chipset firmly plants the A10 in midrange territory — analysts tracking modular device trends note that IoT-focused chipsets in this tier trade peak performance for efficiency, which aligns with an e-ink device’s priorities. Full OLED display technology accessory specs remain unpublished. Final accessory pricing is still unclear. This phone channels the ghost of Project Ara — that beautiful, doomed dream of modular hardware you actually configure yourself, helping to pave the way for bolder display experiments. The target buyer reportedly reads for hours on their phone but doesn’t want to carry both a Kindle and an Android device. Narrow audience, but a real one.
Right now the A10 is China-only with no global timeline. Think of it as a proof of concept worth tracking, not a purchase to plan around. But if that magnetic display performs as the images suggest, Hisense may have handed every niche-display phone maker a genuinely new blueprint.
