Like I said! I bought one of these trendy little gizmos and I love it.
It's a tiny e-ink screen, about 4 inches diagonal I think? It's powered by the ESP32, an impressive wifi microcontroller with anemic specs for stuff like graphics. From what I see from the original Chinese users, it was originally a fun way to show your employee badge on a lanyard. IDK anything about Chinese work culture, but that's a lovely usage, since you only need to power e-ink to change the display. Of course, e-ink is the ideal medium for paper-readers to adopt digital reading.
The price started out at $70 on the official site, and $40 on AliExpress. Unfortunately, it's become quite trendy and the price is over $100 for used ones on ebay now. So, you might be waiting for one, and IDK what sellers you can trust other than Xteink. I went with Xteink, and didn't have to deal with tariffs or anything. There's also a sibling device, the X3, that's smaller with a sharper screen, and has a few more features like a gyroscope.
It really shouldn't work well as an e-reader under my past assumptions. Human eyes like large print that's well lit, and cheap e-ink refreshes slow. Further, it doesn't even have a touch screen, so you're left to navigate the interface awkwardly with three rocker buttons and a power and reset button. It isn't waterproof. There's no gyroscope to rotate the screen automatically. You have to find your own light, it has neither a frontlight or backlight. Nobody would ever make a 4" paperback.
The device is well manufactured, a slim aluminum card with modest bezels. The rocker buttons are slim but feel solid. It has a usb port that doesn't seem picky about chargers (which I don't expect from cheaper Chinese electronics).
This has no right to be good. This is hobbyist stuff, like an Arduino that comes with a few buttons and a display that calls itself a Game Boy. A fun lark for people who obsess over computers, like me.
Think about how hard it is to use your smartphone. What have you done with your smartphone, in terms of case and accessories? How do you carry it on your person?
Chances are, you optimize it to be easy to use anywhere, and you tell yourself it's in case of emergency and to stay on top of work, but let's be real: It's for slacking off. It's a content chute that delivers you all the short form video and two-sentence political takes you can swallow. And smartphones end up designed to be long, thin, and light.
People say they don't want thin phones, that they'd rather the old Nokia bricks with large replacable batteries. That was better for the environment, but from a hardware design perspective, that makes for a thick, heavy phone. People put thick, heavy electronics in their bags, not their pockets. It's a declaration to take a laptop out of a travel bag and find a surface. It's unremarkable to yank out a cell phone and look for something, anything to distract from the current moment.
Living in Jersey City, I'm shoulder to shoulder with strangers on the bus often. As an introverted hermit, this is probably healthy for me. Lauren Berlant says that inconvenience is the first step towards endearment. I don't love the people watching TikTok without headphones or facetiming with people who probably just hear bus noise, but they are my neighbors and carry a Spark of the Divine Light, and living within my faith means I am patient and I love my neighbors like I love my neighborhood. It may be unbalanced and due to trauma, but I love being polite with them and hate bugging strangers on the bus.
My phone has my bus pass, so it's almost always in one of my most accessible pockets. My Kindle, meanwhile, is a 7" device with a big fabric case and a hump. The interface beckons me to buy new books, even before I unlock it. It tells me about Goodreads notifications, reminding me that everything in our society has to be a public scoreboard now, and caring too much about your friend's takes on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the first step on the road to perdition.
In short, my Kindle sips wifi but still exposes me to every possible book I ever bought through Amazon, as well as a dictionary and summary of who each character is with X-Ray. It's an impressive ecosystem designed to delight customers and sell as many books as possible.
But I'm not happy to use my Kindle outside of the books on it. It's awkward to pull out in close quarters, and awkward to put away unless I'm standing up and can mess with my bag. The X4 fits in any pocket, and even can use Magsafe to stick to your phone like a parasite fighter. It is easier to pull out than my cell phone, so it's missing the first bit of friction that makes going on BlueSky easier than reading something new.
The big trend in Weird Phones is to make phones that don't dominate attention. They try this a few ways, smaller screens, crap featurephone that can barely text, app-restricted profiles on a switch. People are getting excited about vintage technology that objectively sucks compared to the digital stuff. A CD, a MiniDisc track, and a FLAC file can all sound like the exact same recording. Like it or not, the Nyquist theorem made music decoding a solved problem.
This ends up becoming a warped reflection of regular consumerism. People with ADHD and anxiety, clinging to a pleasant distraction, listen to pitches that say just a few more gadgets will fix them, or make them more interesting, or smarter. I'm not immune to this worldview, and worried the tiny ebook would be another impulse buy that won't fix me.
People seem to think apps and internet connectivity is the problem. I think the real issue is intention. A smartphone is great because it's a tiny computer designed to do everything. But the human mind isn't meant to think about everything at once. We like reasoning about a few goals at a time, and when we're comfortable, our thoughts spread out and we reflect on stuff and learn lessons and get good ideas.
Phones are inherently overwhelming, and unfortunately, overwhelmed people are easy to manipulate. You read the news, get angry, you scroll through Instagram to calm down, you get a few ads and out of nowhere, you are buying a hot dog duffel bag from a place called QIZNATX. You forget it before it even arrives. You get a news alert that there's a rumor the president will take away your healthcare. Repeat. That loop will start reading anything longform on a cell phone.
So, while my Pixel 9 Pro has an excellent screen and can render anything, I don't like it for reading, because my phone is where I worry and goof off. The longest thing I watch on my phone is Youtubes, and not long Youtubes.
I even think the small screen is better, for neurological reasons. Or ergonomic? Neurogernomic? The point it, I usually track the line I'm reading with my finger on real books, as that's easiest for me to scan the lines. It can make finding my place after I put down my book hard, and sometimes I let a page wash over me without realizing it. With the X4, I see a few sentences and know I'm on them if I close it.
So, frictionless long form attention in a world full of slip-and-slides to make us scared and clueless and burnt out.
When I bought it, the first thing I did was install the Crosspoint custom firmware. It lets the device either join a wifi network or act as a hotspot, and then you can upload epubs/txt/bmps from a web app it hosts. It's quick and easy to do, and while there's more manual steps, it feels more solid than the Email to Kindle workflow. (You see the books transfer and arrive with a progress bar, for one).
There's lots of good public domain ebooks from standardebooks.com, as well as Project Gutenberg, and there are ways to strip DRM from Kindle purchases, as well as authors who insist on selling their works DRM free. There are also pretty easy to find Shadow Libraries online, that host free epubs of most popular books. This is piracy, but I struggle to see how it's more harmful than using a library other than logistics, and I discovered most authors I like from library books, and make a point of supporting authors I like by buying their books. I think this is merely just simplified logistics compared to checking out a book. Whether or not you think it's ethical, it's a query worth exploring for yourself. Even if you disagree and think Amazon has a sacred right to keep DRM on your ebooks, there are so many public domain books you can read!
It's especially good for travel, because like I mentioned earlier, it fits in any pocket. To keep the screen safe (after I messed up the bundled screen protectors >_<) I 3d printed a slide in case. There's many designs, and some leverage the magnet for a more secure fit. Friction is good enough for me and the back is made of anodized aluminum so merely flipping it is plenty of protection.
I'm thinking about printing more versions of the case to make it cuter, and I'm debating even figuring out a clear case I can hook to my bag for it so I can show off like a charm that says whatever I'm reading on the lockscreen. But for now I'd rather keep it safe!
People also have cases that double as wallets and pages in small notebooks like the Travelers' Notebooks. I don't keep a notebook at the moment, but it looks so cute I'm tempted.
What's tragic about the always-on immediacy of smartphones is how it reduces the world to superficial reactions that fill our days like packing peanuts. It makes simple media effortless, and watching proper TV or movies is awkward, and reading is interrupted by notifications. A phone is simply not designed to accommodate long term attention outside of games.
I've felt my mind start to drop more complex tasks as I enter my late 30s. It's a bit alarming, but I accept it as part of life, but suspect the internet chopped up my attention. I find myself listening to podcasts or watching youtube while I play video games. Games are meant to be an immersive escape from reality, but even a hyperreal fake full of violence and adventure can't occupy the millennial mind anymore.
Reading is different, because your mind needs to decode the words and decide what they mean in context. A book demands you trust it and give it something. In exchange, you get a stream of thought that can embody any person, place, or thing. Roger Ebert said a movie projector is the closest thing we can have to an Empathy Machine. Books go beyond that, to a machine that lets you sample new qualia. You may not know what it's like to be a bat, but you can know what it's like to think the words of What It's Like To Be A Bat within your life.
I don't think Xteink are a major brand in China. Everyone knows about Audible and Kindle and how they all come together for a seamless experience. It's hard to launch a hardware/storefront ecosystem, even for big companies. Despite my complaints, I think Kindle is a good product, it just doesn't suit my style of reading where i can quickly read a few lines and then stuff my device in a Girl Pocket.
Xteink has no platform, it's a product of a world that assumes people wouldn't invent locks for books. It's a gadget for displaying ink and it does it well. It proudly advertises it comes with a beloved hobbyist chip that's easy to reflash. Instead of the kindle, where the users buy subsidized hardware to shop for premium content at healthy margins, like a video game console or razor. Amazon is proud this lets them make better devices at lower prices, with the side effect of keeping an amazon storefront at arm's reach. But it's hard to trust a cutthroat tech company offering gifts. I get to own my X4.
If the X4 stays popular, Amazon will probably release a cheap Kindle around the same size with a backlight and waterproofing. It will likely have so-so battery life, a touchscreen, and a strong enough chip to run the android-y Kindle OS. It'll be a good product for people who don't want to mess with weird machines and files, and let people highlight and take notes. I'll probably want to stick with my X4, because I like that it can keep me focused on reading a few books instead of browsing footnotes and wikipedia and urgent news that there's a new Jack Reacher book even tho idk who that is. Living with an Amazon product is like living with a polite salesman you just can't trust.
The Crosspoint project sets a clear scope for the project. They don't want to add features beyond the scope of reading books. I agree with that choice, but there's clearly room for more buttons on the screen, and it's easy to pick up another or reflash it. I think a custom fork might be in my future.
For one, it has Bluetooth and could take a signal from a keyboard to be a laggy text editor, if someone wrote the software. Crosspoint already handles text rendering, so maybe an Alphasmart style editor is doable!
For another, it could easily get a storefront for public domain books if I found the right apis. A full webview would be asking too much, but a structured list of books we page through over a few buttons isn't that hard.
My one wish is that the developers exposed GPIO pins one way or another so I can add stuff that isn't bluetooth, but that'd make it larger and more fragile, so I will live without it. I think I saw one project using it as a spotify player controller somehow, which is also neat! (I don't use Spotify, but I admire a nice remote control!)
When people say "PCs," they mean "IBM Clone." Computer manufacturers don't care much if you use Windows or stick to the Microsoft store. They just want to sell assembled hardware they bought in bulk, at whatever price makes them a profit. There's no expectation I give Lenovo a cut when I buy a Steam game. Nobody gave me grief when I installed NixOS.
The X4 is as free as a blank notebook, eager to be whatever the user wants. A Home Assistant Remote, an ID badge, a low power logging gizmo, it doesn't matter. It is what you would like it to be. You are in control to explore stories and everything else!
IMO, if you used to like to read but find it awkward with your current lifestyle, give this thing a try. It's cheap and you could probably regift it if it's not your thing. Assuming the shortage ends!
I've undersold the jank with this, but the jank is mostly an issue without the custom firmware, and if you think "I want a card that reads books without bs," there's no jank that matters beyond load times when you first open a book :)