This Wallet-Sized Xteink X4 E-Reader Is My Tech ‘Upgrade of the Year’
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One of the often unspoken truths of being a technical reviewer is that you can test, recommend (and sometimes even keep!) gadgets that you would never buy for yourself because you can’t justify their cost. This is why I tend to spend a lot of my reviews talking about price: I love cutting-edge gadgets as much as the next nerd, but I have two kids and live in the most expensive city in America. As much as I admire the Boox Palma 2 Pro, my budget doesn’t really have room for a niche $400 e-reader.
That’s why the Xteink He doesn’t want to replace your phone. It doesn’t want to offer the smoothest screen technology. It won’t run games or apps or sync seamlessly with your phone. It just wants to be a small, inexpensive e-reader that works just well enough and is small enough to take with you anywhere.
Simplicity is the point
As I point out in my review, the Xteink X4 can’t compete in any way with the Palma 2 Pro (or your average Kindle, for that matter). It has an underpowered processor and no screen illumination. Due to digital rights management, you probably won’t be able to use it to read all the Kindle books you already own (although that’s really Amazon’s fault). It’s a bit of a pain to load it with e-books, and once you put them in, they might not look great, because the current software can’t even show paragraph indents or italics.
But it also costs less than $50, and once everything is set up, it performs exactly the same function as a more expensive device: It allows me to easily carry my library with me so that I can read a book instead of looking at my phone. But because it’s very small – about 25% smaller and thinner than my iPhone 14 – it does this better than any other device I’ve tried.
What do you think of it so far?
But more than just functional, the Xteink X4 is amusing– although, admittedly, much of that comes from the vibrant community that has grown up around this topic online. It’s only been available for a few months, but it already has its own active subreddit, filled with geeky users helping each other with FAQs, troubleshooting, and galleries of crowd-sourced screensaver images. They’ve developed tools and shortcuts to get around the device’s limited functionality, from a Caliber plugin that will optimize your EPUB files for the Xteink X4, to an online tool that will automatically convert them into much prettier image files. A few different people are even working on completely new firmware to replace the merely functional native software.
You don’t do it to have Tinkering with the Xteink In their inordinate dedication to a niche device, these people are bringing back the spirit of the old Internet, fueled by a sense of community rather than an omniscient algorithm. Like today’s retro appeal of cassette tapes, the Xteink X4 improves while being a little worse.
