The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
67 points by adaszko
67 points by adaszko
I got myself one of these after seeing some reviews pop up end last year on my YT feed. Great device, am definitely reading more than I used to because it's low friction and available. I tend to put it in the same pocket as my phone, so when I instinctively grasp for my doomscrolling device, I feel the X4 and (more often than not) grab that instead. Wasn't aware about all the different firmwares except for Crosspoint, which I have been running. Might check out inx, looks nice.
what is the page turn latency like? that's one of the main reasons I went back to my phone kindle app over my actual kindle, it just feels more responsive. (the other reason is that the phone is more ergonomic to hold despite amazon's best efforts, but I imagine the xteink readers fix that)
I haven't tried stock firmware recently since I'm on Crosspoint, but my experience was that the stock firmware would instantly switch to the next page, but if you needed to flip to, say, 5 pages ahead, it felt slow because the firmware didn't buffer the actions, it would render each page along the way which adds a bunch of latency. Meanwhile Crosspoint buffers all the actions and seems to render on a different thread, so if you hit next page 5 times it will just immediately render curPage + 5.
All of this comes together to make the X4 feel very responsive on Crosspoint. And single page turning on stock is still instant as the sibling commenter said, if you don't want to flash a different firmware. This single feature drastically improved my experience with the X4, and now my Kindle Paperwhite mostly collects dust.
Within-chapter it's instant. There's lots of smart caching going on so that they pre-render the page and just load it on page turn. Of course, small screen also makes this a bit quicker I reckon.
I got one of these a few months ago and got through several books on it since.
My past e-reader upgrades were always larger, fancier screens and more features. The X4 is the opposite direction. It's a minimal distraction-free reading experience that fits in your pocket and can goes with you everywhere. And this goes a long way.
Like the author I don't care for the "stick to your phone" thing either, I got the official case and that works very well.
I also use the CrossPoint firmware mentioned in the post and I like it a lot, you can tell that it's created by people who actually use the device every day. My one caveat is that the repo gets quite a few vibecoded commits but at least they do require disclosure.
Features you might miss: backlight, rotation sensor (can rotate manually), dictionary lookup. I had no trouble giving these up in exchange for it being so pocketable.
How do you even read on this? It's a serious question!
I read a bunch, and going from an old Kindle paperwhite (6", low-ish DPI) to a new one (7", high DPI) has been incredible, I can't really imagine going the other way
Sideways! Comfortable line length oriented in landscape for me, and far nicer than reading on my phone.
To add to this, horizontally, the even smaller X3 still has more text per line than my iPhone 16 Pro, which I have no trouble reading comfortably on, so the X3 is arguably more comfortable to read on than the average phone.
How do you even read on this? It's a serious question!
Why on earth would it be difficult to read on this? I can't see how it would be difficult.
Let me guess, you have young eyes ;)
If you look at the pictures on their website, showing actual book rendering, the lines read
carefree nineteen-year-old who
spent the summer gallivating
around France.
Sure it does, I assure myself
If I take my kindle, on font size "3", lines read
She grew silent and stared out the window. 'In the mountains,' she
said softly, 'there was never time to be idle. I was the younger of
so about 2x the line length, and kindle shows 35 llines (with some variance, this has 5 paragraphs), the X4 shows 16 lines.
So you get about 4x less text per page, and the constant staccato seems.... inconvenient?
How do you know font size 3 on your Kindle is the same font size used in the picture of the X4?
I was also concerned about the font size, but it's not bad! The default reader settings on CrossPoint get me around 6-8 sentences per screen. Not much, but long enough to not be super annoying. A capital "I" is 3.3mm tall if that's at all helpful (and you can obviously change the size).
I would not use this as my primary e-reader. If I'm home, or in bed, I'd use a larger screen device (especially because this one doesn't have a backlight). But the X4 is nice when you're out and about and only want to read for a few minutes.
Another way to think about it is that this device is the same size as a smartphone from 2010. People used to read all sorts of stuff on those :p You just didn't want to read a lot of stuff.
I am picky about the reading experience (enough to reformat my books with Calibre when necessary) so I was concerned about this but I quickly found a layout that makes me happy. Landscape mode, medium font size, tight spacing, margin: 5 (the minimum), paragraph alignment: left.
On my kindles I always used justified rather than left alignment but CrossPoint doesn't seem to limit inter-word spaces (or the limit is way too high) so I quickly switched to "left".
The amount of text I get on a line and on a page this way feels decent. As an unexpected benefit I find that I don't lose my place on the page as often as I do on larger screens.
Given that the X4 doesn’t support DRM, is anyone aware of places to buy popular/recent-ish DRM-free books? Is that even a thing?
I know it’s possible to sometimes remove DRM from EPUB books, but I’d prefer to give my money to places that sell copies of books instead of licenses that lock you into their walled garden and don't allow you to choose any old device.
I went down this rabbit hole a month ago. All the drm-free bookshops also sell drm books, and have very bad UX about saying which is which. Most books I’ve wanted have not been available, drm-free, anywhere.
It’s not like music: there isn’t an easy solution you can get to with a little research.
I’ve settled on checking https://standardebooks.org first and then buying from ebooks.com second, knowing I’m probably getting drm.
bookshop.org does for some; I got the latest Murderbot there. But another book I looked at only had a DRM'd version; the limit may be more "publisher" than "shop".
("How easy is it to get the DRM'd version" matters too though; e.g. Amazon has some de-DRMed things, but they're not exactly making the download links accessible.)
Ha, yes, I just was (slowly) typing a very similar comment. Too bad there’s no “GOG for books” to sell me DRM-free sci-fi classics (other than paperbacks, of course!).
eBooks.com sells a mixture of DRM’ed and DRM-free ebooks, so depending on the book it might be a good option.
One observation: Bookshop.org makes it easy to filter to DRM-free EPUBs, but they're mostly by independent authors. Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge are there, at least! (But no Asimov, Gibson, Simmons.)
Does anyone use this device as a news/article reader? I am interesting in an e-reader that would consume my reading list of articles in the background, so when I pick it up I can read long reads/articles seamlessly without being on my phone.
I got my partner a Kobo, which has Instapaper integration. So occasionally I borrow her reader to read my saved articles. I did get myself an Xteink X4, its size makes it much easier to always have it with me. I'm currently working on a small tool that fetches my saved articles from Instapaper and bundles them into an epub every day. Getting that on the Xteink will still be manual, but the Calibre remote sync protocol makes that rather easy: Start the X4, select File Transfer -> Calibre Wireless, click a button in my tool and it ships the epub.
It has WiFi, but it doesn't connect to a network until you go into a menu to do so, and only stays connected so long as you're in that menu. This is to save power, presumably. However, it's very easy to write your own firmware for it, so I'm sure you could make it work if you wanted to.
I have so many questions. First where can you find this for £40?
That should be around 46€/53$
https://www.xteink.com/products/xteink-x4 It seems to be 63€/69$ and that's the cheapest I could find it.
Second why would anyone buy this instead of a "real" ebook reader like a pocketbook that can read more than epub, has backlight and is also a very open platform? I mean it's 50% on the price, but it's screen is 6" instead of 4" (I see that as a plus since it still fits snugly in my pocket/hand and is easier to read)
If I could truly get one for the price mentioned, maybe it's worth it, but being only able to find it a much steeper price I don't see the point. I think I would always pay a little bit extra to be able to read PDFs and at night in bed
I just grabbed it from Amazon for $55 minutes ago because of this post. It was firmly in the "cheap enough to try out" and it coincided with my ancient e-reader mostly dying the other day.
Oh on my local amazon it isn't available.
Unbelievable. Apparently, my wife sent a gift order to my inlaws across the country and that set the default delivery address to them. My X4 is now in FL. So much for starting a new ebook on it this weekend.
What is open about Pocketbook? I’d never heard of it, and can’t find anything that makes it sound more open than other e-readers.
Edit: thanks for the replies!
Oh it has a few things that are positive about it. There is for instance the repair guide https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch/repair-guide-ch
Since it uses linux distribution that doesn't obstruct you from adding your own programs there is a more or less active ecosystem for it. For instance you can simply install a terminal emulator like https://github.com/CatInBeard/pb-terminal
Pocketbook runs linux as far as I know. The reader I had a few years ago just had an internal sd card as the main storage medium. You could just take it out and modify it easily.
I got one of these because my regular ereader was on the fritz, but despite that I rarely use it because it's too small and it made me realize I usually read in the evenings in the dark, so without a light, it wasn't really useful. I keep it just because I might want to tinker with the firmware a bit in the future.
there are rumors they will release a v2 pro version of this with backlight.
They have already announced a S4 model that is basically the same but running android and it already will have backlight.
They also have the X3. A bit unintuitive, but X3 is newer than X4 (but smaller, hence the name).
I have one mostly for times the kindle is inconvenient. It does have a lanyard attachment point! With crosspoint the fonts seem fine. Hope the battery is long life.
I got an X3 recently and I love it. It sticks to the back of my phone, which means I always have it; every spare moment that I'd end up checking my phone now guides me towards reading, which means I've read more in the time I've had it than I did the entire year or so prior. Unlike the author, I'm sticking with crosspoint for two reasons: they're all largely vibeforks that aren't as active in development (this matters because the X3 is decently new and required a ton of work to get feature parity), and crosspoint ends up getting all of those features soon enough anyway. At some point I'm wondering if I should get another and vibefork my own firmware and use the larger X4 as an e-ink cyberdeck, but I'm so happy with the X3 right now that I'm planning to make it the birthday gift I give to several people over the rest of the year.
i got one of these about a month ago, and i absolutely adore it! i have a hard time staying focused while reading, and while i still struggle with that when reading on the X4, i've found that having a dedicated device has helped a lot.
i run crosspoint like most people, and it really does improve the experience. flashing it was so simple too. kudos to the community that's grown around these devices; people are doing great work on them!
I have one as well, though I haven't managed to get any books loaded onto it yet. But when I get around to mess with it again I'll try using it for a bit to read during downtime and so on. I have a kindle that really is portable enough as well on the other hand.