GoKawiilI’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Selamat, Neil Brown, joelchrono, and moddedbear among them), so I got curious and ordered one.
First impressions
Out of the box, the X4 is lightweight, properly light, the kind where I’d forget it’s in my pocket. The display is crisp for its size, and the device ships with a branded 16GB microSD card (cute touch) plus a card reader and adhesive metal ring for MagSafe mounting.
The microSD slot is awkward (I needed a stylus to push the card out, felt like I was doing something wrong). The stock OS defaults to Chinese, but the UI is navigable enough that I had it switched to English within a minute of blind fumbling.
Marketing pushes the “stick it to your phone” angle hard. I’ve got a MagSafe-compatible case on my Pixel 7a, but that spot’s already taken by my card holder. Even if it wasn’t, the X4 mounts inverted for some reason (polarity issue with third-party MagSafe cases, presumably).
The real portability win is the size and weight, not the phone mount. This thing actually fits in a trouser pocket and disappears.
Software
Stock firmware is usable but minimal (three fonts, basic line-height and paragraph spacing controls, EPUB support). Page turns are instant with no noticeable ghosting. The hardware’s good, the firmware just doesn’t do it justice.
Rather than live with stock, there’s a small crop of custom firmwares, all forked from CrossPoint. CrossPoint itself has come a long way since I first started poking at this (it’s now on v1.3.0 with OTA updates, 24 UI languages, and SD-card font installation without needing to reflash). Flashing takes about two minutes and one terminal command, no button combos or debug modes needed. If the terminal’s off-putting, CrossPoint has a web-based flasher that does it in the browser instead.
Units bought from AliExpress or elsewhere outside China ship with USB flashing disabled. CrossPoint’s docs point to the SD card flashing method instead, which works fine for getting custom firmware on, it just doesn’t unlock USB flashing itself.
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