(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Xteink's X4: a $69 e-ink reader that magsafes to your wallet [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-02-23  

Xteink's X4 is a tiny, rinky dink e-ink gadget that didn't get much attention when it launched, but the street found its uses and it's now a cult hit. It's a tiny, hackable e-reader that magsafes to the back of phones, lasts a week on a charge with daily use, and costs $69 in black or white. Chris Person compares it to the pocket pulp books of times past: "I love a garbage novel."

My younger years were spent reading the flimsy science fiction novels they dumped out constantly in the 70s with ancient covers that would disintegrate when you shoved them in a coat pocket. The books understood their purpose — to be cheap, tawdry and legible. The Xteink X4 is the beaten up paperback of eReaders. It is neither feature rich nor powerful; its UI is sometimes in Chinese by default, it has many basic drawbacks, and requires weird workarounds to become usable. But it's about 50-70 dollars, magnetically snaps to your phone, is barely bigger than a credit card, and with a little tweaking does exactly what is required of it and many things a Kindle could never dream of.

Others echo the sentiment. Here's Khairul Selamat:

I'm starting to love the X4 E-Ink e-reader — sometimes even more than my Kindle — despite its many, very noticeable flaws. If you're considering purchasing one, I hope my experience gives you a clearer idea of whether this quirky, minimalist device is right for you. … The X4 E-Ink reader is flawed, limited, and sometimes frustrating. And yet — I reach for it constantly.

The most powerful chip in it is an ESP32, a four-dollar microcontroller. It has a 4.3-inch non-touchscreen display with 220ppi. There are two side-buttons two on the front. It has a USB-C port, a headphone port, and 32GB microSD card. It shows DRM-free ePUB, text files, BMP, and JPG without modification. But modification, such as the Crosspoint Reader firmware, is where the fun is at, adding features that aren't there and polishing off the sharp edges.

CrossPoint Reader is a purpose-built firmware designed to be a drop-in, fully open-source replacement for the official Xteink firmware. It aims to match or improve upon the standard EPUB reading experience. … CrossPoint Reader is pretty aggressive about caching data down to the SD card to minimise RAM usage. The ESP32-C3 only has ~380KB of usable RAM, so we have to be careful. A lot of the decisions made in the design of the firmware were based on this constraint.

I wonder if it can be used as a display for a keyboard, running a barebones text editor—making it into a BYOK that's good for reading too. Anticonsumption limit break: it doesn't have a backlight. The maglight connection is off-center on some phones, too, which some users find weird.

In this Reddit thread, the OP magsafes it onto a tiny A7 Muji notebook sold in a magnetic cover. See also the Moft Flow, mentioned by another user.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/02/23/xteinks-x4-a-69-e-ink-reader-that-magsafes-to-your-wallet.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/