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  • I've been using it for about 6 months. Very, very good - especially paired with anna's archive.

    IT IS VERY FRAGILE! The eink screen on my first broke while in my backpack. The company is generous, I bought a new one and they gave 35% off and included all accessories (reading light, case, extra protectors). Highly recommend.

    by senorcrab
  • I've bought a X3 and I loved it (with crosspoint). However, the screen broke after just a week, even if I used the official cover all the time. It's a cute gadget but it's too fragile for the intended use: its strength is the form factor, you want to bring it with yourself to read a page in any mobility setting, but its fragility is a critical issue.
    by emme
  • I've looked at this device and I wonder how good the layout engine is. Screenshots never show text with any hyphenation going on which makes me wonder if it even supports hyphenation.

    One of the images on the Amazon page for the reader has somebody holding one beside their laptop and if you look at the screen, it looks terrible. There are even words jammed together ("would be most suitable forthe job").

    I love that it has physical buttons though. My reader is the Kindle Oasis and the buttons are one of my favorite features of the device. The Oasis layout engine and typography are both pretty good and I wonder if the X4 would end up feeling like a big downgrade.

    by criddell
  • Custom firmwares support hyphenation
    by lisnake
  • The layout engine is limited. It does flow text quite well, but when I had mine (the screen broke a few months ago) I was working on adding more features to the rendering engine.

    It's easy to write a HTML & CSS layout engine to support most of the epub spec, but hard to do it well on such a constrained chip. Even things like nested lists and inline code snippets are a challenge.

    by azertify
  • The alternative firmwares give you a lot more options in this, stock is OK in layout
    by bouk
  • I got one, it's pretty cool that it's small enough to just magnet to the back of your phone. If your someone who needs to use a large font on their ereader to read its certainly not for you, but the screen size is good enough for regular sized text.

    It's also cool that it's chip is just an ESP32.

    by ApolloFortyNine
  • I would like to see a phone case which this inserts into --- bonus points if there's a way to use it as a status display for the phone for use in bright/direct sunlight.
    by WillAdams
  • I ordered the X4 this past Christmas and received it sometime in January. I have it running Crosspoint. I like it a lot but I do wish it was a bit larger, like a 7-8" display so more text could fit on the screen. The thing I love about the X4 is that I can flash different firmware on it and it's dead simple. It's not an Android tablet with an e-ink screen, it doesn't download ads from Amazon servers, it's just an e-reader.
    by hecifato
  • I've had an x3 with crosspoint for a couple of months. Overall I love the device, it's making it easy to pull up the phone and read a couple of pages instead of doom scrolling. But a huge drawback is that it's unusable in direct sunlight since the screen fades away. Here is how it looks: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1q5fhwf/dire...

    I contacted support and they answered

    "We would like to clarify that on e ink displays, text may appear lighter under very strong direct sunlight. Once the screen refreshes or you return to normal lighting conditions and turn a few pages, the text will fully recover. This behavior is related to the low power design of the display and does not cause any damage to the screen."

    by ludvigcosma
  • Oof... I just ordered the x3 and plan to add CrossPoint on it. If hesitating to cancel my ordered as it didn't ship yet. I have plenty of other e-ink screens and it has never happened. I specifically enjoy e-ink in directly sunlight or at least outdoors ... so I'm not sure if that's still a good usecase for me anymore.

    Thanks for for sharing.

    by utopiah
  • Crosspoint has a software fix for this in settings. It’s not 100% but it does work. It’s called the Sunlight Fading Fix under Display settings. https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader/blob/...
    by jeromechoo
  • Apparently the cable to the screen is to blame and the workaround is a piece of tape to block UV light reaching that component: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/comments/1qlyq3s/this...

    Personally, I've found that just moving the screen out of the sun (for example by turning it upside-down, or holding my hand in front of it) when refreshing a page is enough to prevent it.

    by kilian
  • I got the X4 a few weeks back and installed https://github.com/uxjulia/CrossInk and it has been a dream.
    by dinkleberg
  • Love my X4. Shameless plug, I also built an iOS/Android app to manage books and also send web articles over to Crosspoint

    https://crosspointsync.com/

    by zabi_rauf
  • Thank you. I'm not the biggest fan of the Crosspoint web interface, so I'll definitely give this a try.
    by ihowlatthemoon
  • Was just looking at this. What keeps me from buying is the screen is just too small. I'd love to slap this magnetically on the back of my iPhone and have it on the go as a focused reading device but eyes after 40 aren't so happy about reading super tiny characters.

    My two wishes are: to size it up so it is roughly the width of a modern smartphone (2.72" -> 2.8") and decrease bezel size. At these small sizes, even 1/2 to 3/4" screen size increase is a big deal in area gained, which leads to more comfort reading and less line scanning.

    Hope they'll ship one with the size up 4.7" ED047TC1 display [1] instead.

    [1] https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-EPD47/blob/esp32s3/...

    by npunt
  • I mean, people read HN articles and discuss them on phones all the time.
    by fg137
  • I've read an entire book on the X3 attached to the back of my phone and it hasn't been an issue. Reading horizontally I get close enough to the 80 chars per line ideal that it doesn't bother me at all.
    by square_usual
  • The screen size isn't really an issue for font sizes. Just put fewer words on the screen.

    There are e-readers that put a single word on the screen, this can fit plenty in a decent font size, you'll have to switch pages more often, but I haven't found that to be an issue, the button is very light to press and the page transition (with Crosspoint) is fast.

    by alias_neo
  • I love my X3. I glued its magnetic folio to the back of my Apple Wallet. It turned out perfectly, for me. Pictures below. I've read The Odyssey and several other shorter books on it and have yet to recharge it.

    - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCStWYAAOj6f?format=jpg&name=...

    - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCO8WIAASMEn?format=jpg&name=...

    - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCPEXgAE3O4z?format=jpg&name=...

    by enthdegree
  • I got one last April, and love it: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2026/04/04/1800

    I also built two quick hacks for it that people might like:

    - https://github.com/rcarmo/bun-readlater-epub

    - https://github.com/rcarmo/bun-opds-server

    by rcarmo
  • I have the X4 and the X3 (newer smaller one). I will get whatever the next version is if it has a backlight or more DPI / support for smaller font.

    X4 is great - has usb-c charger and with the cover feels like an easy to pocket and bring everywhere reader. Does not fit on the back of an iphone. I assume the magnet layout works with popular android phones though.

    X3 is also great, actually fits on the back of the phone with the magsafe - magnet is a _bit_ too weak. It does fall off in my pocket frequently but I haven't lost it yet. Does not have usb-c - has weird little magnetic 4 pin charger.

    I will gift my X4 to my brother once I've loaded some more content to it.

    I recommend this for anyone that wants to save web novels for offline reading https://github.com/lncrawl/lightnovel-crawler - Calibre will sync the epubs to the x4 and x3.

    Use the crosspoint OS https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader

    All that said... I do still use my kindle as default. More content accessible more easily, better syncing, backlight

    by harrisonjackson
  • the next version will unfortunately be a generic Android reader. This device is good because, by chance, out of a thousand devices, one of them has to be better than all the rest. This product is not good by design or merit, but by chance. Same goes for lots of popular cheap Chinese tech, like the Miyoo Mini+ for example. Better than it has any right to be, and the people making it don't have a clue; every change to such a device can only be for the worse.
    by functionmouse
  • Got the X4. Put CrossPoint on it. Works like a charm. The http server accessible over wifi makes transferring books extremely simple. (Shame on the Kindle for locking everything down.) This is proof-of-concept that a microcontroller is more than enough for something like an e-reader.

    I have a Kindle and a Kobo. They are sturdy devices. But the X4 is the one that is a genuine e-reader. Would not get it as my one and only e-reader though as you tend to miss the size and backlight of the larger ones.

    What would I want from future iterations?

    - backlight even if it compromises on battery a bit

    - a bit more DPI

    Everything else is good enough.

    by sieve
  • I have the Kobo Libra Color and the contrast on the X4 is much much better.

    The whole sticking-it-to-the-back-of-your-phone i find a bit useless, but mine came with two metal rings so that I can stick it to other places.

    I have one ring on the dashboard of my car so the X4 can hang there until i need to use it. Good for trips with many stops.

    by abricot
  • Do you know what the maximum SD card size that it'll support? I'm especially interested if a 1TB card will work.
    by UI_at_80x24
  • It was probably a decade ago, but I used to have this extremely cheap e-reader that ran off AA batteries, used a monochrome LCD screen (no lighting) and was based on a microcontroller. If you let the batteries die and waited too long to replace them, you had to reflash the software on it. I think it only handled mobi format, but it might have been epub.
    by coredog64
  • You can always install KOReader on Kindle to get the painless wireless transfer as well. It can even sync wirelessly with Calibre.
    by czpl
  • There are rumors they will release a V2 Pro version with touch and backlight in the second half of this year.

    They also have already announced the S4 that is basically the same device, a bit ticker with touch and backlight and running android.

    by tmottabr