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One of the often unspoken truths of being a tech reviewer is you get to test out, recommend—and sometimes even keep!—gadgets that you would never buy for yourself, because you can’t justify what they cost. This is why I tend to spend large portions of my reviews talking about price. I love a cutting edge device as much as the next nerd, but I have two kids and I 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 X4, a minimalist 4.3-inch e-reader, is my tech upgrade of 2025: Here’s a device that has no delusions of grandeur. It doesn’t want to replace your phone. It doesn’t want to serve up the smoothest screen tech. It doesn’t want to run games or apps or seamlessly sync with you phone. It just wants to be a tiny, inexpensive e-reader that works just well enough, and is small enough to carry with you anywhere.
The simplicity is the point
As I make clear in my review, the Xteink X4 can in no way compete with the Palma 2 Pro (or your average Kindle, for that matter). It has an underpowered processor and no screen light. Due to digital rights management, you probably won’t be able to use it to read all the Kindle books you already own (though that’s really Amazon’s fault). It’s kind of a pain to load it up with e-books, and once you get them on there, they might not look great, as the current software can’t even display paragraph indents or italics.
But it also costs less than $70 (as little as $45 if you order from AliExpress, a sort of Chinese answer to Amazon Marketplace), and once it’s all set up, it fulfills the exact same function as a pricier device: It allows me to easily carry my library around with me so I can read a book instead of staring at my phone. But because it’s so very tiny—around 25% smaller and thinner than my iPhone 14—it does this better than any other device I’ve tried.
What do you think so far?
More than just functional, though, the Xteink X4 is fun—though admittedly, a lot of that comes from the vibrant community that has sprung up around it online. It has only been available for a few months, but it already has its own active subreddit, filled with geeky users helping each other out with FAQs, troubleshooting, and crowd-sourced galleries of screensaver images. They’ve developed tools and shortcuts to get around the device’s limited functionality, from a Calibre 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 folks are even working on entirely new firmware to replace the merely functional native software.
You don’t have to tinker with the Xteink X4—it’s perfectly usable out of the box, once you get used to quirks like navigating its slightly confusing menus with its slightly unintuitive physical buttons—but it’s fun to be engaged with a bunch of other people who are excited about making it work better. In their outsized devotion to a niche device, these folks are bringing back the spirit of the old internet, powered by a sense of excitement and community rather than an all-knowing algorithm. Like the current retro appeal of cassette tapes, the Xteink X4 makes everything better by being a little bit worse.
