Tiny E-Reader Is the Best Piece of Technology in Years - The Atlantic

I’m glad it got the author of this article to read more, but there’s no real mention of why someone would use this instead of the myriad phone apps for reading already in existence, including the one that you have to download special software to get to run on this thing.

The TikTokification cannot be much different between this and a phone screen. You can only fit a few sentences on a phone screen in the first place, so I can’t imagine there’s a real change even when you halve the size.

Traditional ereaders have a place for a variety of reasons and this seems to go against everything someone would want in an ereader. I really just don’t understand this product and there was nothing that helped explain it’s purpose in contrast to the phone it’s presumably going to be attached to. Really wish they bothered to address that point at all.

So I bought one of these for my wife a couple months ago and she loves it. She likes that the eink screen is easier on her eyes and that it removes the temptation to open up social media and doom scroll. I do however have a few gripes about the X3.

First, the biggest issue for me is the device isn’t backlit. For my usage pattern that’s a deal breaker. The upside is that the company just released the X4 Pro and that is backlit, although it’s also a bit pricier (not by a ton, it’s still just barely sub-$100, but it’s noticeable). My wife has a rechargeable light that attaches to the X3 magnetically which she’s happy with, but that’s not for me.

Second rather than using something sensible like USB-C it uses a semi-proprietary magnetic charger with pogo pins. Not only is that another annoying cord to keep track of, but it’s unacceptably easy to short the charging cable and start a fire. I really hope they see reason and release a later revision of the device that uses USB-C (the slightly larger X4 does include USB-C charging, but that model is discontinued).

Third the buttons are kind of hard to press at times. This is more of a nitpick but I’ve got larger hands/fingers and it ruins the ergonomics of the device for me.

Fourth, these devices have an incredibly small quantity of RAM and as such they have to get clever just to open and display ebooks. They heavily cache indexes to the SD card to speed up access and those indexes take time to generate. When you first open a book and periodically while navigating you’ll be subjected to very long pauses while the firmware generates and saves that books index files.

Overall the devices are interesting, and I can see how some people could find them useful/enjoyable, but they’re also far from perfect and there’s a lot of room to improve.

Really appreciate your detailed write up. I mentioned elsewhere that some of these comments were swaying me towards trying one out, certainly more convincing than the article in my opinion. I appreciate the fact you outlined some pros and cons. I always have my phone, and anywhere I go for more than a quick chore I generally throw my ereader in a bag, so I understand I’m likely not the target audience, but I guess having more ways to read can’t be a bad thing. The lack of backlight and proprietary charger are giving me pause for sure. I might still give it a week to mull it over, but your comment was super helpful and saved me a cursory search before really diving into comparison shopping. Glad to hear they are helping some people read more. Fingers crossed they keep improving them, even if they’re not quite right for me.