If you follow me over on Mastodon you'll no doubt have seen I have a new favourite device! The Xteink X4 is a tiny eink ereader which is pretty affordable, and definitely very pocketable. At around £44 from Aliexpress I took the plunge.
One big plus that I had read about was that there are actively developed open source firmwares available for this device, most notably Crosspoint Reader. The supplied firmwares are pretty naff and also mine and most of these come out of the box setup with Chinese localisation. So to be honest, beyond just booting the device to check it worked I immediately flashed Crosspoint reader onto it within seconds. Flashing Crosspoint Reader is incredibly simple as there is a web flashing tool. Simply USB your device to your computer, point a chrome based browser at this website and click flash! Simple.
After flashing Crosspoint I needed to add some epubs to read. I have a collection of stuff I've bought from HumbleBundle and usually used the PDF download so it was nice to see that they are all in my library available as epub files as well. The supplied SD card was pretty useless on my unit and contained a few spurious .bin files I couldn't quite decipher so I chucked in a better quality branded SD card. Of course you can simply copy and paste Epubs onto an SD card with the SD card connected to your computer, and in many ways thats the simplest and robustest method.
However Crosspoint has a couple of other options. You can set the Xteink X4 up as a hotspot, connect to it via your computer or phone WiFi menu and then it will serve a small website with a file browser and transfer options. Similarly you can also connect the Xteink X4 directly to a WiFi network and then browse to your device from another device on the same network. Lot's of options.
Speaking of options. there are also other ways you can create Epub to read on the device. There's an
excellent browser plugin "send-to-x4" which acts to snip webpages and export them either to computer storage or directly to a connected Xteink X4 as epub. It's kind of cool to grab a long form article of pages like Hackaday and take them in my pocket to read offline. The other really useful one for me is that Libreoffice Writer which I use every day for work can directly export epub files. This means I can take an article I am writing and want to read a draft of, or simply write myself a to do list or some notes which I can chuck on the device.
So yes, it's primarily an epub device. No native support for PDF or other extravagant formats. However there is an Xteink format XTC which people sometimes use for graphic heavy books (Manga comics et al). There are some online convertors and a lovely
SOURCE magazine reader (and donator!) asked if XTC might be a good format for SOURCE magazine on the device. Whilst it works... let me tell you... it's too small a device for the graphic heavy SOURCE magazine to work well on as a reading experience!
Aside from books and documents, there's an ace feature in the Crosspoint reader firmware that allows you to set a single custom sleep image, or a folder with a gallery of randomly picked sleep images. I knocked up this super quick little name badge bmp image in Inkscape and GIMP and now my Xteink can double up as a lanyard mount name badge! Perfect.
There are numerous official cased for the device, but I found the nice lanyard case on one of the many printables/thingiverse type websites. But I really like reading on the device without a case, so I ended up making a custom version of a parametric FreeCAD Rugged box project and lasercut some different thicknesses of foam to make it the correct fit where it doesn't move in the case, but isn't likely to crush the screen.
So my final thoughts on it are, it's cool, I love it, even in the little rugged case its incredibly pocketable and I am actively reading more having it in my life. It reads well outdoors and indoors and whilst not backlit its perfect for bedtime reading and gets me away from my distracting smart phone!
