this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
69 points (88.8% liked)
Technology
87896 readers
3843 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I agree that this sounds like all the drawbacks of an ereader with none of the bonuses of a phone, I think compartmentalisation is a pretty big factor. If the back of your phone is for reading, some people will be less likely to get distracted while their phone is flipped over - even though they're literally holding the likely source of their distraction.
you can't overstate how much nicer it is to read on an eink screen compared to a phone. but the magnet gimmick is silly, it's hard to use it like that and negates one of the main benefits, which is how light it is
I have an eink ereader, and it really is wonderful, but I absolutely would not use it as much if it was the size and shape of my phone. For short stretches I guess it's fine, but one of the reasons I got an ereader is because my phone was so ergonomically bad for reading.
i'll try not to sound like a shill here (i bought the x4 a few months ago) but i thought the same and tried it anyway due to how cheap it was. the text can of course be set to the same size you like it on a normal ereader but it's so light that you can hold it in thumb + forefinger without effort, i quickly came to prefer it over the old kindle paperwhite i was using
Honestly, people seem to really like them based on the comments here. 70 seems silly to essentially combine two products I already have, but I may give it a week or so and if it's still top of mind go ahead with it. I really appreciate people bothering to share their experiences with it, since I really was not convinced by the article.
I think of it less as "combine", and more "separate" on purpose. There's the images pointing out how much stuff one had to carry before that a smartphone replaces as one slab but... it doesn't do most of those things as well.
I really like my X4 from that standpoint. It's much longer battery than my phone screen grants, and I don't have to open any menus to toggle anything to say "go away, notifications", or anything like that. I'm separated from everything else on my phone while I read on it.
That's fair. I did get an ereader in part to have a dedicated device for reading that had an eink display, so I get that desire. Part of me still feels it's a bit ewaste-y, but whatever gets people to read more is generally good in my opinion.