If you’re looking for an e-reader that can easily fit in your pocket (or snap onto your magnet-equipped phone), the tiny Xteink X4 Pro might be worth a look. It features a 4.26-inch, 800 x 480 E Ink display, making it significantly smaller and thinner than Amazon’s smallest six-inch Kindle. It’s also quite a bit cheaper. Right now, you can pick it up for $84.15 ($25 off) at Amazon, which is its best price to date.
The X4 Pro brings several welcome upgrades over its predecessors, including a touchscreen that gives readers another way to interact with it. It still has physical page-turning buttons, though. There’s also a new touch-sensitive button below the display for quickly returning to the home screen, along with a built-in light with adjustable brightness and color temperature, so you can read in the dark. It ships with the excellent CrossPoint Reader software, which makes navigating your library and reading books a much better experience than on previous Xteink models we’ve tested, though it’s still not quite as polished as Amazon’s software.
Understandably, not everyone is a fan of Xteink’s decision to swap the X4 Pro’s USB-C port for a proprietary charging connector. If you can look past that, the X4 Pro is a great, little e-reader that features magnets that let you attach it to compatible smartphones, just like previous models. The magnetic connection is stronger this time around, though we still wish it were a little more secure. All the same, my colleague Andrew Liszewski still considers the X4 Pro the best tiny e-reader you can buy, calling it a device he “won’t leave the house without.”
Read our hands-on impressions.
