It’s official. The Xteink X4 Pro was released today, and it’s available to order from Xteink’s website for $99, with a list price of $109. It’s not listed on Xteink’s Amazon store yet, but it’ll probably show up soon (right now they have the smaller X3 on sale for $63.19).
The Xteink X4 Pro has the same 4.3″ E Ink screen with 219 ppi as the original X4, but the Pro model adds a touchscreen and a frontlight for night reading, and they changed some of the other details as well.
The overall size of the X4 Pro is a little smaller than the X4, and they did away with the lower set of buttons now that it has a touchscreen, but it still has side buttons for paging forward and backward, along with a power button. And there’s a new capacitive button below the screen that takes you home.
They also increased the size of the battery on the X4 Pro to 1100mAh, compared to 650mAh on the X3 and X4. Battery life was already excellent with the smaller battery so even with the frontlight the X4 Pro’s battery should last a long time between charges.
When it comes to charging the battery, that’s another difference with the X4 Pro. The original X4 has a USB-C port, but they’ve replaced that with a pogo pin connector on the X4 Pro so it requires using a special cable to charge it. I guess they’re doing that to keep their devices as thin as possible since some people like magnetically attaching them to the back of phones.
Like the other two models, the X4 Pro comes with a 16GB microSD card (and it supports cards up to 256GB). It’s easy to put ebooks on the memory card, but you can also transfer books wirelessly using the Xteink app. It’s important to note that Xteink ereaders don’t support ebooks with DRM so you aren’t going to be able to add purchased ebooks from most stores without processing them through Calibre first.
The native software supports ebooks in TXT, EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats, along with JPG and PNG image formats. But from my experience with the X3 and X4 the stock software is so buggy it’s basically unusable. I don’t know if Xteink’s new touchscreen-based software works any better, but I wouldn’t bet on it being very good out of the gate, and it’ll probably take a little while for alternate options like CrossPoint to become available.
I’m a big fan of the original X4, which is only $69, and I like the smaller X3 as well, but I’m skeptical about the quality of the frontlight on the X4 Pro with it being a budget device, and frontlight layers usually make E Ink screens look darker and less clear. The same can be said about touchscreen layers so I don’t think the screen on the X4 Pro will look as nice as the original X4 and X3, but I look forward to comparing them directly to find out. The screen on the X3 is a little nicer than the screen on the X4 (text is slightly darker and the background is slightly lighter), but I still like the size and button placement of the X4 better so superior contrast isn’t everything.
A lot of people wanted an Xteink ereader with a frontlight so it’s good to finally have that as an option on the X4 Pro now, as long as they keep the non-frontlit and non-touchscreen models around too.
CrossPoint already has firmware development going for the X4 Pro, so it’ll most likely be available by the time people receive their units.