Boox is taking on Xteink with its own tiny e-reader by Stevie Bonifield
Boox’s new Tile lineup will take on Xteink’s popular e-readers that are small enough to stick on the back of an iPhone with MagSafe. As spotted by Good E-Reader, the first one is the Picco, which will feature a 3.97-inch front-lit, black-and-white e-paper display and expandable storage with an SD card slot. Boox confirmed to The Verge that the Picco is in the works, noting that it’s part of a new Tile lineup and will have an “accessible price point,” but without any other details about its plans, like specs, the specific price, or a release date.
I linked to a X3 review recently. After reading the review, I looked at and asked Claude if it would work for my use-cases. Spoiler: it won’t. So this news does not really concern me.
But I love e-readers though. I love the idea of using a e-reader to read.
I have smartened up a little now though, thanks to the two Kindles I have somewhere around the house.
Boox of course is the company that makes the Palma. It is costlier than what I’m willing to pay for a device such as this though. I was interested in Xteink because of its price.
Nobody is making the device of my dreams, for the price I want.
Review: Xteink X3 is the little e-reader the world’s not quite ready for
If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap5 and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign up for Kindle Unlimited’s all-you-can-eat plan. Kobo, who makes the hardware that I prefer, is a distant second, and has some advantages, but operates on roughly a similar scheme.
What I want, is to be able to run NetNewsWire on this. Or something similar that pulls new articles from RSS feeds to it. That’s my use case, in addition to reading books.
But it’s cheap, I’m tempted to just buy it.