u/ashraf_bashir

I actually love the pogo connector on the X3 and X4 Pro. On a tiny e-reader, it makes a lot of sense. Here are my 5 points:

1. Thin, light and space-efficient: Pogo needs less depth and device-side hardware than a USB-C receptacle. On a device this small, I'd much rather see that precious internal space used for things that directly improve the product: a larger battery, or even a larger display while maintaining the same outer dimensions. That's a much better engineering trade-off to me than dedicating that space to a relatively bulky port.

2. More durable and safer mechanically: USB-C puts a socket, internal tongue and contacts inside the device, exposed to repeated insertion, wear and sideways cable forces. Pogo leaves simple contacts on the reader and moves more of the mechanical parts to the replaceable cable. If the cable gets caught, it breaks away instead of becoming a lever on the port or pulling the reader with it. I'd rather replace a cable than repair a charging port.

3. Better outdoors, especially if you read at the beach: Sand, dust, dirt and pocket lint can get trapped deep inside a USB-C socket. Pogo has no deep port: the contacts are exposed, visible and easy to brush or wipe clean. That's exactly what I want on something I'll throw in a bag, carry in a pocket and read at the beach.

4. Better economics: A simpler device-side connector can mean fewer parts, less assembly complexity and lower manufacturing cost. On a device this small, I'd rather see that cost and engineering budget go into the battery, display, frontlight, or other things I actually use.

5. Simple and well suited to a micro/mini e-reader: It snaps on magnetically, breaks away safely and provides what a small battery actually needs. It's a simple charging interface for a simple, low-power device.

Regarding the concerns:

(A) Cable Universality: Pogo isn't as universally interchangeable as USB-C, so you may need another cable. But this isn't a phone that needs charging every day; with e-ink battery life, the cable spends most of its time at home anyway. For portable charging, the tiny pogo dongle is actually useful: throw it in your bag and use your existing USB-C cable.

(B) Connector Stability: while connection stability is a fair criticism of the dongle, a dedicated charging cable with the pogo head built directly into it is significantly more stable, with less rigid mass and leverage pulling on the magnetic connection.

My advice to XTEINK: Bring back the dedicated pogo cable that came with the X3, or even better, include both the cable and dongle in the package. The dedicated cable gives you the more stable everyday charging experience, while the tiny dongle is perfect for travel because it works with the USB-C cable you're already carrying. They complement each other rather than one replacing the other.

For an ultra-small e-reader, thinness, lower weight, dimensions, better use of internal space, device-side durability, breakaway protection, outdoor friendliness and easy cleaning make pogo a design I genuinely like and I wish Xteink won't replace it in future versions. ❤️

I wanted to understand what actually affects X4 Pro battery life and it's consumption patterns, so I tested it during normal reading under several conditions over the past week and compared the results with my X3 and X4.

🧑‍🔬 Test conditions

I have all of the three devices running Crossink 1.5.1-RC4. I measured approximate battery loss per hour while reading under three X4 Pro configurations:

• Frontlight OFF + Touch OFF
• Frontlight OFF + Touch ON
• Frontlight 50% + Touch ON (both warm and cold gauges in the middle)

I used Bitter font, size 12, and enabled incremental rendering. My reading speed is on average 45 second per page (incl. Highlight time, based on Crossink statistics). No new books were added during the test to avoid cost of file writing and data transfer. All books are epubs files. Books are text-based (no comics/manga). All epubs are optimized using the web uploader tool.

I also observed overnight sleep consumption, highlighting behavior, and the discharge pattern across different battery levels.

⚠️ These are real-world measurements rather than controlled laboratory tests, so the numbers should be treated as approximate.

📈 Measurements for X4 Pro

• Light OFF + Touch OFF: ~2%/h
• Light OFF + Touch ON: ~2.5%/h
• Light 50% + Touch ON: ~8%/h
• Sleeping overnight: ~0.5% total

For comparison, under my normal reading:

• X4: ~1%/h
• X3: ~1.5%/h
• X4 Pro: ~2%/h at its lowest-power configuration, but that's not practical, you will use touch and lights, so in average my normal use is 5%/h tweaking light on and off based on surrounding light

💡 Interestingly, the X4 Pro has a much larger 1100 mAh battery vs 650 mAh on X3/X4, yet currently consumes a larger percentage per hour.

🔬 Finding 1: Frontlight dominates consumption

Touch itself has a relatively modest effect: 2% → 2.5%/h. But enabling the frontlight at 50% takes consumption to: ~8%/h. So the frontlight is by far the largest power variable I've observed.

🔬 Finding 2: Battery % isn't linear

The displayed percentage doesn't seem to decline at a constant rate:

• 100–80%: faster
• 80–20%: noticeably slower
• 20–0%: faster

The first discharge cycle was also the fastest. On subsequent cycles, individual percentages seem to hold longer.

💡 My interpretation is that some of this may be battery gauge/calibration behavior, rather than actual energy consumption changing that dramatically.

This makes short tests misleading. I wouldn't take a 5–10% drop and simply extrapolate it to 100%. Longer tests, particularly across 80–20%, seem much more representative.

🔬 Finding 3: Highlighting matters

Highlighting can be surprisingly expensive when done frequently.

• More efficient: select first word → tap last word
• Less efficient: select → drag across the passage

Dragging continuously changes the selection and causes multiple intermediate display updates as you move through the text.

💡 For heavy highlighters, those updates add up. This also means that "one hour of reading" isn't necessarily comparable between users: passive reading and interaction-heavy reading create different workloads.

🔬 Finding 4: X4 is still the efficiency champion

My observed reading consumption: The X4 is clearly the battery beast in my testing.

💡 I suspect the clock/background activity on the X3 may partly explain why it consumes more than the X4, but I haven't isolated this, so that's a hypothesis rather than a finding.

🏁 Conclusion

• The X4 Pro's biggest battery cost isn't touch; it's the frontlight. Sleep consumption, meanwhile, is excellent at only ~0.5% overnight.
• The X4 Pro is also still a very new device. I believe CrossPoint and CrossInk will continue improving background activity, display/touch handling and power management as their X4 Pro support matures.

⚠️ I'd consider these results a baseline of the current software, rather than the final potential of the hardware.

After using the X4 Pro (coming from X4 then X3), quite a few of my expectations turned out to be wrong, both positively and negatively. Forget about tech specs on paper, this is a real daily-use experience review

What I thought I wouldn't like, but was wrong 👍

• Frontlight at night: I thought the lowest brightness would still be too bright in a dark room as many reported. With CrossInk it's very controllable and can go comfortably low and eye-friendly

• Touch: I expected accidental touches to be annoying, but they haven't been an issue for me. It actually makes looking up words in the dictionary and highlighting/creating clippings much easier. And when I don't want touch while reading, I can simply disable it.

• No front buttons: I thought I'd really miss the X3's and X4's front buttons. Surprisingly, I don't. I adapted very quickly.

• Pogo-pin charging: I thought I'd dislike it and find it inconvenient. In reality, it barely matters. I don't charge the device every day, so connecting the pogo charger occasionally isn't an issue.

• Weight: I expected it to feel much heavier than the X3, but surprisingly it doesn't. It still feels very light in actual use.

What I thought would be better or wouldn't matter, but was wrong 👎

• Battery: The announced larger battery made me expect noticeably better battery life. In my experience, I'm actually getting less than with my X3 and X4 (maybe because of light and touch gestures?!)

• Larger screen: I thought I'd love the extra reading space and having more text per page, but what I did not know is that the X3's higher DPI makes text noticeably sharper, especially at smaller font sizes.

• Size Portability: I thought the size difference from the X3 would be negligible. It isn't. The X3 is almost iconic in how tiny and pocketable it is. The X4 Pro is still portable, but the difference is significant, and its size also means it doesn't fit many phone pockets/holders where the X3 fits naturally (the mini front right pocket doesn't work anymore if you used to use it in Jeans for X3).

Better than I expected 🙂

• Extra RAM: This is one of the most important improvements. The extra RAM seems to make an extreme difference. I'm seeing no memory errors and crashes than I did on the X3/X4, and the X4 Pro generally feels less constrained on rendering.

• Frontlight distribution: I expected this to be worse especially that with such a small screen, any light leakage or unevenness can be quite noticeable, and it's super hard to control quality of screen front lights across devices of the same model in all brands, but frankly it's not that bad. There is still some visible light leakage, but it's less disruptive in actual reading than I expected.

Worse than I expected 🙃

• Back magnets: They're much weaker than on my X3 and X4. My X3 sticks firmly to the back of my phone, while the X4 Pro barely holds on. I didn't expect such a noticeable difference here. Not to mention that the new size doesn't fit the back of most phones (hint and hack: try to rotate it 180'!)

Overall: Most things I expected to dislike, frontlight, touch, losing the front buttons, pogo-pin charging and weight, turned out to be non-issues. The real compromises are battery life, lower DPI, larger size and weaker magnets, while the larger reading area, extra RAM and touch make the X4 Pro a more capable and comfortable reader.

On the latest Readest Android version 0.12.1, when Scrolled Mode and Swipe to Paginate are both enabled, swiping does not paginate.

• Scrolled Mode + Tap to Paginate → works
• Non-Scrolled Mode + Swipe to Paginate → works
• Scrolled Mode + Swipe to Paginate → does not work

So the issue seems specific to the combination of Scrolled Mode + Swipe to Paginate.

Using the Readest KOReader plugin, I've found that highlight deletions don't sync properly:

• Add a highlight in KOReader
• Run Tools → Readest → Push/Pull annotations now
• The highlight successfully shows up in Readest
• Delete the highlight in KOReader
• Run Tools → Readest → Push/Pull annotations now
• The highlight still shows up in Readest, unchanged

Note: adding highlights syncs correctly in both directions — it's specifically deletions that don't propagate from KOReader to Readest.

Is there a solution for this?

It would be great to have an Unfinished filter in the library that shows books I’ve started but haven’t completed yet. As the library grows, partially read books can easily get buried among unread and finished books. An Unfinished filter would make it much easier to quickly find what I’m currently reading or previously started and want to continue instead of seeing a huge library

I just discovered a fantastic improvement in TCL UI 9.0 on my TCL NXTPAPER 60 ULTRA and I think e-books lovers will really appreciate it

Color Paper Mode now supports warm color temperature adjustment🔥

In previous versions, I actually stopped using Color Paper Mode because it lacked warm color temperature, and it was painful to use its cold light at night. I preferred reading with a warmer screen, so I had to stick with Normal Mode or Max Ink Mode, where this option was available. I discovered the introduction of this feature by accident in the new UI

After upgrading to UI 9.0, warm color temperature is finally available in Color Paper Mode as well, making long reading sessions much more comfortable, especially in the evening

For me, this is one of the best quality-of-reading improvements in the update. Combined with the excellent NXTPAPER display, it has completely replaced all of my E Ink devices; I now do 100% of my reading on the TCL NXTPAPER 60 ULTRA 🎊🎉

After the June 19 update, tap-to-paginate on Android is behaving strangely.

Pagination only works when tapping on the empty margins at the sides of the screen. If I tap on text (on the right side, where the next-page tap zone usually is), the page does not turn. As a result, when reading in paged mode, I constantly have to search for an empty area near the screen edges to tap in order to turn the page, which is not user-friendly. In addition, many taps are not registered correctly, making page turns unreliable and frustrating.

This behavior was not present before the update and significantly impacts the reading experience.