Xteink's $99 e-reader ships with crude stock software, but reviewer upgrades it with CrossPoint, a year-old open-source firmware

The decision to flash the device came before the device did. "That didn't faze me: I was already planning to ditch the X4 Pro's stock firmware for an open-source alternative called CrossPoint," the reviewer wrote in Fast Company's Plugged In newsletter, describing the fonts in his first book ^[8][20]. So the $99 bought a body, a lit screen and a page button, and the reading software came from somewhere else.

CrossPoint is the work of a developer named Dave Allie, who started it shortly after Xteink shipped its first e-reader last year, plus a community of coders who update it now ^[9]. The project is roughly a year old ^[15]. It gives the X4 Pro, its siblings and a few other tiny e-readers better typography and a lot of interface control ^[10]. The review leaves install and contributor counts unreported ^[16].

What the review actually measures is one reader's habit. The writer says his X4 Pro goes everywhere with him, and that he has been reading a few pages while waiting in line and a chapter or two before sleep ^[18]. "If an e-reader's ultimate purpose is to make reading books so easy you do more of it, this might be the best one I've ever owned, all the way back to the original 2007 Kindle," he wrote ^[11]. The depth of use here is the user's own account, with no page counts or session data behind it. It is all the outcome evidence the record holds.

A storefront is the usual reason a reader picks one device over another. Xteink has none, and the review says that "turns out not to be a catastrophe" ^[14]. Xteink sells the object: 72 grams, paper-like screen, weeks between charges ^[3][17].

One question is what the device is worth running only what the vendor shipped. The other is how long the replacement has been maintained, and by whom, named. Those two separate the hardware bet from the software bet, and they apply to anything whose appeal arrives from a third party. For the X4 Pro the answers are a lit 72-gram reader with font rendering the reviewer took for a bug, and a project about a year old started by one developer ^[7][15].