Comment by swdunlop

For me, it is:

1. Yes, the size. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about "do I really want to bother with this in my pocket, I'm just going to the store."

2. The ecosystem. There's a lot of different firmware forks, people tinker and optimize. Which is important, because that helps with..

3. The UI. There's only a few buttons, no touch screen, so the power on experience sends you straight into the last page you were reading, and there's not a lot of farkles trying to drive engagement.

4. No touch screen. The buttons aren't very soft, and there's no touch screen, so you can just toss it back in your pocket, without turning it off, and pick it back up.

5. It's cheap, and it is not linked to my accounts. I'm not terribly worried about theft or someone accidentally knocking it out of my hand.

All that comes down to just.. no ceremony. No unlock the screen, push past the notifications, find the app, wait for Kindle to pass some advertising back and forth with Amazon. Nothing. Pick up the book, read the next page while you are waiting for coffee to steep.

That said, there's some suck to be had:

6. No frontlight. You can't read in the dark without a separate light.

7. No, the font rendering is not perfect, the DPI is pretty low. This is not the most beautiful screen. But it's pretty readable. I got over it.

8. It's a pretty small screen. If you have awful eyesight, you're going to go through a lot of page turns. But if you are prone to skipping ahead and scanning, you might actually read more of the book this way.

9. It is not fast. The firmwares I have used all do some indexing at the start of each chapter, and it can take a few seconds.

10. The vendor either doesn't quite understand its customers (it seems like xteink got lucky sometimes) or is scrabbling through parts bins and unable to communicate with its customers. The X4 Pro really confused its fans.

I think it really just comes down to "this thing is too simple to become more fucking adtech pretending to be useful."