A gadget that looks like something you'd scroll past on Temu has quietly become a candidate for the best tech in some time. Writing for the Atlantic, Saahil Desai makes the case for the Xteink X3, a credit-card-size e-reader that magnetically sticks to the back of your phone and costs about $70 on Amazon. It's "plasticky," has limited capabilities, and is made by a little-known Chinese company whose site leans on AI-generated images—and yet Desai says it has dramatically changed how much he reads. With a screen roughly half the size of the smallest Kindle, each "page" is just a paragraph or two, which Desai says creates a TikTok-style urge to keep going, turning spare minutes in line or on the train into reading time and cutting his iPhone doomscrolling by 25 minutes a day.
The device is bare bones: There's no backlight, no touch screen, clunky software, and no one-click integration with Amazon like the Kindle has. But fans are souping it up with custom firmware, 3D-printed accessories, and even library-app access, turning it into a surprisingly flexible, genuinely fun object at a moment when big-brand gadgets feel expensive and predictable. "Our laptops, smartphones, and tablets are thinner and more powerful than ever, but that feels like a weak substitute for innovation," Desai writes. The Xteink X3 is "the single best piece of technology that I have purchased in years." For the argument that this kind of cheap, hackable hardware is what tech desperately needs now, read the full piece here.
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