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Comment by functionmouse | Hacker News Reader

the next version will unfortunately be a generic Android reader. This device is good because, by chance, out of a thousand devices, one of them has to be better than all the rest. This product is not good by design or merit, but by chance. Same goes for lots of popular cheap Chinese tech, like the Miyoo Mini+ for example. Better than it has any right to be, and the people making it don't have a clue; every change to such a device can only be for the worse.

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Good catch. I have the Miyoo Mini+ and that's exactly my feeling : it's not good, it _happen_ to be good because somehow, they made it the good form factor and especially, they put a 640x480 screen which allows you to play most retro consoles at native resolution or at integer (x2) scaling.

And the firmware is shitty but the community firmware is good.

And when you follow what the company does, you understand that the biggest selling point (the screen) is just there for reasons that are totally unrelated to creating a great product. It happened to be there because they randomly (economically, I guess) choose this screen and it happened to be good and have the right resolution for retro gaming.

None of their previous models had this advantage but more than that, none of the models that followed kept the advantages that made this device a banger.

It's exactly like if the company behind the device never understood how and why they created a community behind their devices.

For the xteink, I wouldn't be surprised for the next ones to be shittier, closed, and bloated, and probably for no reason.

There will be an Android (11, unfortunately) reader, the S4. (This is already visible on xteink.cn and they've teased it in social media.)

There's also going to be an X4 Pro, which is an ESP32 reader too, and this seems to be an X4 with backlight and touch screen.

> There's also going to be an X4 Pro, which is an ESP32 reader too, and this seems to be an X4 with backlight and touch screen.

mite b cute

The best thing about these fly-by-night Chinese tech companies that manage to shit out something actually good is that they rarely lock the device down so it's relatively easy to flash some new firmware when they inevitably disappear from the market.

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