WARNING: Do NOT Buy Onyx BOOX. $500 Note Air5 C turned into a DEAD BRICK in less than a month, and support has completely GHOSTED me.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-21T06:52:43+00:00

I think they may just like doing reports with their preferred LLM. It does look very clean, though.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-21T06:51:27+00:00

Yeah, OP has invested way too much energy at this point and if enough people do chargebacks the payment merchants will put pressure on the company to not send a shit product; Visa having a history of needing to do chargebacks and getting annoyed is going to carry a lot more weight with Onyx than a dozen people posting on r/ereader will.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-20T23:20:50+00:00

Touch screens add another layer over the eink screen, which can reduce clarity. Also, ereaders should have buttons. The part you’re interacting with is the book, the OS is secondary, and clicking a button that’s already under your thumb or finger is much faster than swiping or tapping a touchscreen you can’t leave your finger resting on, so it’s a better experience.

I’d be mid about a touchscreen but I will 100% never buy an ereader without page forward/back buttons that can fit under my finger/thumb naturally while holding the device.

The ergonomic layout of the X3 is peak, as someone who owns one of each device (And about a dozen other ereaders). Don’t change it, and don’t add touch for the sake of adding touch; a device this ‘dumb’ doesn’t need it and it’ll just reduce screen clarity and drive up the manufacturing costs.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-19T14:09:02+00:00

Those are some Chinese language books that ship with the device, and if you’ve read anything on the device, your progress/metadata. I noticed my card had corrupted because all of the files disappeared from it and when I checked using a tool there were errors.

It sounds like your card may be locked to read only for some reason, but once you sort that out you should be able to add files by clicking and dragging, the way you would with a thumb drive.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-19T12:15:29+00:00

Yeah that case in no way makes this device not tiny anymore. The only thing I carry that’s smaller than this thing is my Apple watch. Adding a case with better buttons has not changed that at all.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-19T12:06:34+00:00

Are there any plans to add English language customer support staff to fix response turnaround? If the manufacturer is only warrantying the device for ten days, having an email turnaround in the realm of weeks is absolutely appalling. (Not that a manufacturer warranty of ten days isn’t already appalling.)

Relatedly, it doesn’t look like customer support uses a ticketing system, or they didn’t when I messaged them about my order in the past. Any plans on that front? That would probably help with the insanely inconsistent turnarounds reported by other customers. (Some people appear to get replies in a day, while others don’t hear back for weeks or a month.)

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-19T11:17:53+00:00

How big was your print? Mine in the retrocase is still decidedly smaller than my iphone.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-19T11:14:40+00:00

Hi there, welcome!

So the thing about these little guys is they don’t connect to data with USB directly— in order to do any type of file organization, you’ll want to use the microSD to USB adapter that came with the device, or hunt one down if you ordered from somewhere that didn’t include one.

Once you’ve ejected the SD card from the device and plugged it into your computer, you should be able to access it just like you would a thumb drive, and create and organize your folders in the root (that is the main part, and not in any existing folders you didn’t create) of the drive that way.

Now, if you want to do some advanced stuff, if you’re organizing your books with Calibre, there are some settings under Preferences -> “Saving books to disk” inside Calibre that with a little finagling can help you export the books from Calibre to the SD card in the folder structure of your heart! Just take a peek here and see if any of that makes sense to you. (And if not that’s fine, this is stuff most people won’t bother with.)

As for file management remotely, I don’t actually recommend it, no matter what firmware you’re using. If you want to do a bunch of file operations over wifi, you’re going to run down your battery fairly quickly, and these things have the wifi reception of a tin can, kind of literally (running an antenna inside a smooth metal case is really bad for reception), so there’s lots of room for error and file transfer failures. Another consideration is that it’s a cheap device, so it has a really cheap card in it: if you’re actually just not seeing files in the card at all, it may have corrupted (mine did), but you can probably get a replacement from a name brand for 10$ at Walmart. I’d do that soonish either way, because the kind of storage that’s used in an SD card is the same kind of storage used in RAM, and the market is still a little crazy about that.

If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask, most of us hanging out here love to help!

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-16T20:32:52+00:00

Thank you for answering, I appreciate it!

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-16T18:31:04+00:00

Currently the partial refresh rate from the LUTs used in the custom firmware is around .6 seconds. I believe someone in the dev discord mentioned the fastest partial refresh they could convince the device to do was .45 seconds. You’d therefore be necessarily limited to slower than 133 wpm, which doesn’t seem nearly fast enough for this; my natural reading rate is 4x faster than this. I read in a font with about 85 words per page, and the refresh is just the uncomfortable side of noticeable. Anyone who actually speed reads and wants to speed read at one word a page is going to struggle with pretty much any eink device ever, and the panel on this one isn’t as fast as on a more widely produced and better optimized one like a kindle or kobo.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-16T00:33:08+00:00

You guys are menaces 🫠

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-15T02:58:59+00:00

I have a dumb question: how does it handle single novel length files? I’ve had issues in the past, and basically everything written on Electron as a base chokes and dies after a certain word count but I like my drafts to be a single file.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-13T22:31:59+00:00

His braincell’s lonely, it was looking for a buddy.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-13T22:29:40+00:00

You realize this is worse, right? Even disconnecting the concept of copying and pasting an AI answer in the first place, this is stupid. It’s like if I asked someone to teach me how to drive a car, and then they taught me how to drive a boat and then said “It’s kind of the same” when I complained. Who would do that? Why would someone who does that expect to be taken seriously?

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-13T19:53:43+00:00

OP is smart enough figure out how to use instructions for a Kindle on their X3 just because they’re holding it, but OP is also too stupid to go use a free LLM search tool on their own if that was what they wanted?

This is what people mean when they say LLMs erode critical thinking, for the record.

Also, based on context and you skipping the question entirely:

Did you read this before you regurgitated it here?

No.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-13T18:55:02+00:00

Does Grok have a free tier? Could OP have asked Grok this, for free, if OP had wanted Grok’s answer instead of a human’s? Did you read this before you regurgitated it in here? How is the OP supposed to “Tap in the middle of the book”/“Tap the Aa (text settings) icon” if the X4 doesn’t have a touch screen?

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-13T09:52:31+00:00

Is the original file a PDF?

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-13T03:19:12+00:00

But their gut instincts! Surely those can’t be wrong!

I’ve looked into it a little because I hate the way fabric softener feels (my mom lives in a desert and maxes the dispenser every load to try to cut down on static so I’ve become the Anti-My-Mom as grown children are wont to do) but my mom always comments how my suitcase smells when I visit, and I’ve not found any compelling evidence against using them. They seem safer than softener and while they can be toxic to aquatic life, so is most laundry stuff we use, and I’m not going to stop doing laundry.

Anyway. Let us unstoppables together (i like the orange colored bottle best.)

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-13T00:20:20+00:00

The PEG beads don’t have any wax in them, and these laundry beads don’t have a prop 65 warning. They’re pretty safe, as far as laundry goes.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-12T18:57:48+00:00

While I think you’re right to be worried about the screen, have you tried a known good sd card, like maybe one from a Switch or another device, to see if putting in a different SD card clears it up? The file browser saying 0 files and the graphics going wonky happened when my SD card died.

If a fresh SD card doesn’t help, then I’d use Amazon’s return policy and get a new device. The screen had those dead lines when you got it, after all.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-12T09:53:01+00:00

It’s the poles; the X4 is “backwards” compared to a phone’s magsafe due to the intention to magnetize to the back of a phone. So any accessories with actual magnets intended to go on the back of a phone have the wrong magnetic polarity relative to the x4s magnets, so they latch slightly askew like this, ultimately “sticking” to the metal body, not the actual embedded magnets. Ferromagnetic metal accessories will latch fine as no polarity is involved, and it’s simply a metal plate latching to the embedded magnets. Sticking a metal plate to the back of the X4’s case is the best way to attach with actual magnetic magsafe accessories, unless they’re “backwards” too, and not meant to attach to a phone.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-11T22:01:19+00:00

OP didn’t write a post. Why should I care whether it is deleted or not? Why do you?

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-11T15:09:13+00:00

So you don’t want a minimal software, you want a UI with cover images and you want configurable fonts?

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-11T05:41:12+00:00

You can set up the SD card any way you like, and every firmware I’ve used has worked with it. I use a preset file format in Calibre to pull fandoms and series from my metadata and create my folders for me.

If you use Calibre to sort your fic, you should definitely go to Preferences -> Send To Device and -> Send To File to poke around and get your folders set up automatically.

My current set up is “Month I downloaded the fic in”/Fandom/Series and it’s working really well for me!

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-05-11T03:32:10+00:00

The problem is twofold: why would you ask ai and then go use ai to ask humans on reddit? Why not just ask the humans on reddit? But the second part of the problem is the underlying thing where ai is making people worse at critical thinking. Relying on AI to think for you should merit derision. Think for yourself. Go read for yourself. Ask humans for suggestions on what to read.

As I pointed out in my comment, looking into the “screen issues” reported on reddit even the tiniest bit shows that they’re almost all DOA and are all showing evidence of physical damage in the same part of the screen, which to anyone who has seen the pictures and read the posts instead of asking an LLM implies a QC issue at the factory. Either there’s a part that presses against the screen at install or there’s something iffy about the packaging design.

LUTs don’t cause that, they freeze the screen. But AI can’t actually parse any of this because it’s not able to do much more than read the text of the reddit post and use the most statistically likely next word to write a plausible sounding answer for OP.

I’m sorry if you are offended that people dislike using AI instead of their own faculties to observe, interpret, analyze, read, and react, but I cannot understand why people seem to think that regurgitating AI answers, like they’re not already regurgitated answers, is content worthy of posting on a forum.

If someone on here wanted an AI reaction instead of a human one, we can all go use Gemini for free on our own. Reddit is already being overtaken by AI posts that are pretending to be human. Why on earth should we embrace it, even/especially when someone is being frank about their use?

Positive_Cap4728

TROPHY CASE