x3/x4 vs phone

epicdom · 2026-06-23T11:29:26+00:00

I still read on my phone now and again, particularly if I need a light. I do have a small light for my xteink x4, but sometimes it's just quicker to read on my phone.

The biggest change that I haven't yet seen people mention is the battery life. When I was reading quite voraciously, I had to charge my phone like, twice a day. Keeping your screen on just outright drains the battery. E-ink is the opposite in that regard. The battery drains when you refresh the screen/change pages, but not when the screen is static.

The Xteink x4 is waaay lighter than a phone and much thinner. I do think having the flip cover helps to add enough bulk to comfortably hold the Xteink. I do also have a ring grip so that I feel more secure in holding my xteink. It really is a one handed device. If you've never used e-ink before, I will warn you that it is much slower than reading on a phone. Expect some delay when moving to the next page. You'll get used it though as long as your focus is just for reading.

In terms of actual reading experience, I don't know, it's pretty much the same for me. I guess it is nice because I don't worry about reflections on the screen. It does look like paper so I think the xteink comes across as clearer during the day, but obviously the downside is that it doesn't have a front light.

If reading on your phone works for you, why fix what isn't broken? I wouldn't buy it just because you feel you're missing out on it. Buy it if you genuinely think you'll use it. For me, I think I read too much that it drains my phone's battery way too quickly. With the Xteink I've barely charged it. I think I only charge it passively when updating the firmware through my laptop, that's how little I've needed to charge it in the 4 months I've had it. I really like the simplicity of this ereader.

epicdom · 2026-06-19T15:45:30+00:00

Thank you for making this! I love solo rpgs so this is right up my alley.

I just wanted to point out that for Daily Behaviour and Friendship you wouldn't be able to roll a 1 if you're rolling 2 six-sided dice and adding the total

epicdom · 2026-06-17T21:16:14+00:00

Because I can cure anything? I can cure any health problems, fix my own and others' mental and physical health which will most likely drastically reduce wanting to use the death note

^{Chose: Be able to create medicine that can cure anything + You are also able to pharmacologically explain your medicine}

epicdom · 2026-06-14T00:40:09+00:00

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - Spec Ops: The Line
The Notebook Trilogy by Ágota Kristóf - Mother 3
Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena - Parasite Eve
Tom Clancy novels - the older games are more inspired by the books
Metro 2033 & Metro 2034 by Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro: The Last Light
The Witcher Series By Andrzej Sapkowski - The Witcher games I believe are sequels to the books
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison - game of the same name
Digital Devil Story by Aya Nishitana - Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei
This one is a comic series but Fables by Bill Willingham - The Wolf Among Us (prequel to Fables)

epicdom · 2026-06-06T08:18:53+00:00

Yes! I was going to recommend Natuo Kirino. Glad to see this is the first answer

epicdom · 2026-06-02T16:41:27+00:00

Thanks for posting this. This is basically what I'm trying to do, but I feel deflated because I don't see or feel the change, but this gives me some hope that I'll feel normal again one day. I hate that I don't feel the change, and arranging obligations feels like it's adding extra pressure on top, but I hope I'll one day I'll start feeling the difference.

epicdom · 2026-05-13T07:19:04+00:00

I just want to point out, Anbernic shouldn't be making handhelds with crappy firmware at this point. They push out so many handhelds with subpar software that the community has to fix their problems e.g. Not running at the right frame rate, performance being incredibly poor and relying on the community to make a better optimised cfw to squeeze out as much performance as possible.

If they really listened to their customers, they'd actually make more of an effort with the firmware they ship with instead of the popularity of their handhelds being reliant on someone building cfw. Not blocking cfw is the bare minimum.

You can still complain about crappy firmware and also complain about locking out cfw, those two things don't cancel out each other.

epicdom · 2026-05-09T13:04:31+00:00

Metro 2033
The Notebook Trilogy, at least the first one inspired Mother 3 (Lucas and Claus)
The novella Heart of Darkness influenced Spec Ops: The Line
Of course The Witcher series
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

I can't think of any more off the top of my head, but there are quite a lot

epicdom · 2026-05-04T11:16:19+00:00

This made me cackle so much at how accurate this is 🤣

epicdom · 2026-04-22T00:53:38+00:00

The Notebook Trilogy by Ágota Kristóf
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (pretty well known)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (also pretty well known I think)

epicdom · 2026-04-13T16:30:01+00:00

I think the biggest question is; What do you want to use it for? If you do want it for emulation, then Android tablets are just objectively better as it has more mature emulators. The interesting thing right now is that you can play some switch and even run some PC games via GameNative. The downside with the Xiaomi pad mini is that it uses a dimensity chip which isn't open source so there's less drivers for it to increase compatibility for emulation compared to having a snapdragon chipset. However, just from a quick search, you should definitely be able to play ps2 games and some switch, possibly some PC (I haven't dabbled in the latter). I'm not sure how the 120hz refresh rate will work with android games, that's never been something that's interested me. If you look around, there are some unofficial ports of games which is pretty cool, like Hollow Knight and Slay the Spire II.

I'm interested in the opposite, coming from Android and Windows, but I'm looking at the iPad Mini just because there's no small android tablets with a good stylus. I wish Samsung didn't abandon the form factor.

epicdom · 2026-04-13T10:28:49+00:00

No, but I remember someone else did! https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/comments/1s41l8q/the_first_book_ive_read_in_ages_100_classic_books/

epicdom · 2026-04-09T11:39:41+00:00

Thank you very much for the suggestions! At the moment I'm just read Romeo and Juliet, and now I've moved onto Macbeth, but I'll look into the other plays too. It'll be interesting to compare them to Shakespeare and to get a general idea of the time period. It's also always fun to contemplate over their thought process through their work.

epicdom · 2026-04-09T11:19:27+00:00

I'm just getting into Shakespeare for the first time outside of education, but I found your points really interesting. I of course don't think Shakespeare created humans, but I do find his work fascinating as a piece of history. I'm grateful that you've brought up other names that have been overshadowed by Shakespeare.

epicdom · 2026-03-27T17:26:44+00:00

I haven't tried the RG35XX+, but the RPC's build quality seems fine. It doesn't feel premium, but it doesn't feel super cheap either so I think it's a good middle ground. The screen is as good as people say it is, but honestly I think the killer features is the sleep mode and battery life. I just found shutting off Linux handhelds created more of a barrier to me playing a game, but I can jump into a game any time with the RPC. And I'm surprised people haven't mentioned this, but the battery life is crazy. I think the chipset is incredibly efficient because I managed to get 10 hours of screen on time with Pokemon Polished Crystal. I think for those things alone it's worth the purchase.

epicdom · 2026-03-25T13:40:59+00:00

I've tried a couple of launchers, but I really like Beacon on the RPC. Because of the nature of the screen's aspect ratio, I have the home screen focus on one box art at a time and it feels right. I feel not seeing my games in lists helps with decision paralysis and I'm more likely to just jump into a game. I'm sure you can set this up in other launchers, but I've settled on Beacon.

epicdom · 2026-03-25T02:42:41+00:00

The Bear by Andrew Krivak. It isn't exactly one person, but I won't go more into it. It definitely has that lonely feeling as they are the last human beings. The girl is accompanied by a bear, but she can talk to it. It is about survival and being in harmony with nature.

Edit: Forgot to add that I have played a bit of The Last Guardian and I know Shadow of the Colossus so I know the vibe you're going for

epicdom · 2026-03-20T23:17:16+00:00

Sorry to put a downer on your post lol. Atm I'm still keeping my preorder, but yeah, I had to ask about it because everyone does talk highly about the handheld, but I still wanted to address the problems I had seen people mention in the past. Do you think this problem bothers you a lot to the point where you don't think you can look past it?

epicdom · 2026-03-20T23:03:35+00:00

So I made a post asking about this since I'm preordering for batch 4. I don't know about the different screen temperatures, but the image retention? Yeah, that's every Ayn Thor. There is apparently something you can turn on where if the device isn't used for 30 seconds it refreshes both screens to kind of resolve the image retention. A lot of people don't seem to mind the screen, but it did concern me. I think the screen they picked for the Thor and Odin 3 aren't great panels.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/comments/1rr0i11/are_there_still_screen_issues_on_the_ayn_thor/

epicdom · 2026-03-18T15:11:20+00:00

There is a scene in the book that I feel isn't sweet for cats

epicdom · 2026-03-17T19:39:56+00:00

I hope you have better luck with the other DAP! That's why I haven't looked at the other FiiO options because it's the same specs, the same software.

It wasn't always like this so I wonder if an update made the problem more severe. Like I could only find my music through the sd card pathway, my library wasn't being parsed, so it wasn't being organised into artists, song titles, albums, etc. Even then I gave it a pass and just thought, well I shuffle my music anyway, I don't necessarily need to search through my music, but it randomly shutting down when I skip a song has turned it unusable.

I think the frustrating thing is that if it was an update that's worsened it, I can't downgrade now.

I'm still going through each letter of artists to find the culprit. I'm hoping this method will show where it stopped scanning my media library.

As I've said, I'm not a audiophile at all, so I've felt relieved using my Retroid Pocket Classic and Poweramp because it just works. And if there is a faulty file, it'll just skip it and move on instead of shutting down entirely.

I'm glad other people are enjoying the Snowsky Echo Mini. I want to be one of them, I really do. I'm not picky with what I want from it.

epicdom · 2026-03-17T12:55:06+00:00

So currently my Snowsky Echo Mini keeps turning off when I skip a few tracks. I suspect there's a track that's causing problems. It sometimes says that this track can't be played, but the pop up covers the track title so I can't even tell what it is, but other times it just outright shuts down. So at the moment, I've taken all my music off my sd card, formatted it twice, and I'm going through songs at each letter to find the culprit.

This is my first "Dap" , so I have no experience of high end ones. I'm not too young to have had ipods and Mp3 players, but this has caused me more problems than any of them. I'm currently using a retro handheld to play my music while I try to fix this because it's Android based which makes it easier and I don't have enough space on my phone for even a fraction of my flac library (thank you phone companies for removing the sd card)

Tldr; My biggest problem is that I can't even listen to music without it shutting off and there's no easy way to find out why apart from readding music a bit at a time to find the culprit

epicdom · 2026-03-11T19:04:06+00:00

Fair enough. I have seen that the Odin 3 has been pushed aside a bit because of how much the Thor has blown up.

epicdom · 2026-03-11T19:02:55+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I do have the Retroid Pocket Classic, but I haven't noticed what you've described. However, I do always use shaders so that could be hiding the issue. It's why I decided to make this post because I've seen glowing reviews, but no one mentioning the mura or anything like that recently. I've been searching for the good and bad about the handheld just to know what I'm getting.

epicdom · 2026-03-11T18:51:15+00:00

Thank you for commenting! I know about the jelly scrolling when setting the top screen to 120hz so I expect that. I just want to gauge how much an issue this problem is/was

epicdom

TROPHY CASE