September 11, 2026

Stop jailbreaking your Kindle and buy an XTEINK X3 instead

Before you jailbreak your Kindle, WAIT — you shouldn't, and in fact you should just replace your Kindle.

If you're about to jailbreak your Kindle, you've been searching how, you're out in the weeds trying to figure out how to do it, just hang on a moment. I've already done that. I even made a video about how great it is, maybe you've even seen it. It's one of the first videos I ever made on this channel and it's still getting regular views. But I wanted to talk about why I no longer read on my jailbroken Kindle, and in fact, I read on a completely different device.

It's entirely because of this brand new little guy, the XTEINK X3. It's been stuck to the back of my phone since I bought it back in May. It has a 3.7-inch screen, weighs a super light 58 grams, and is about as thick as maybe four or five credit cards. It's honestly the perfect reading device because it's the one I actually read on. I was so excited when I saw that it was pre-orderable. I picked it up personally with my own money, and I've been reading on it for the last several months.

I already purchased one of these with my own money before XTEINK reached out to me about a partnership. They sent me a second unit to test, compare, and use. It's actually my wife's now. She loves reading on it, and I couldn't say no to this partnership because I was really excited they reached out. I am a pretty big fan of this little device.

I was so excited, I was gonna write about this anyway.

Every time I pick up my phone, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I have my book," and I read instead of scroll.

One of the coolest little features of this device is that it has MagSafe, just like my iPhone, so it sticks to the back of my iPhone. I literally just take it with me everywhere. When I'd otherwise be scrolling, I flip over my phone and read. When I sit down with it, I do pull it off my phone and read, because honestly the iPhone 17 Pro is very heavy and I don't really want to hold a brick just to read my book. However, the XTEINK is so incredibly light that for a lot of use cases I will just read it off the back of my phone, and that is how my wife reads hers!

Besides how incredibly good the portability is, let's talk about the battery. I have charged it twice since I got it the first week of May, once when it was down to 80%, and once when it was down to 65%. They tell you it'll work ten to 14 days at about an hour a day, or about a week of dedicated reading. But mine has been weeks and months of it. I keep forgetting it even has a battery. The battery life is just so gosh darn good, probably as good if not better than the Kindle Paperwhite it replaced!

I've seen some people online say the tiny screen is gonna be a problem, and I'm here to say that it really isn't. It's about the width of a magazine column or a newspaper column, and that was good enough for the better part of a century (and there are studies that demonstrate it's actually ideal, but we'll not go into that here). Once you're reading a book, the width just doesn't really matter, you just read. I read the entire Red Rising trilogy by Pierce Brown on this little device, and I am working through the Giver series now. Both are really good series, one a classic, the other a decent sci-fi. If you haven't read them, I recommend checking them out.

One of the funnier features is that there's a gyroscope, so you can rotate it to turn the page. I personally don't use that, I just use the buttons. It is not a touch screen, which is something I actually prefer for a device like this, especially when it's stuck to the back of my phone all the time. It has side buttons to turn the page, or if you prefer the bottom rocker, you can use the right side of the rocker to turn pages as well.

And this little device, out of the box, is how every single ebook reader should be.

It's because Amazon has nothing to do with it. The Amazon Kindle is a decent reading platform, but, well, actually, maybe I should say that it isn't a reading platform. It is a book-selling platform. The entire reason Amazon builds and sells Kindles is to sell books, not to promote reading. They don't care if you read books after you get it; they care that you buy books after you get it. So the device is designed entirely around that, from the homepage to the storefront. Maybe that's why you're looking into jailbreaking your Kindle and ended up here?

This little device is a bit on the pricier side for how big it is. I got it at like $70 or $80, but that doesn't matter because this is the only purchase you make from them. You buy this to read your books. You own your files. And it works without turning into a weekend project to jailbreak your Kindle and get rid of Amazon.

Jailbreaking your Kindle will take a bunch of time, at least an hour, and Amazon can update the software at any point and make it impossible for you to jailbreak it in the first place. They've done that several times before. For a good portion of last year, you just couldn't jailbreak your Kindle at all if it was up to date. With this little device, you don't need to worry about that. The only thing you need to worry about is where you get your books.

Personally, I buy my books throughout the year at random times and don't necessarily buy a book to read it immediately. I load my books onto this device in batches, and that's looking like a once or twice a year event, depending on how often I need to. It has a micro SD card slot for those books and comes with a card by default, but I recommend getting a standard micro SD card from SanDisk or one of the more reliable brands because it will last longer. I've heard mixed things about the quality of the card they include. It's awesome that they include one, but yeah, I recommend getting your own.

I use calibre (you know what, I don't like the "real" pronunciation and I like the play on words of calling it calibre), and it sees that micro SD card as a device you can push books to. If you're not going to do that, they have the official XTEINK app, which is a really easy way to scan a QR code, get connected, and push a book to your device. It's worked well enough when I've tested it, but I personally just pull the SD card out, load it up with books, and put it back in, which is also very quick.

but it's not all sunshine and roses

This device only supports DRM-free EPUB or TXT book files. Some Kindle titles are DRM-free, so if you're able to get them DRM-free, you can technically source them from Amazon. There's also the Internet Archive for a ton of books. Basically, the publisher has to ask Amazon or others to lock their ebooks.

And if you didn't know, I have written my own book. It's coming out on September 16th, and it will be DRM-free. So theoretically, you should be able to buy it off of Amazon and load it onto something like this just fine, without any work on your end.

But not all books are like that. A lot of publishers lock down their books, so you can't put them on a device like this, which is the main downside. It has nothing to do with this device specifically and more to do with how copyright works right now with books, and how ridiculous that is, but sourcing your DRM-free ebooks can be a bit of a challenge for some.

It also doesn't have a backlight. I don't know that I would call that a downside, personally, though for many it would be.

Another downside, and for some it won't matter at all, for me it's only a slight one, is that it comes with a proprietary connector for charging. It has a little pogo pin connector on the back, but that's probably because the device is so thin. I think it would be pretty tough to stick USB-C on this, but personally I would prefer it to be slightly thicker if that was the constraint. The thing is so thin, I don't know, it's a give or take, I suppose. I don't mind the pogo connector, but for some, if you lose the connector, you have to replace it, and that's annoying. I do prefer standard, universal USB-C. Tiny bit of a downside.

I still technically have my 2024 Kindle Paperwhite, but it's basically just living in a drawer by my bed.

When you look at them side by side, the Paperwhite is the quote-unquote "real" e-reader, and this one shouldn't be able to take its job. But I don't miss the Kindle, it just sits in the drawer. It's not portable enough for me. For a lot of people it would be portable enough, and they would need bigger text, but that's not me, and I think that's not the average person. This XTEINK is a fantastic little reader and it's somehow incredibly portable for what it represents: thousands of books.

But clearly this might not be for everyone.

It doesn't have a backlight, so at bedtime when my wife wants to sleep, I just have to stop reading. I don't really reach for the Paperwhite still because, eh, I haven't set up reading sync, and I tend to want to catch up on YouTube so I'll just grab my phone. If you read in the dark, you're gonna want a different nightstand device for that purpose, or a real soft reading light. Or, I hear the big brother of this device, the X4 Pro, has a backlight now.

It is still a lot harder to source books. Sometimes it is very hard. Some titles I just don't think will ever be available for this because their author and their publisher are super paranoid about piracy. If your whole library lives behind Kindle DRM or DRM of any kind and you don't want to deal with that, you're gonna probably have a bad time with this device. But if you don't mind working with DRM-free ebooks, this is the perfect device for you.

If you're about to spend your weekend jailbreaking your Kindle so you can unlock good features that Amazon should put in to begin with, maybe don't. Maybe sell it, pick this up, and stick it in the back of your phone instead.

Link to pick yours up:

XTEINK X3 Affiliate link, which supports my work without any additional cost to you.