Around ereaders

I am on my third Kindle now. I do not remember the model of the first one well enough to specify it, but it was a very old one, from the early generations. I am an avid reader, and when Amazon decided to launch those e-readers, I got excited right away. It was getting hard to walk around with books inside my backpack, and if I was carrying a folder, it was even worse.

When the Paperwhite version came out, I did not think twice. I bought it. And my first one, I gave to my cousin (that is why I do not remember the model). I fell in love with the Paperwhite because it was thinner, but in terms of functionality, there was not that much difference. It had a better texture, and the backlight was completely comfortable.

I used it for about two or three years until one day I saw that Amazon was once again going to innovate with the launch of a color model, the Colorsoft. I got even more excited. I had thousands of comics that I used to read on the PC. What I needed was exactly that.

I waited one year after the launch to buy it. I wanted people to review it first and talk about their impressions. Then came the Colorsoft Signature, and the time had come. Coincidentally, Amazon, on the day I bought it, was giving a discount (I think it was Amazon week or something like that). I paid R$1,500. I am not sure of the price in dollars, but certainly in reais, like everything in Brazil, it was probably much more expensive than buying it in the United States or anywhere else beyond our borders.

It was perfect. But something disappointed me. It was the lack of native support for comic books, just that. Fortunately, this could be solved with software developed by the community and available on GitHub.

Around the same time, the “hackers” released the jailbreak for the Kindle, but I could not test it. It was compatible with the model I no longer had, which was my older Kindle, but I no longer had it for a good reason.

Anyway, after filling it with books and delighting myself with the dear Colorsoft Signature, I saw something online about a device that was being produced in China, called XTeink. I thought it was some parallel thing, and I did not pay much attention. But a few days later, the internet, or at least the places where I browsed, was talking about nothing else.

I was taken over by a lot of curiosity. It was not an expensive device, and everyone spoke well of it. Not to mention that it was extremely portable. I went to AliExpress and, without thinking too much, bought the X4. A joy that did not last long. A few days later, I received an email saying that my purchase had been canceled. So I went back to the website to buy it again and saw the listing this time for the X3, but it was marked as a new release. I did a brief search, because I had found it strange that the X4 had been released before the X3, and in fact this X3 was the newer version.

Besides the size, apparently nothing had changed. But since it was the most recent one, I bought it.

Then I realized that I had bought it in pre-order and that what I had seen about it were only reviews. But that was not a problem. It was January 2026. I received the product at the end of April / beginning of May.

It arrived in a modest little box, with a screen protector and a case. I was charmed right away. As soon as I turned it on, came the new surprise: it was in Chinese. And the screen displayed a QR Code to download the app. The surprise that should have been good turned into a mix of frustration and the urge to throw it against the wall.

It was literally the Chinese version, meant to be used in China, and it needed a Chinese phone.

So I would need to find a way to get a Chinese number or change the firmware. And I researched. The available firmwares I found taught how to change the stock firmware of the X4 and the first-gen X3, but they did not mention the new X3 (the connection methods and USB are a little different). Until I found out how. The process was similar to the others, but with peculiarities I will not talk about here, in this post.

And I went ahead and changed the stock firmware for another one. My happiness came back. It turned on and, even better, it had Brazilian Portuguese translation. I used it tirelessly for one month. Excellent texture and OPDS support, which allowed me to connect my Calibre to the device.

Then I started thinking about why I had not bought this before, and I had the idea of checking whether there was something better than the Kindle Colorsoft.

That is when I discovered Bigme. A wonderful e-reader tablet. I was enchanted after watching some videos on YouTube. It had everything a tablet could have, but it was an e-reader. It had compatibility with Play Store apps, it had its own apps, and it came with a pen. Yes, you can write on it, and the latency is almost zero.

I bought it. And after some customs problems, the device arrived. I can say that I was impressed enough after using it for only a few hours, and it has been three days since it arrived. I installed it, configured it, uninstalled things, installed more apps, did everything, prepared my agenda, etc., etc., etc.

I must confess that the Kindle is a robust device, but it was the others that are making me feel happy.