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This tiny, magnetic e-reader could stop you from doomscrolling
It was love at first sight. It felt like scouring the mall, dipping in and out of sprawling department stores in search of a specific, elusive item, only to finally find what you’re looking for. Only, I didn’t even know I was searching for something like the Xteink X3, because I never dared dream of something so delightful: a tiny, MagSafe-compatible e-ink reader that could attach to my iPhone like a Pop Socket.
This was it. My life would change forever. I would get my hands on the Xteink X3, and I would stop doomscrolling forever. I would read more books than ever before… which is saying something, since – brag – I read at least 50 books a year. But – not a brag – I probably spend even more time on social media than I do reading. I know that I feel generally less anxious when I limit my social media time, but alas, the siren song of TikTok beckons me. What if instead of opening social media, I could just flip my phone over and read on a tiny, Kindle-like e-ink screen? Could this $80 gadget fix me?
I’ve tried reading books (… or downloads from AO3) on my phone, immersing myself in a fictional world, rather than posts from the president in which he threatens to obliterate an entire country. But something about looking at my phone, where I’m constantly tempted to open Instagram to see whatever Reel someone sent me, doesn’t quite soothe me the way that a book or an e-ink device like a Kindle does.
I was so excited for my X3 to arrive that I constantly refreshed the tracking link until finally, it was delivered. Even though I had meticulously compared the dimensions of the X3 to my iPhone 16, or my Pop Socket wallet, I still worried it might not fit – the previous model, the Xteink X4 (basically the same device but a little bigger) only fit on larger phones like the iPhone Pro Max line. But sure enough, the X3 magnetically attached to the back of my phone like it was custom-made to fit.
My X3 came in the mail about two hours before I had to leave to go to a Phillies game, so I rushed to load books onto it, because I thought it would be really funny to take photos in which I read “The Power Broker” in a crowded baseball stadium. Behold, my handiwork:
For the first several days that I had the X3, I carried it with me on the back of my phone. This made me a bit nervous, though, since I’m used to having a Pop Socket wallet, which means I’ve gotten in the habit of leaving home without my actual wallet. But I found that I used the X3 just as much when I carried it in my purse or pocket, rather than attaching it to my phone. I’m still not sure if I’ll keep this setup, or if I’ll start actually using a real wallet so that I can attach the ereader, but for now, that’s what has felt most natural. Plus, my X3 shipped with a very compact, cute, magnetic case, which perfectly protects the device and its screen and makes it a little easier to hold. At just $9 for the case, I’d recommend getting one. The case can also magnetize to your phone, though it feels a bit less secure than attaching your X3 alone.
Over my two weeks of testing, I did find that the X3 helped me read more. If you’re in line at a coffee shop, or waiting for the bus, you can just pull out the ereader instead of opening Instagram. I didn’t find the small screen difficult to read on, either. But just buying the device won’t change your habits – you have to remember that you have a 3.7 inch screen in your pocket that can fit hundreds of books.
The Xteink X3 is pretty close to being the device of my dreams, but it’s not quite there yet. The firmware that the device comes with is pretty clunky – not unusable, but not exactly intuitive. I expected this, since the Xteink Reddit community was buzzing about CrossPoint, a community-made, free, open source firmware. The process of downloading CrossPoint was a bit intimidating as someone who writes words, rather than code – but with the instructions on CrossPoint’s website (and a few videos), it was easy enough. I encountered some difficulties at first, but then I realized it was because I was trying to download the X4 firmware onto my X3, so… my bad. You probably won’t even need the YouTube videos!
When you start loading books and open source firmware onto your X3, you’ll notice another divisive aspect of the device: it doesn’t have a USB-C port, unlike the X4. Instead, it uses a magnetic charger. Yes, it’s annoying to have yet another charging cable specifically for this one device, but I don’t care that much. After two weeks of consistent use, my X3 has dropped from a 100% charge to a 96% charge, so I can’t imagine I’ll be using that magnetic charger too often. You don’t even need the cord to add new books to your ereader – you can transfer files over Wi-Fi from your phone or computer (I wouldn’t call the process user-friendly, but I was able to figure it out without Googling anything).
Speaking of loading books, that’s another drawback. The majority of what I read on my Kindle comes from Libby, which is my favorite app (#notsponsored). The Libby app allows you to easily borrow ebooks or audiobooks from your library and send them to your Kindle. But you can’t get those ebooks (legally) onto an Xteink ereader, since libraries use protected versions of .epub files that deter users from copying them (you also can’t read books you buy from Amazon’s ebook store on non-Amazon devices, because capitalism). This lack of compatibility is a drawback, but it also makes the device feel unique – it’s a “dumb” device that has no apps and no touch screen, which feels startlingly refreshing in an era of AI-enabled refrigerators.
It’s not hard to find interesting .epub files to load onto the X3, even if you can’t access your Kindle library or Libby. A lot of great books are in the public domain, which means that they’re no longer subject to copyright and can be downloaded for free (I’ve weirdly never read “Pride and Prejudice,” so the time is now). A few months ago, I bought the entire .epub catalogs of sci-fi writers Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz as part of a charity fundraiser, which should keep me busy for quite a bit. If you wanted to, you could even turn online articles or blogs into .epubs using a free program like Calibre.
So, did the Xteink X3 fix me? Am I now a newly reformed woman who has a healthy relationship with social media and has read a bunch of classic novels that I never read as an English major, since I mostly took classes with ridiculous titles like “Aestheticus Extremus: The Politics of Precarious Invention in North American Poetry and Poetics”? It’s not that simple. But if you meet the X3 halfway and make a concerted effort to use it, then maybe you’ll spare yourself from a bit more brainrot.
Nicolas Sauvage believes it takes four years for the best bets to look obvious — thinking that he shared on stage last week at StrictlyVC’s San Francisco event, which TDK Ventures co-hosted.
It’s a theory he’s been working to prove since 2019, when he founded the corporate venture arm of the Japanese electronics giant, which is now managing $500 million across four funds. The AI chip startup Groq, valued at $6.9 billion during its most recent funding round last fall, is the highest-profile example of this thinking.
In 2020, well before the generative AI boom made infrastructure bets look obvious, Sauvage wrote a check into the company, which was founded by Jonathan Ross — one of the engineers who built Google’s Tensor Processing Units. Groq was focused from the start on inference: the computational heavy lifting that happens every time a model responds to a query. Ross had designed his chip by building the compiler first, stripping the architecture down until, as Sauvage describes it, “you can’t remove one part and have it still work.”
It might have looked niche to some, but knowing what he did about his parent company’s constraints, Sauvage saw asymmetry. Unlike consumer hardware, which has a natural ceiling, demand for inference keeps compounding with every new application and every new model. Sauvage couldn’t know then that demand for inference would explode this year, thanks to every AI agent that plans and acts across dozens of calls (where a single query used to suffice).
But in some ways, Ross got lucky, too. After all, a Japanese electronics conglomerate best known for magnetic tape is not, on its face, the most obvious investing partner. In fact, Sauvage describes TDK Ventures’ own existence as very unlikely. But after two back-to-back Stanford lectures — one making the case for corporate VC, one cataloguing every reason it fails — Sauvage, who is French and joined TDK in Silicon Valley through an acquisition, pitched the idea to higher-ups at TDK headquarters despite having no obvious standing to do so. (“I’m not Japanese. I don’t speak Japanese; I don’t live in Tokyo,” he told this editor.)
After refusing to take no for an answer, he finally received the green light in to build a fund whose mandate was to answer one question: What’s the next big thing for TDK, and what might kill it?
The portfolio he has since assembled is dotted with technologies that have become more widely interesting to VCs over the last year: solid-state grid transformers, sodium-ion batteries for data centers, alternative battery chemistries that sidestep the geopolitical fragility of lithium and cobalt.
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The discipline behind all of it is the same: identify the bottleneck four years out, then find the founders already working on it.
The question, of course, is what’s next. For his part, Sauvage is watching physical AI closely — not all of robotics but robots with a highly specific job to be done. Agility Robotics, for example, in his portfolio, focuses on the single, mundane task of moving things from one place to another in warehouses facing workforce shortages. Another portfolio company, Swiss portfolio ANYbotics, builds ruggedized robots for environments too hazardous for human workers — places where the job definition is essentially to go where people can’t. The through-line is clarity of purpose. The robots Sauvage is betting on don’t try to do everything; instead, they do one hard thing reliably.
Sauvage says he’s also watching the compute stack shift again. GPUs dominated training — the massive, parallel computation of teaching a model. Inference chips like Groq’s are reshaping what happens when that model speaks: faster, cheaper, at scale. Now, Sauvage argues, CPUs are due for a renaissance. They’re not the most powerful chips or the fastest. But they’re the most flexible and best suited to the branching, decision-making logic of orchestration. When an AI agent delegates a task, checks on its progress, and loops back across dozens of steps, something has to manage the whole choreography. That something, increasingly, looks like a CPU.
And then there’s China. A recent report from Eclipse — a venture firm he follows closely — documented what Sauvage describes as “vibe manufacturing” — the rapid, AI-assisted iteration of physical hardware prototyping, mirroring what vibe coding did for software. Chinese manufacturers, the report found, are compressing the design-build-test cycle for physical products in ways Western supply chains aren’t yet equipped to match.
For Sauvage, it’s a bottleneck signal — and one he’s already moving on with TDK Ventures’ various investments. One remaining unsolved problem, he says, is dexterity. Models are improving fast enough that physical AI feels inevitable; what’s still missing is the physical fluency to match. The countries and companies that figure out how to iterate on atoms as fast as others iterate on code will have a manufacturing advantage. That’s the wave for which he’s positioning TDK Ventures today.
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