Boox's answer to the pocket-sized Xteink X4 e-reader is coming into focus. The company teased the Picco — a device with a 3.97-inch e-paper display — back in July, and fresh reporting from IFA has now filled in most of the picture, though the price remains a mystery.
The Picco's small display will be a touchscreen, which reviewers of the Xteink X4 Pro called a welcome upgrade, and physical page-turn buttons will flank the screen. Their behavior can be customized, with different actions assigned to short and long presses. Unlike Xteink's devices, however, the Picco will not have magnets on the back for attaching the reader to a phone.
Storage relies entirely on a microSD card — there is no onboard memory — but Boox is making it easy to fill: books and documents can be copied directly to the card, or pushed to the device over USB-C (a port the Xteink devices lack) and over Wi-Fi from a companion app.
The most notable departure is software. While Boox's other readers run Android, the Picco uses a stripped-down, Linux-based operating system with a handful of built-in extras such as a timer, a to-do list and a reading-stats tracker. The trade-off, reviewers note, is that Boox is unlikely to open up its firmware the way Xteink has, so the Picco will probably be less hackable and customizable.
Still unknown are the price, battery life, Bluetooth support and whether an audiobook player will be included. Boox is expected to reveal all of it in November, when the Picco is slated to launch.
