Onyx BOOX Picco is a pocket-sized eReader with a 3.97 inch ePaper display

Disclosure: Some links on this page are monetized by the Skimlinks, Amazon, Rakuten Advertising, and eBay, affiliate programs, and Liliputing may earn a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on those links. All prices are subject to change, and this article only reflects the prices available at time of publication.E Ink displays are designed to offer a paper-like viewing experience and most of the eBook readers released over the past two decades have had E Ink screens that are around the size of a mass market or trade paperback.But eReaders don’t have to be limited to standard sizes, and recently we’ve seen a growing number of smaller models that are easy to fit into a pocket… including some that are so small that you can magnetically snap them to the back of your phone. The Onyx BOOX Picco falls into this category: the upcoming eReader is a tiny model with a 3.97 inch display.Onyx is a company that helped define the pocket-sized eReader space with phone-sized models like the Onyx BOOX Palma 2 featuring a 6.13 inch, 824 x 1648 pixel displays with 300 pixels per inch and a 2:1 aspect ratio.But that’s a $400 device that takes up just as much space in your pocket or handbag as a phone.More recently, we’ve seen smaller, cheaper devices from a company called Xteink, which tend to have 4.3 inch or smaller screens and price tags under $100. Devices like the Xteink X3, X4, and X4 Pro are widely considered to be… less capable than something like the Palma 2, but a lot more affordable and maybe even more convenient. But in order to get the most out of them, many users find they prefer to install third-party firmware like Crosspoint Reader or Witch(hunt) Reader.So it’s interesting to see a more established brand like Onyx BOOX moving into this space. The company hasn’t provided many details about the upcoming Xteink Picco yet, but here’s what we know about it’s features so far:3.97 inch monochrome ePaper displayFront LightmicroSD card reader“accessible price point”According to materials the company shared with Liliputing, the Picco will also be “the first product in BOOX’s new product category of ePaper devices with diverse form factories,” extended beyond “traditional eReaders” and eNotes. The company is calling this new product category BOOX Tile.While we’ve got a few pictures of the device, that’s about all the hard information we’ve got so far. More details should be released closer to launch.But at this point we don’t know anything about the screen resolution or pixel density (Xteink’s devices tend to have low-resolution 400 x 840 displays, although the small screen size means they still pack in 200+ pixels per inch), processor, RAM, or operating system (Xteink devices tend to have ESP32 chips and support third-party firmware, while most existing Onyx BOOX devices run Android-based software).So it’s a bit early to say whether the BOOX Picco is an Xteink X4 Pro killer. But from what we know so far, it certainly sounds like that’s the device Onyx BOOX plans to compete with.