Most of the screens that you encounter everyday is always fighting for your attention, always buzzing, glowing, pulsing with red notification badges designed to hijack your focus. The TRMNL X, a 10.3-inch e-ink smart display priced at $219, takes the opposite approach entirely. It just sits there, calm and papery, waiting for you to glance over when you’re ready. And that restraint might be the most radical design choice in consumer tech right now.
TRMNL’s original model was deliberately lo-fi, a smaller 7.5-inch 1-bit screen with no touchscreen and no backlight. It was almost stubbornly analog in spirit. It appealed to developers, minimalists, and those of us tired of all the bright screens. The TRMNL X is the company’s answer to users who loved the philosophy but wanted more screen real estate and polish. And it delivers on both counts without losing what made the original special.
Designer: TRMNL
The display itself is gorgeous in the understated way that only e-ink can be. At 1872 x 1404 resolution with 16 shades of gray, it renders calendars, weather dashboards, news headlines, and artwork with a crispness that feels more like a printed page than a screen. Partial refreshes happen in under 200 milliseconds, which is fast enough that the display doesn’t feel sluggish when cycling through your content. It’s the kind of screen you can stare at for hours without your eyes complaining, which is something no LCD or OLED can honestly claim.
What I find most compelling about the TRMNL X is how much it trusts you. There’s no algorithm deciding what you should see. You configure your own dashboard with plugins pulled from a library of over 850 options, everything from Google Calendar and Reddit feeds to ChatGPT summaries and YouTube subscriber counts. You arrange them in one of eight layout templates, set your refresh interval, and walk away. The device wakes up periodically, pulls a new image from the server, displays it, and goes back to sleep. That’s it. No infinite scroll. No dopamine trap. No dark patterns. Just information you asked for, presented when you want it.
The hardware reflects this same philosophy of quiet confidence. The frame comes in six finishes, from black and white to sage and faux wood, and the front is completely clean with no visible branding. There’s a magnetic USB-C charging connector, a built-in accelerometer for auto-rotation, and a touch gesture bar for quick navigation. Battery life stretches anywhere from two to six months depending on your refresh rate, which means you can genuinely forget it needs power at all. The enclosure is also waterproof and dust-proof, so it can live in a bathroom or a workshop without issue.
But the real personality of the TRMNL X shows in its hacker-friendly DNA. The firmware is fully open source. The case has actual screws, not glue, so you can open it up, swap components, and tinker to your heart’s content. There’s a Qwiic connector for attaching external sensors, and the community on Discord has already built custom integrations for Home Assistant and all sorts of niche projects. In an era when most gadgets are sealed shut and locked down, this level of openness feels almost rebellious.
At $219, the TRMNL X isn’t an impulse buy. But it’s also not competing with tablets or smart home hubs. It occupies a category that barely existed a few years ago: the passive information display. Something you put on your desk or mount on a wall that keeps you informed without pulling you into a screen-time spiral. The fact that it runs for months on a charge and requires almost zero maintenance makes it feel less like a gadget and more like a piece of furniture.
There’s a growing appetite for technology that respects boundaries, that does its job and then gets out of the way. The TRMNL X is a beautifully considered expression of that idea, a screen that proves sometimes the most powerful design choice is simply knowing when to stay quiet.
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