Review: Kobo eReader
As if there weren’t enough eReaders in the world, Borders recently released the Kobo eReader. While not as spiffy cool and full of magical pixels like the iPad,1 nor as hip and trendy as the Kindle, our crackpot team of crackpot scientists2 at the Secret Lair’s test lab annex thinks the Kobo is a pretty cute device in its own right. I was lucky enough to be selected to prod and poke3 at the Kobo. My report is as follows.
Pros:
- It has open format support, specifically EPUB. It will also accept PDF format.
- The display is an e-ink display. I really like this as my eyes tend to freak out easily.
- It has an SD card slot which is also a bonus. No one likes running out of space. I imagine you could also use this device as a thumb-drive as well as that’s how it shows up when plugging it in via standard USB.
- Simple, intuitive navigation makes finding what you want relatively painless. There are three buttons on the side (home, menu, display, and back) in addition to a direction pad. Home takes you to a list of what your currently reading (or have looked at recently). Menu displays a bunch of options depending if you are home or in a book. This is where you can configure the Kobo, or if you are in a book, change chapters. Display lets you choose between five different font sizes, and two different font types. There is also a decent library function where all your loaded books are listed in alphabetical order by title.
- Slip resistant back is a nice little after thought sort of feature. It does a decent job on keeping the device stationary when it’s set down.
- The battery life claims to be two weeks or 8,000 page turns. I haven’t had mine long enough to require a recharge, so I can’t really confirm these claims. So far the battery seems to be doing really well (from what I can tell from the indicator).
- The screen is a nice size. It’s just about as large as a standard softcover book.
- It’s very thin and light, but it doesn’t feel fragile or cheap. It has some mass to it despite its size, while still being quite comfortable to hold.
- It also has bluetooth capability. From what I’ve read, the purpose of this is to sync with a data phone in order to purchase books on the fly. I don’t have a data plan on my phone, so, again, I’ll just have to take their word for it. It’s still nice to know it has this ability (not as cool as the Kindle 3G access, but still nice).
- It comes preloaded with approximately a butt-ton4 of public domain books. So if you were meaning to catch up on all the classics, Kobo has saved you the effort of hunting down everything and loading it yourself.
- Lastly, the price is fairly reasonable (at $149.99) considering the competition. Also, as of this writing, Borders is giving folks a $20 gift card with each Kobo purchase, so, yay!
Cons:
- It’s not the speediest of devices. The boot up is a little sluggish (about 30 seconds). The loading of a new book can by quite slow. For instance, it took about two minutes to load On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, while it only took a few seconds for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve heard a few complaints about the speed of page turning (about a second), but it hasn’t bothered me. So, while not a fast device, I’m generally not in a hurry when reading. It might bother the more impatient among us.
- The Borders ebook software is a bit lacking. I was a little bit disappointed to see that most of the books that came pre-loaded don’t show up in the library list. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add existing, non-DRMed titles that you may already have (which were not purchased through Borders) to the Kobo via this software. Granted, you can just copy the files over to the device itself, totally bypassing the software. For library management, I would recommend Calibre over the included software. It will convert pretty much any document you have into either epub or pdf format and load it onto your Kobo for you. It also has a nice library organizer.
- No light for night time reading.
- Rumor has it the bluetooth is only supported with Blackberry devices. Alas, my phone isn’t cool enough to test this out.5
- Directional pad placement may be awkward for lefties.
Conclusion:
Despite the slowness, so far I really like this little device. It does exactly what it was meant to do which is store books and allow me to read them easily. In this task I feel it does a very good job. I am using Calibre for my library management, so any issues I had with the included software is null. I’m able to load files and manage them without any issue using this method which is perfect for me.6 All in all a pretty nice little device for the money. I would recommend this for anyone looking for a simple eReader that allows for a lot of flexibility of content without a lot of bells and whistles.
Rating: 4 out of 5 robots7
- Yes, all you technical technicality technicians, it’s technically not purely an eReader. Whatever. It’s still full of magical pixels. [↩]
- They’re the crackpottiest! [↩]
- In a purely scientific fashion, of course. [↩]
- That’s Imperial butt-ton units. [↩]
- What? Really? Ah well. It’s not like I was going to use that feature anyway. [↩]
- And the fact that I can use 3rd party software with this device is another bonus. [↩]
- If the loading was a smidgen faster and there was a light of some sort, in my opinion, it would be perfect. [↩]
Episode 0048: The Great Old Pumpkin
[...] upon a time, our own Secretary of Artistic Propaganda reviewed the Kobo eReader from Borders Booksellers. When I decided it was time to acquire an eReader, I thought it might be [...]