Kobo mini review

I didn’t get to spend much time with the Kobo, unfortunately. Unlike the heavier touch screen Sony PRS-600 my friend’s got, the Kobo looked appealing with its uncluttered design, clean UI and beautiful sharp screen. Due to probably the lack of the touch screen, the fonts also looked sharper than the Sony, something that must certainly hold true for other non-touch readers. The black version I got helped focus eyes on reading with the additional uncluttering contrast. The rubber backing proved to be handy in holding the reader upright without it sliding out of the hand, something that happened to me a number of times with the Sony. The list of positives ended as a few issues become quickly apparent..

Interface

The first thing I noticed after opening up the attractively simple packaging was that navigating around a book is rather tedious. Aside from longer response times than the Sony, the Kobo, as of the current firmware 1.4, offers no way to either jump to a particular page in the book, nor bookmark a given page to quickly navigate to later. That basically translates to you being fucked if your 500 page PDF book lacks a table of contents which a lot of PDFs out there do, unfortunately.

Preloaded books

The Kobo comes with a 100 preloaded books, which certainly seems like a plus, until you realize you can’t get rid of them easily. And since the UI lacks any sort of “jump to book title starting with letter X” or fast scrolling functionality, once you’re done uploading your books, you’re left to scroll through pages and pages of preloaded public domain material until you find the desired books you’ve just uploaded.

PDF

Adobe PDF files show up under the Documents tab of the reader. Since most PDFs are likely to be too large for the portrait orientation, going into landscape mode seems like the right thing to do. Zooming in doesn’t work too well here, though, as there is no zoom slider present: you’re left with “too much” or “not enough” as far as zoom settings go. Once zoomed in, it’s also typically impossible to centre text in the middle: pressing the left or right navigation arrows while in the zoomed in mode pans text far too much cutting off a good 10 characters making reading while zoomed in impossible. Doh! To be fair, while the Sony PRS-600 offers a much more fine tuned zoom slider and a set of navigation controls for the zoom mode, it resets back to regular fit-to-page mode once you decide to browse to the next page. Such UI decision makes me wonder what on earth the zoom mode could be used for beside zooming into diagrams.

Buttons and Overall Impression

I really wanted to like the cute little Kobo, but just as I was convincing myself that I’ll be able to convert everything to well indexed ePubs with detailed hand-made tables of contents, the Display button used for setting display settings suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason. After less than an hour of skipping through Sherlock Holmes and Art of War. Resetting with the pinhole didn’t help.

At this point, $150 really feels like a waste of cash. If you’re in U.S. or have friends there, a Sony PRS-600 is currently going for $169, and a wifi Nook can be had for the same $150. The latter, aside from having all the missing navigational functionality and a speedier CPU that Kobo lacks, is running Android, and will certainly be the reader I’ll be planning a trip downstairs for. Kobo, get your shit together.

1 year ago  /  1 note  /  Comments