Amazon's own approach to front lighting, reportedly four years in the making, offered up a much whiter and far more evenly distributed illumination across the screen. When the Kindle Paperwhite launched just a few months later, however, Barnes & Noble's proprietary technology already seemed dated. The reader showed promise for front-lit E Ink displays in a way we hadn't seen. When the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight went on sale earlier this year, we were quite impressed. However, Kobo get points for managing to keep the weight down. As such, most of the qualms we had about the Paperwhite's form factor carry over here - neither is as nice to hold as Barnes & Noble's Nook products. On the whole, there's not much in the way of excitement as far as the hardware design goes - particularly now that we've already handled the similar-looking Kindle Paperwhite. We're pretty happy we got stuck with classic black, but the different choices should appeal to some buyers. Kobo's selling the device in black and grey, as well as brighter pink and blue options. The entire reader is coated with the sort of soft-touch material you've come to expect on e-readers and other devices. Turns out, the battery had become unseated during shipping. In our case, we had to pry it off to find out why the reader had a strange rattle to it. (It doesn't offer up much more traction to help prevent slippage.) Interestingly, the back plate peels off, should you need to swap out batteries or just take a nice long look at the internals. It's been toned down a bit here, though, bringing it in line with Kobo's other new devices. The back, naturally, maintains the diamond pattern - it wouldn't be a Kobo device without it. On the bottom, there's that micro-USB port. Such concerns are perhaps rendered moot in this age of near-ubiquitous cloud storage (Kobo Everywhere, in this case), but it's always a welcome feature. On the left side of the device, you've got a microSD slot, which lets you expand the device's built-in 2GB of storage to a max of 32GB. Nearby is a small indicator light that will flash green as the device boots up.īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy.
And while you use a physical button to turn the light on and off, the dimming process still occurs entirely on the touchscreen. We'd much rather have the physical page turn buttons of the Simple Touch devices, but Kobo left those in the dust a couple of generations ago. Ultimately, it comes down to personal preference - we can't say we strongly prefer one way over the other. It's tough to say which method is better. Kobo's bucked the trend by incorporating a physical button for turning the front light on and off. To the side of that is a small rectangular night light button. There's a switch for power / waking the device from sleep.
But while Kobo scores points for keeping its device so light, this reader just doesn't possess the same build quality as its competitors.Īll of the physical buttons now live on the top of the device. When you're holding a device like this for long stretches, every ounce counts. More impressive is the fact that Kobo has managed to keep the reader's weight down it's the same 6.5 ounces as the Touch - not too shabby compared to the 7.5-ounce Paperwhite and 6.95-ounce Simple Touch with GlowLight. That compares to the Paperwhite's 6.7 x 4.6 inches, though it does make up a little bit of that footprint with a 0.39 inch thickness to Amazon's 0.36 inches. For starters, there's the fact that Kobo's managed to pull off a slightly shorter, skinnier form factor, at 6.4 x 4.5 inches (down from 6.5 x 4.5 on the Kobo Touch). Upon closer inspection, there are some key differences, however. Those changes are enough to make the device a dead ringer for the recently released Kindle Paperwhite, especially if you buy it in black. Sure, Kobo hasn't made much in the way of radical design alterations since the days of the Touch, but it has made a few tweaks to the front of the reader, dropping the home button on the bottom bezel, and replacing it with the lower-case logo. As standalone readers continue down the path toward buttonless, touchscreen devices, it's getting more and more difficult to distinguish the competition. The more things change, the more they stay the same - or, as far as e-readers go, the more things change, the more they begin to look like each other.
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