Despite my rant yesterday, and despite having received no shipping notification my Kobo Aura 6 inch ereader was delivered to my door this afternoon. I’ve played with it for a little while and here are my first impressions.
It is a gorgeous device. I really like the industrial design that the screen is flat without a bevel. It makes it feel very tablet like – and avoids messy crumbs being caught! eReaders aren’t normally noted for their look, but I really love what Kobo has done with this. From other reviews I’d seen I’d been concerned about the reflection of light on the screen, but it didn’t seem to be any more noticeable than on the Glo.
The screen is really lovely, too. Comparing it to the Kobo Glo, it’s an incredible difference. You can see some pictures here:
The Kobo Aura is on the left.
and compared to the Kindle Paperwhite (2013 edition)
The Aura’s Comfort Light is warmer to my eyes than the Glo’s and certainly much more even, and in comparison the Glo’s screen seems somewhat muddy. Page turns are the same on both devices. This is hardly surprising, given that they both have the same processor. However, the Aura only does a full refresh each chapter which makes reading smoother than on the Glo which refreshes every six pages. I didn’t notice any ghosting on the Aura at all.
With regards to the new functionality coming with the new devices, I checked out the Pocket integration. It is fantastic. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been saving articles to my Pocket account and they were all there for me on my Kobo Aura when I linked my accounts. Awesome. That is a functionality I will certainly make use of. The multitouch brightness control works well, too.
However, it seems that Kobo’s Beyond the Book still has some ways to go. I downloaded a sample of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit that I have seen used to demo Beyond the Book and did indeed see that some items were indeed underlined. Clicking on these took me to an error page. I think it will be some time before this feature is as fully formed as Amazon’s X-Ray, which was able to import Shelfari data (Shelfari is owned by Amazon)
All in all it’s a lovely little device and looks great.