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Kobo Aura One & Kindle Paperwhite: Frontlight Comparison

04.09.2016 16 Comments

kobo aura one 5The Kobo Aura One is both Kobo’s largest and most expensive ereader, and thanks to its frontlight it is arguably the best on the market.

Few are touting this fact, but the Aura One has 17 LEDs lighting up its 7.8″ screen – 9 white LEDs and 8 more RGB LEDs (for the night reading mode).

That’s seventeen LEDs compared to the Kindle Oasis' ten, or the six LEDs on the Kindle Paperwhite, but what does that mean in practice?

Based on the time I have spent with the Aura One, I can tell you that it means that the Aura One has the brightest screen of any of the ereaders I have owned.

As you can see in the following gallery, at the maximum setting the Aura One is at least twice as bright as the Kindle Paperwhite (2015). It’s also brighter at the minimum setting, although the Paperwhite is brighter when the frontlight is turned off due to the fact that the Kindle’s frontlight never turns all the way off.

Note: I did not take photos of the Aura One’s night reading mode because the Paperwhite doesn’t have a similar feature.

As you can see, the Aura One has a more even frontlight than the Paperwhite. (I no longer have a Kindle Oasis, so I am using a Paperwhite.) The latter looks positively splotchy in comparison.

To be fair, the Paperwhite does cost half as much as the Aura One, but that doesn’t really matter. It would only cost Amazon about a $.25 more per unit to double the number of LEDs in the Paperwhite and give it a brighter and more even frontlight.

Coincidentally, that is a step Amazon will have to take with the next Kindle Voyage, or whatever device replaces it at the $200 price point. If and when it is released, that new device will need to be competitive with the Aura One, and adding more LEDs is a cheap way to accomplish that goal.

Kobo Aura One: Comics, PDFs, And Its Guts (video)

30.08.2016 6 Comments

getting mike cane's goat is funThere were three burning questions about the Kobo Aura One when it launched: how the night reading mode worked, Overdrive integration, and whether the Aura One had an internal microSD card slot.

I answered two of those questions within days of the Aura one’s launch a couple weeks back, and today I can answer the third.

A new review video by the Italian-language blog HDblog.it reveals that the Aura One does not have that internal microSD card slot.

This is going to disappoint potential Aura One owners who feel that the 8GB storage on the device simply is not enough. I can understand how they feel; the Aura One has an 7.8″ screen which could be great for PDFs and comics – if not for the fact that PDFs will fill up that 8GB fast.

Then again, I have found (and other reviewers concur) that the Aura One is frustratingly slow at both opening a PDF and turning the page in PDFs, so I don’t think the lack of storage is as much of a problem as it could be.

 

Kobo Aura One Ships in September, Will Cost $230

17.08.2016 23 Comments

Waterproof_for_the_ultimate_escape_kobo_eReaderKobo hasn’t sent a press release yet with an official announcement, but a bunch of sites have posted reviews of the new Kobo Aura One on Wednesday.

I still don’t have one of these babies (I found out while writing this post that mine is literally on the UPS truck right now), but The Verge, Tom’s Hardware, and Techcrunch have all posted reviews which confirm the leaked specs and our guesses about the prices.

Update: the product listing is now up.

The Aura One will cost $230 when it goes on sale on 6 September. It’s going to be available in the US, Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Turkey. Prices will vary across markets (according to last week’s leak the Aura One will cost 229 euros).

This ereader is not only larger and as sharp as Amazon’s flagship Kindle, it also costs less and is nearly as thin.

And it looks pretty in the video:

And oh yes, it is waterproof; I just got the press release from HZO, the company which developed the tech for water-proofing the electronics (it’s not a waterproof case like on the Aura H2O). The Aura One meets the IPX8 standard, where the Aura H2O met the IP67.

Edit: And somehow Kobo has also added night reading mode which filters out the blue light:

kobo aura one

I’m still reading the reviews, but a couple interesting points jumped out. According to The Verge, it’s thin (they also said the bezels are too small to hold it comfortably):

The first thing you notice about the Aura One is that it’s big for an e-reader. While Amazon used 9.7-inch displays on some of the early Kindles, and more obscure companies like Pocketbook have sold e-readers in that size range in the past, the industry (Kobo included) has since settled on a standard of 6–7 inch screens. But the Aura One sports a 7.8-inch, 300ppi display, which is large enough to make it not just Kobo’s biggest e-reader ever, but essentially the biggest high-resolution e-ink screen you can buy. That size increase doesn’t come with any extra bulk. The Aura One is just 6.9mm thick, and weighs 230 grams — thinner than an iPhone 6S, and not much heavier than a 6S Plus.

The reviewer also noted one of the more interesting software features.

Remember when Rakuten bought OverDrive last year? The Aura One benefited from that acquisition:

Kobo’s parent company, Rakuten, acquired a company last year called Overdrive that has deep ties with the growing e-book lending programs around the country, and so library lending also features prominently in the Aura One’s software. The most useful part of this is that, as long as you have your library credentials plugged in, titles that are available for borrowing will also show up when you search. It’s an important feature for the company’s business, too: Kobo boasts 5 million titles in its store, which is a lot, but it’s still not as deep a well as you can find on Amazon.

I don’t usually do library ebooks because they are more of a hassle than checking out a paper book, but this could change my mind. That sounds like an even easier solution than the Kindle-OverDrive integration, and I can’t wait to test it when my unit arrives.

Review: eGlide Reader2 Android Tablet

11.12.2011 7 Comments

The Reader2 tablet is the second of  recent tablets launched by eMatic, a small gadget company. It looks to have been originally designed by another company (Rockchips would be my guess), with eMatic importing it into the US.

This is a cheap 7″ Android tablet, and it’s running v2.1 Froyo on a 1GHz CPU. As you can see it has a basic tablet shape with slots and ports on the lower edge, a speaker on the back, power button in the bottom left corner and the 4 buttons to the right of the screen.

 

Pros

  • cheap ($99 retail)

Cons

  • marginal build quality
  • buggy software
  • poor battery life
  • poor touchscreen

 Hardware

The eGlide Reader2 is one of those crossover tablet designs. For the most part it is a tablet, but it also has some details of an ebook reader. That’s where the 4 buttons to the right of the screen came from. Two are page turn buttons and the other 2 are the standard Android back and home buttons.

The overall feel of the tablet is about what I expected for a cheap tablet. That’s not a criticism; the tablet feels fine. But there are a couple of hardware details that are disappointing. For example, the microSD card slot is poorly mounted. Somehow I managed to insert my card into the case while completely missing the slot (that’s something I’ve never seen before). Luckily I was able to get a pair of tweezers and pull it out again before it was permanently lost inside the case.

And then there is the touchscreen. This is a truly junky touchscreen. It does not like fingertips nor does it work well with a stylus.  I’ve used a lot of touchscreens, and no matter what I did to change how I pressed the screen I still could not get it to work consistently. Even after I calibrated the touchscreen I still saw a high number of mis-hit keys. And they’re not my fault; the issue persisted after I switched to a stylus.

Battery Life

The Reader2 is specced at 22 hours music or 9 hours of reading.  Unfortunately, I never got to use it that long. There have been several mornings that I picked up the Reader2 and found the battery almost drained overnight.

This tablet looks to have the same battery life issue as the eGlide Reader Pro that I reviewed a couple weeks back. It looks to me like neither tablet has an actual sleep mode; when you press the power button you merely turn off the screen. The tablet is still running down the battery.

Video & Audio

The Reader2 comes with a fairly good audio video players. It can play background music while you are using other apps.  The sound quality was acceptable, considering that it had just the one cheap speaker on the back. But the one speaker also wasn’t very loud, not even when I cupped my hand. This is definitely a tablet that needs headphones.

The tablet came with a number of sample videos (480×854). They played fine without dropped frames or visual artifacts. The image quality was decent for cheap Android tablets (an IPS screen this is not). I don’t have anything with a higher resolution at the moment so I couldn’t push the abilities. Unfortunately I could not play my usual test video on Youtube; the Reader2 won’t play the video in the browser (and the Youtube app wouldn’t install).

Apps

I covered the stock apps in my first impressions post, so here I’ll just discuss trying to install apps. I got the Amazon Apstore to install okay, but I’ve had to repeatedly go back and reenter my log in info in the Appstore app.  I also got some unexplained errors when trying to install  the Youtube app. Angry birds eventually managed to install, and it runs slowly.

I also had a mysterious error while trying to read ebooks in the Kindle app. It told me to delete the ebook and download it again. I did, and the problem persisted. BTW, I’ve seen a similar problem on other tablets with a Rockchip CPU (including the eGlide Reader Pro). I generally take this as a sign that there is a problem in the original firmware that some single developer is using on multiple devices.

Reading Experience

Given the numerous other issues with this tablet I’m not sure that this section is worth writing. But for the sake of completeness-

The eGlide Reader2 comes with both the Kobo app and a stock reading app. The stock app supports Adobe DE DRM, and it reads Epub, PDF, and an number of other formats. It’s workable, and it has a nice minimum set of features ( 5 font sizes, TOC support, bookmarks). But it also a faux page curl, and I hate that. PDF support is okay, but the app only supports 5 zoom levels and does not reflow the PDF. A standard 8.5×11 PDF is readable on the 1.25 zoom setting. You can also zoom in closer and then swipe your way around the screen. The zoom will persist after you turn the page.

The Kobo app is their usual Android app. It had a lot of features, including a night reading mode, both serif and san-serif fonts, a slider bar of font sizes annotation, and a special menu just for the highlights and notes. BTW, the page turn buttons don’t work with the Kobo app; that’s a limitation of the app.

The stock reading app was actually nicer to use than the Kobo app because of the page turn buttons. It was easy to keep my thumb wedged below the next page button and then shift it up ever so sightly to tun the page. The stock app will also accept screen taps ans swipes for age turns, which is nice.

Expectations

I was expecting a cheap Android tablet that would be underpowered for most activities but still work okay for use as an ebook reader and for light web browsing.

Opinion

The low price of this Android tablet is reflected in its poor build quality.The builders scrimped on everything from the touchscreen to how much they paid the programmers. I believe there are better options out there.

Specs

I have the spec sheet here.

  • 1GHz CPU
  • Android v2.1
  • 7″ (800×480) LCD screen
  • resistive touchscreen
  • Wifi
  • g-sensor
  • 4GB Flash
  • microSD card slot
  • speaker/mike
  • ebook format support: ePub, TXT, PDF, MOBI, LRC-FB2, RTF, HTML, PDB
  • audio/video support: MP3, WMA, FLAC, AAC, OGG, MPG, RMVB, WMV, WAV, MP4, AVI, FLV, ASF, 3GP, RM, DAT

First Impressions of the Slick ER-701

07.12.2011 24 Comments

Last week I posted about a super cheap 7″ ebook reader, the Slick ER-701. That post drew a fair amount of comment from owners, and they pretty much agreed that it was a great device for the under $50 market.

Mine arrived today, and I second that opinion.

I wasn’t too sure about this ereader. It looked awfully clunky in the photos, but in person it is actually quite nice. As you can see, it has all the buttons along one long edge, which at first seems like a bad idea. But it works.

That one wide bezel might make the ER-701 look off-balanced, but the effect isn’t nearly as noticeable in hand. When I’m holding this ereader, the wide bezel just works. The bezel doesn’t seem so wide when it’s underneath my thumb. BTW, this ereader isn’t as well balanced as I like. It seems to be more heavy towards the edge away from the buttons. But it’s not an issue once I put the cover on; then I can maintain a grip just fine.

Now that I’ve played with it for a bit, I can confirm that this is running firmware that I’ve seen before. I’m pretty sure that this ereader was designed by Gajah, a ebook reader developer based in Singapore. They use the same menus and reading app on all their ereaders, and that includes all the rebranded models like the ER-701.

The formatting of the ebook app was never very good, but this is still a feature rich ereader. You can rotate it so the buttons are on all 4 sides of the text while reading, but it appears the menus only use 2 of the directions.  It has a video and audio player, photo viewer, and a file manager. The backlight can be set quite dim,and it looks dark enough that I can use it for night reading.

Format support includes Epub and PDF and it does support Adobe DE DRM. It has 6 font sizes, bookmarks, and you can play background music while reading. You can also set the type and background to any of 6 different colors, so if you wanted the traditional white text on black background of night reading mode you could do it.

I have to say that this is a lot better than I was expecting. It was less than $50, so my expectations were quite low. The ER-701 far exceeded them.This is definitely one of those cheap ereaders that break the stereotype. I’m looking forward to posting a review.

Specs

  • 7″ (800×480) screen
  • 1.5GB Flash Storage
  • microSD card slot
  • speaker
  • headphone jack
  • Ebook formats: Epub, PDF
  • Video & Audio formats:  not stated

Review: Nextbook Next7

09.10.2011 5 Comments

The Nextbook Next7 is the latest tablet from a relatively young company by the name of E-Fun. They first showed up last fall with a couple cheap tablets/ereaders, and over the past year they have released a number of different Android tablets – each a slight improvement over the last.

E-Fun calls the Next7 their premium tablet, and with good reason. It is a well-finished gadget with a premium feel to the design. But with a retail of $300, it also has a price pretty close to that of a premium tablet.

The Nex7 is based on a 7″ (800×480) capacitive touchscreen and it is running Android v2.3 Gingerbread on a 1GHz Cortex-A8 single core CPU. it has Wifi, a g-sensor, 3GB of Flash storage, and a SD card slot,. But unlike a true premium tablet, the Next7 lacks  Bluetooth, cameras, a microphone, or anything other than the basic hardware of a tablet.

But it is also  solidly made and quite pretty. The Next7 has a glossy front and back, with the rear edges rounded into a smooth curve. The front of the tablet is smooth slab like surface with the 4 standard Android buttons below the screen (search, home, menu, back). There are no buttons on the sides, top, or front of the Next7. The only button on the tablet is the power button, and it’s on the lower edge with the power jack, SD card slot, headphone jack, and USB port.

The touchscreen was very responsive, and I had no missed taps or laggy responses. The image quality was also quite high for a budget tablet.

Video & Audio

The video player was nice, and it offered a number of different zoom options to fit the various video aspects (4:3, 16:9, etc).  Like I have come to expect with this tablet, there were no dropped frames, laggy sound, or artifacts on the screen.

The sound quality was generally good. I tried my test video on Youtube, and the test word came through just fine. BTW, the Youtube clips I loaded in the browser were played in the same video player as other videos.

Apps & Games

The Next7 ships with the usual apps, including a file manager, video and audio players, email, web browser, and so one. It also comes with the SlideMe App store, E-Fun’s own reading app, and it comes with the Kobo Android app. I’ll cover the reading apps in a later part of the post.

First, I had no trouble installing the Amazon Appstore, the Kindle app, or any other apps.

I also tested the Next7 with Angry Birds, which is my usual test app.  It ran quite well, and the performance was better than most budget apps I’ve tried. In fact, the Next7 performed a lot better than I was expecting based on the 1GHz CPU. The animation in Angry birds was smoother and the load time and response rate were better than I expected.

Reading

The Next7 ships with the same reading app as the previous Nextbook tablets. It also comes with the Kobo app, but that’s not enabled as the default unfortunately.

E-Fun’s reading app supports Adobe DE DRM, and it reads Epub and PDF. It’s workable, and it has a nice minimum set of features ( 5 font sizes, TOC support, bookmarks). But it also a faux page curl, and I hate that. The page curl also slows down the turning the page, which is a problem. PDF support is okay, but the app only supports 5 zoom levels and does not reflow the PDF. A standard 8.5×11 PDF is readable on the 1.25 zoom setting. You can also zoom in closer and then swipe your way around the screen. The zoom will persist after you turn the page.

The Kobo app is quite nice, but I unfortunately had trouble getting the Next7 to open my personal ebooks with this app and not E-Fun’s. That pretty much means that I could only read ebooks I bought from Kobo. But it had a lot of features, though, including a night reading mode, both serif and san-serif fonts, a slider bar of font sizes annotation, and a special menu just for the highlights and notes.

Conclusion

The Next7 has a nicer build quality, better responsiveness, and an over all better vibe than most tablets in its price range. Unfortunately ffor the Next7, the Kindle Fire ships next month with better specs and a cheaper price.

Still, this is a nice tablet.

Specs

  • 7″ 800×600
  • 1Ghz CPU
  • 3GB Flash storage
  • SD card slot
  • WiFi
  • Speaker, headphone jack
  • g-sensor
  • Power button
  • Dimensions: 7.5″ x 5″ x 1/2″

 

Introducing Booki.sh – a new way to read Epub in your (Kindle) browser

14.10.2010 5 Comments

A few weeks back I posted a video that showed an Epub file being read on the Kindle. I just got an email and that Epub reader is now ready.

It’s called Booki.sh, and I love it. It works on your Kindle (it might not work on the K2 or K1), but it also works on just about every modern browser. It reads Epub and Zhook (a form of HTML5) files. BTW, this is the second browser based Epub reader from Inventive Labs, an Australian developer. The first was Monocle, and it was much simpler.

It’s great. I like it because it’s cross platform (apps are _so_ 2010). But I also like it becuase of the formatting options. Booki.sh has 3 line space options, 5 font sizes, justification, 3 font choices, and it has a night reading mode.

The fact it uses pagination is also a plus. You don’t scroll to see more content; instead you turn the page. It’s a must have feature, IMO; any app that lacks it is incomplete.

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