Kobo e-readers have been around for a while but take a back seat to the behemoth from Amazon. Kobo e-readers though are far from their poor cousins and you could easily argue that they are at least the equal of the big dog.
I’ve used both in the last few years and in fact my go to e-reader is a Kobo Sage, which I love for a multitude of reasons.
Now e-ink displays in e-readers have gone colour and we are here for it. Is it essential? Far from it but it sure as hell is great to have.
Kobo sent me the new Libra Colour and the Clara Colour to check out. Read on to hear my thoughts on these new e-readers with their coloured displays.
Libra Colour:
The Libra Colour is the bigger of the two new colour e-readers. The display is a 7-inch E Ink Kaleido 3 display with a 150ppi resolution. Interestingly, the coloured display is half that of the black and white display Libra.
The display is compatible with the Kobo Stylus 2, which is important to have for some of the new coloured functionality. I say important but not essential. You can get by without it but if you will be using the e-reader for marking up etc you will want the stylus for the full experience.
Tapping or swiping the display or clicking one of the buttons on the side is performed to turn the pages. I found a few times that the tap was inconsistent or slow with it either not working, bringing up the progress bar or skipping a page when I tapped twice thinking it hadn’t worked the first time. This didn’t happen all that often though and did not happen using the buttons.
Speaking of the buttons they now have a louder click to them than on the Sage which I did not like considering I am reading before sleeping in bed and am conscious about keeping my wife awake while reading. I would prefer the buttons be silent.
The front light (or backlight, whatever you prefer to call it) is a ComfortLight Pro with allows not just altering of brightness but also the ‘temperature’ (warm or cold) of the display which is very handy at night where a warmer display allows for more relaxation of the eyes.
The storage is 32GB which is enough for a lot of books (can store up to 24,000 eBooks or 150 audiobooks based on 1.3MB per book and audiobook length of 6.5 hours with 28.8MB per hour) but if you stick a few comics on it that space will vanish quickly – although how many do you need on your device at any one time.
The 2,050mAh battery is enough for up to 40 days of battery life (based on 30 minutes of reading per day with the front light at 30% brightness and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off. Nothing I’ve seen in this review has suggested to me otherwise which is great to hear because my Sage battery won’t last a week (there was apparently meant to be an update coming to improve battery life but I haven’t seen that in the last couple years I’ve been using it).
The Libra Colour comes with an IPX8 rating meaning it is “protected against the effects of continuous immersion in water.” The X in it means it has not been tested against dust/solid ingress but water is the main thing for an e-reader with many folks liking to soak in a hot bath and relax while reading on their e-reader.
The Libra Colour is 144.6 x 161 x 8.3 mm which is smaller than my Sage, mostly due to the slightly smaller display. This is not a massive issue as it is still larger than most Kindles that you see around, especially if you have decent eyesight. For me, with my woeful eyesight (without glasses) I do need the text quite large to be able to read properly given that most of my reading is before falling asleep at night, when I do not want to be wearing my glasses. This results in less being able to be visualised on the page so I do need to turn the page more often – *shrug*.
Clara Colour:
The Clara Colour is the smaller of the two new colour e-readers with the design similar to the original Kindle design with no physical page turning buttons and a bigger bezel on the button of the e-reader than those around the sides and top of it.
The display is smaller with just a 6-inch E Ink Kaleido 3 display and the same PPI resolution as that in the Libra Colour.
Although the Clara Colour supports the same file formats as the Libra Colour and has the same type of display as the Libra Colour albeit smaller it DOES NOT support the Kobo Stylus. Interesting choice by Kobo but I dare say they think the display is too small to be marking up on?
The rest of the specs are the same as in the Libra Colour although the battery is slightly smaller at 1500mAh battery with Kobo once again suggesting a full charge will give you over 40 hours of use for basic reading. Once again, I didn’t see any reason to doubt this with it easily handling over 20 hrs of my use with it only just below half. I put this down to me having the brightness up a bit more than usual and playing with the settings and functionality a fair bit.
The Clara Colour is just 112 x 160 x 9.2 mm in size making it quite compact and great for travelling. It is 26 grams lighter than the Libra Colour at 174 grams but to be honest, both are light enough to carry in your bag easily without developing any kind of kyphosis in your spine from the weight.
As mentioned above there were times when tapping the Libra Colour display to turn the pages did nothing and there were times when it reacted so slowly I ended up skipping a page. I’m not entirely sure why this was the case because it was difficult to replicate it when trying to figure out a reason so it was obviously not that much of an issue. The Clara colour display did not have this issue.
The colour marking up with notes etc was incredibly simple, especially when using the Kobo Stylus on the Libra Colour. To highlight words, lines and paragraphs though you do need to tap and hold on a word using your finger rather than the stylus. The Clara Colour does not support marking up, only highlighting.
The colours used for highlighting etc, along with the colours of the display are incredibly subtle and muted compared to that on a smartphone or tablet but that is one of the limitations of an e-ink display (at this stage – never say never).
The displays are easy to read and I love the ability to change the temperature or ‘warmness’ of a display based on time of day and also your preferences.
The UI for the Kobo e-readers has not changed but there are new features added to the UI such as the dark mode which has been added recently but older Kobo e-readers needed an extra step or two to implement it.
Within the settings you can decide which options you wish to use to turn pages, ie. which parts of the screen you will need to tap to move the page forward or back. I always choose the entire bottom half for the page forward direction. The picture with the navigation instructions is misleading though because the bottom centimetre or so doesn’t turn the page but instead activates the page number navigation.
Now, one of the main reasons I love the Kobo is its vast file support. It natively supports 15 file formats – EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR.
It also supports audiobooks BUT ONLY Kobo Audiobooks which is crazy. I tried to put a standard mp3 audiobook file on there, all to no avail. It also means that audiobooks from sources such as OverDrive will not work either.
The other main reason I love Kobo readers is the multitude of ways you can put the books and other files onto your e-reader.
With the more advanced Libra Colour, not only can you drag and drop from your PC but also download from OverDrive, Google Drive, Pocket and Dropbox. The Clara Colour does not support Google Drive or Dropbox though. It is very handy and it makes me wonder why this option is not included on the Clara Colour and given its $260 price tag it really should be.
One software option hidden away inside ‘Beta Features’ is the web browser. It is very simple and can’t do much to be honest but it can be used to search quickly for a book from Goodreads for example. I’m not entirely sure when you would use this all that much given that these days most people have an Internet connected device such as a smartphone or tablet nearby that has a fully functional browser.
Notebooks within the UI of the Kobo Libra Colour allow you to make notes (funny that) on the go and then export them. This is very handy once again. Once again I wonder just who doesn’t have an Internet connected device designed for this sort of thing nearby anyway but I think it’s a great push towards a healthier digital lifestyle.
By that I mean using the tech (e-reader in this case) to read and chill but it also has a few other basic functions to allow you to do some urgent tasks without being over the top and distracting from what you should be doing, relaxing, away from distractions, mindfulness.
Now the advanced notebooks did convert my handwriting into text well, it did not recognise smiley faces so you’d have to insert these as a freehand drawing if you really wanted them in. You do not have the formatting that you’d get in a fully-fledged office program but once again, it’s the basics only for basic things.
Interestingly, it was only during using the notebooks that I noticed any ghosting on the display. As you can see in the pictures below the writing was still ‘there’ after it had been converted to text. I suspect that is a small software tweak needed where it should refresh the display once converting to text but doesn’t.
Unfortunately, the only audiobooks that will play on either Kobo e-reader are those downloaded from the Kobo store which is incredibly disappointing.
Those that you have downloaded from there though will play as designed once you have connected a Bluetooth speaker or headphones to the e-reader. I tested with both a speaker and headphones and they both paired quickly and easily and played the audiobook as expected.
The audiobook interface is super simple as you would expect, similar to that on Audible but it was refreshing for those who like an audiobook on occasion. I just hope that they open it up to audiobooks from other sources too. They haven’t closed off the standard books to those from their store so I am not entirely sure why they have done so for audiobooks.
If you expect the same performance from an e-reader that you get from a half-decent iPad or Android tablet you are simply barking up the wrong tree. The specs of the engine under the hood are actually a MediaTek MT8113T dual-core at 2.0 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM.
The chipset is nowhere near as powerful and the RAM is a lot less too but you do not need much. Most of the time your page is static while you read so there is no real need for a higher performance chipset, that would just negatively affect battery life.
Although I had some issues with turning the pages and there were times it was a bit slow you just need to be patient.
Kobo offers some great stands/covers that you can purchase separately from the e-reader. They offer standard folio covers (SleepCovers) along with some that fold into a stand to help prop up the book while reading it.
There is of course the Kobo Stylus as well. There is a special cover/folio case that has a stylus holder too. For me I think the stylus could be of great value if using the e-reader for marking up, such as reading and making notes on articles, grading papers and editing articles.
The SleepCovers start at $44.95 for the most basic Libra Colour version but add an extra $5 for one that includes a folding stand in its design. Clara Colour SleepCovers start at $44.95. SleepCovers are actually great value and although I’d prefer them to be cheaper the ones with the included stand in the design are incredibly useful.
While the Kobo e-reader is not perfect for this task it is good that the stylus extends the uses of the Kobo Libra Colour meaning you may be able to get away with carrying one less device.
The Kobo Store is Kobo’s version of the Kindle Store but although Kobo doesn’t say just how many books it has we know it has more than 1.5 million, it doesn’t seem to have quite the same coverage that the Amazon Kindle Store does. This is not a huge issue if you know where to buy the book you can relatively easily transfer the book from another device to your Kobo.
As for Kobo Plus I’m still yet to be convinced. Kobo Plus has over 1.5 million eBooks and 150,000 audiobooks but for some reason there are very few of the big-name books or big new releases. While Kindle Unlimited doesn’t either, it does give you the option to buy one for free each month.
For this reason I’m not convinced that Kobo Plus is decent value for your hard earned. You are more likely to get better value out of OverDrive which uses your local library’s online ebooks and is normally fairly extensive.
Kobo Plus Read and Kobo Plus Listen are both $13.99 per month or you can opt for both of these for $16.99 per month. You can get a month free trial though if you sign up so that may be an option for those undecided.
OK. Forever may be a bit of a stretch but Kobo wants to extend the life of your e-reader with a design that allows it to be taken apart – and repaired. They have partnered with iFixit to allow users to buy and replace their own batteries, circuit boards and screen replacements.
The overall goal of this program is to be more environmentally conscious. Not only are the new Kobo e-readers made with recycled plastics and their retail packaging from 100% FSC-certified recycled paper, printed with soy-ink but the tablets themselves should have an extended lifespan due this repairability.
The Kobo Clara Colour is a great little device and it really is a nice little size. Compact and incredibly portable it is a great e-reader, but that is all it is. It is unfortunate that Kobo has gimped the amount of ways to add books to the e-reader as it would have been nice to see Dropbox and Google Drive support for it too.
This e-reader is for those who are either on a budget or only want their e-reader to read books (and listen to audiobooks if you want to get them from the Kobo Store). The black and white version of the Kobo Clarsa is just $20 cheaper than the Clara Colour which is a no-brainer in my opinion. At $259.95 it is still not cheap but one of the cheaper e-readers on our market here in Australia (it is slightly cheaper than the similarly specced Kindle Paperwhite which is black and white only although with a 6.8-inch display instead of 6-inches).
The Kobo Libra Colour though is an e-reader that does it all. It is compatible with the Kobo Stylus 2, it has colour (der), it has support for Google Drive and Dropbox and has physical buttons (and gestures on-display) for navigating. You can browse the web, mark up articles or asssignments etc, make notes in the notebook, read e-books, listen to audiobooks — everything possible in an e-reader.
There really is no equivalent Kindle to the Libra Colour with the Scrobe supporting stylus use but is a massive 10.2-inch display (you may as well buy a tablet at $549), the Oasis is the same size and has physical navigation buttons but doesn’t support stylus use and neither of them are coloured. The Oasis is also $559.
The Libra Colour is the only Libra sold by Kobo these days and at $359.95 it is a great deal. It may be $100 more than the Clara Colour but it can do so much more. It is bigger thanks to the display size and the physical navigation buttons but that can be a good thing rather than a bad thing. If you are looking for an e-reader than can do anything and do not care about using Kindle Books then the Kobo Libra Colour is for you.
Kobo Libra Colour retails for $359.95 AUD, Kobo Clara Colour for $259.95 AUD, and Kobo Clara BW for $239.95 AUD at www.kobo.com/ereaders and select retailers. The Kobo Stylus 2 is currently available and retails for $119.95.
Scott is our resident open technology expert. If you can mod it, or want to use it your way, Scott has probably done it. From Laptops to phones, headphones and game consoles, he’s played with it and wants to see the next generation.
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