[9littlebees]

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

Oh goodie, indeed it does sound like your eyes are as sensitive as mine. I hate reading on LCD screens too. I'll choose to trust your judgment then Thanks

Ugh! Well then you get an extra big fat thank you, for giving us all the rest of your precious free time!

You're very welcome!

Originally Posted by dura

That's what interests me most too; how well does it really function as a night time reader?
I'm thinking of buying one for on the nightstand.

The main time I read physical books is at night, in bed, as I am so busy during the day and evenings, so my usage would be probably fairly similar to yours.

Originally Posted by Nightyume

Yay! My first post here ^_^

Welcome!

Okay, now that I've said that...

First of all I'd like to say that your review seems quite well thought out. Secondly I'd like to say that the focus on the reading like as requested above is great (as you seem to concur). Personally I don't mind reading on LCDs during the day but at night they are way too bright, even on the lowest setting (and I've never really enjoyed them for ebooks). But also the light is one of the few things really differentiating things about the glo compared to the Touch (the other two being the higher contrast and higher res screen and the faster processor).

I stare at LCD monitors all the time for work and for two of my major hobbies (programming and digital photography), plus I am often using my Android phone for the usual texting/emailing/random smartphoning, so the appeal of an ink reader is quite high. As I mentioned earlier, the only time I really have to read normally is at night in bed, so the innovation of built in lighting to an ereader is a huge pus for me, and the main reason I decided to buy one.

I'd like to mention two things which I think might be of interest to many (even if they don't realize it).

One is the font weights. With the new firmware among all the things one can do is change the weight of the font to make it lighter and darker. It might be interesting to see screenshot of what the font looks like at its lightest and heaviest weight.

Font weight is a big element of readability and I was planning on testing this quite thoroughly, but obviously forgot to implicitly mention it on my list, so I'll do that now. Also, on the subject of screenshots, I am a semi-pro photographer and I plan on providing an absolute shedload of pictures to go along with my review. I may also post some videos where relevant.

For anyone interested, my photography website is fotokay.net.

You mentioned looking into the dictionaries. I would like to suggest, if possible, testing support for non-English alphabets. This is important for people who read in more than one language but also for foreign words/names which can appear in English texts. Reading Ovid's Metamorphoses on my tablet and phone is annoying whenever they mention names in the original alphabet as then some of those characters show up as those annoying squares. Personally for the sake of simplicity I would suggest testing with French as then that covers at least three kinds of accents ó ô ò, as well as the ç which I think covers the differences of most dominant romance languages (though there's also the ü accent, not to mention the ñ from Spanish). I'm also curious as to support for Asian languages when one thinks of Kobo's acquisition.

Personally the languages that most matter to me are Spanish, Catalan, and Japanese when it comes to secondary language support on the Kobo but I am planning on buying it anyway so don't focus on my needs as I'll find out for myself just how good or bad said support is. I just thought it could be of interest for others.

Again, these are things I am planning on addressing. My girlfriend is German and I speak the language at an intermediate level, so displaying non-English characters (umlaut, esszet, grav, circumflex, etc) is one big element I plan on looking into. I will ensure that I look at all the supported languages and will endeavour to find an ebook in the relevant language to test whether the script is displayed correctly. I can't stress supported enough, though. If Kobo do not support a non-Latin alphabet (i.e. Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese), then I will obviously not be able to test it. I'll be providing a full list of supported and availabe languages in the review, naturally, as well as commenting on how much space they take up on that 1GB system partition (if I can figure out where they're stored!).

Also if the supported formats are mentioned in the manual it could he good to mention that as they are mysteriously missing from the specs page despite being mentioned in the mini's and arc's pages, not to mention previous gen readers. Or maybe only mention it if there's a difference when compared to the mini's format support.

As mentioned in a previous post, although not displayed on the kobo website, a bit of digging on the interwebs turns up a Kobo Glo factsheet, which provides data for the following supported formats:

EPUB, PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RFT, CBZ, CBR.

Oh, one more comment. You mentioned that you would be testing to see if notes can be exported. It supposedly isn't possible to do so initially but is planned for future firmware update some time after its release (I haven't the foggiest as to when that would be). Just thought I'd mention it. Though it would he interesting to see if they can be conserved when transferring the book to a different device (be it another ereader or to kobo's app on pc or mobile devices).

I appreciate this probably won't be supported initially. As suggested in the first reply, I'll be providing updates to the review when things are fixed, so I'll provide an update on note exporting once it has been patched in. The point in my list is more of a holding point and to ensure I mention that it is being planned in future, if it isn't provided from the outset.

I'll add a point in about syncing notes with the book to another device, but I believe that if this is supported, it would only be supported on official kepubs and not on sideloaded ebooks, as only kepubs are synced between devices. Fear not, I'll look into it.