Touch Kobo Touch Firmware 2.0

[Peakcrew]

Originally Posted by Splicer

hi Peakcrew,

My wireless is typically off as I realize that can indeed 'eat-up' quite a lot of energy especially in case of bad connection .. so that isn't the problem.
I'm wondering if there's some other activity going on in the background that not only drains the battery but also renders the touchscreen unresponsive after a while. Note that as the home-button still reacts and actually takes me to the home-screen, the device isn't locking up during the sleep, its just the touchscreen that doesn't respond to touching after a >30 min. or so sleep.

Cheers,
Hans

Thanks, Hans - I hope you didn't mind the comment about wifi. I have just found in the past that some folks don't realise how much wifi can suck those electrons up!

I note RJCroy seems to have the same problem. I have been specifically monitoring battery use following an earlier post, and have found that mine (updated 2.1.1 on Monday) seems to be using slightly more power than before, though not to the extent of 25-30% overnight - more like 15%. Like you, I leave mine on Sleep, because it seems to use quite a lot less power than rebooting from Off every day.

I also seem to be experiencing delays in things that I didn't experience with 2.0.1, as if the processor is struggling, though the screen-response isn't one of them. Going from highlight to Annotations and back has slowed down by at least a factor of 2, and changing font settings is horribly slow - over a minute to change font size yesterday.

It is as if improving the page-turn time (which 2.1.1 has definitely done) has come at the price of slowing down/stopping other things.

Out of interest, roughly how big are the sections in the books you are having difficulty with?

[rjcroy]

Originally Posted by Peakcrew

...
I note RJCroy seems to have the same problem. I have been specifically monitoring battery use following an earlier post, and have found that mine (updated 2.1.1 on Monday) seems to be using slightly more power than before, though not to the extent of 25-30% overnight - more like 15%. Like you, I leave mine on Sleep, because it seems to use quite a lot less power than rebooting from Off every day.
...

I find it interesting that you say that using Sleep mode uses less power overall than rebooting each read. It had me wondering too.

I have been struck by the extremely impressive battery performance of my wife's Sony PRS-T1 (Japanese firmware). She has been using it for 3 months, with relatively light use (started the second book recently). But during those 3 months it has only needed to be charged 3 times! Or is that 2? It's so rare I forget.

And what surprised me about the Sony PRS-T1 is that you can't change the sleep/power settings. It has fixed settings.
1. Go to sleep after 30 mins
2. Power Off after 3 days!

That almost suggests Sony's engineers know just what you suspect @Peakcrew.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by rjcroy

I find it interesting that you say that using Sleep mode uses less power overall than rebooting each read. It had me wondering too.

This has started me wondering why I have my Kobo Touch set to power off at all. I used to have an Astak reader, and never powered it off. Batteries lasted forever too.

I can't remember why, but I have a suspicion an earlier version of Kobo firmware worked better for me with regular reboots. Hence I set it to power down after 30 minutes, forcing it to reboot before nearly every reading session.

I just changed it to never power down - and just go to sleep after 15 minutes. It will be interesting to see how it goes w.r.t battery usage and also stability.

[Peakcrew]

Originally Posted by rjcroy

I have been struck by the extremely impressive battery performance of my wife's Sony PRS-T1 (Japanese firmware). She has been using it for 3 months, with relatively light use (started the second book recently). But during those 3 months it has only needed to be charged 3 times! Or is that 2? It's so rare I forget.

And what surprised me about the Sony PRS-T1 is that you can't change the sleep/power settings. It has fixed settings.
1. Go to sleep after 30 mins
2. Power Off after 3 days!

That almost suggests Sony's engineers know just what you suspect @Peakcrew.

That's impressive! Even allowing for the fact that Sony might have the inside track on battery technology (I think they have a battery manufacturing arm), that is good.

There will always be a difference between booting from off and rousing from sleep, because the reboot requires examining the database etc and doing any updating. However, the KT does seem to have a marked difference - 1-2 days shorter battery life switching off every night and rebooting the next day (never recharging at less than 25% on the meter).

The KT's power use seems to be worse than the Jetbook I had, and that had a TFT screen, which uses more power than e-ink.

[DrNefario]

I never power the KT off (or my Kindle, for that matter). I'm not sure I even knew I could.

[Peakcrew]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

I never power the KT off (or my Kindle, for that matter). I'm not sure I even knew I could.

Interesting. What battery-life do you get?

[Splicer]

Originally Posted by Peakcrew

Thanks, Hans - I hope you didn't mind the comment about wifi. I have just found in the past that some folks don't realise how much wifi can suck those electrons up!

I note RJCroy seems to have the same problem. I have been specifically monitoring battery use following an earlier post, and have found that mine (updated 2.1.1 on Monday) seems to be using slightly more power than before, though not to the extent of 25-30% overnight - more like 15%. Like you, I leave mine on Sleep, because it seems to use quite a lot less power than rebooting from Off every day.

I also seem to be experiencing delays in things that I didn't experience with 2.0.1, as if the processor is struggling, though the screen-response isn't one of them. Going from highlight to Annotations and back has slowed down by at least a factor of 2, and changing font settings is horribly slow - over a minute to change font size yesterday.

It is as if improving the page-turn time (which 2.1.1 has definitely done) has come at the price of slowing down/stopping other things.

Out of interest, roughly how big are the sections in the books you are having difficulty with?

Hi Peakcrew,

Don't think my problem is related to chapter-size as it also 'freezes' during sleep when I'm not reading a book (i.e. at the home-page) .. of course the last book is still loaded in memory and in this case its a side-loaded epub with modest chapters (about 15 pages/chapter). This morning I bought another kobo-touch for my sister-in-law and that one doesn't seem to have the sleep-issue, so I returned mine to the shop also and exchanged it for a brand-new one which I immediately upgraded to 2.1.1 .. its now sleeping for the first time .. I'll let you guys know if it comes back alive OK (i.e. with responsive touch-screen) after its first nap .. fingers crossed !

W.r.t. power-usage, I would suspect that when powered-off the battery-use should be next to zero (like in the shop, these things must be there for weeks/months and all three I had over the past week all where at 50% power when booting-them up the first time ..)

Thanks for all good comments and 'responsiveness' so far !

Cheers,
Hans

[Peakcrew]

Originally Posted by Splicer

Hi Peakcrew,

Don't think my problem is related to chapter-size as it also 'freezes' during sleep when I'm not reading a book (i.e. at the home-page) .. of course the last book is still loaded in memory and in this case its a side-loaded epub with modest chapters (about 15 pages/chapter).

Ah, well - it was worth a try! If you look around, there are a few of us trying to get to the bottom of the odd behaviour of KTs, hence the questions.

Originally Posted by Splicer

This morning I bought another kobo-touch for my sister-in-law and that one doesn't seem to have the sleep-issue, so I returned mine to the shop also and exchanged it for a brand-new one which I immediately upgraded to 2.1.1 .. its now sleeping for the first time .. I'll let you guys know if it comes back alive OK (i.e. with responsive touch-screen) after its first nap .. fingers crossed !

Good luck! Out of interest, is your sister-in-law's KT on 2.1.1 or an earlier version?

Originally Posted by Splicer

W.r.t. power-usage, I would suspect that when powered-off the battery-use should be next to zero (like in the shop, these things must be there for weeks/months and all three I had over the past week all where at 50% power when booting-them up the first time ..)

Yes - as I understand it, e-ink devices don't draw any power when off, even though something is on the screen.

Originally Posted by Splicer

Thanks for all good comments and 'responsiveness' so far !

Just wait until the Australians wake up!

[PeterT]

@Splicer: I wonder if you are using an SD card? My experience when I have tried one is that my Touch never goes to sleep; instead when it does enter sleep, 3 tp 4 seconds later it wakes up again...

[Peakcrew]

Originally Posted by PeterT

@Splicer: I wonder if you are using an SD card? My experience when I have tried one is that my Touch never goes to sleep; instead when it does enter sleep, 3 tp 4 seconds later it wakes up again...

That's interesting. I have an SD card in mine (with only a couple of books on at the moment), and I have had no problems with powering off, either timed or on the switch (when I was asked to switch it off by the cabin-crew on the landing approach last week).

[Splicer]

Originally Posted by PeterT

@Splicer: I wonder if you are using an SD card? My experience when I have tried one is that my Touch never goes to sleep; instead when it does enter sleep, 3 tp 4 seconds later it wakes up again...

Hi Peter,

I wasn't (yet) using an SD-card when experiencing the sleep/wake/non-touch-responsiveness issues, so that can't be the issue.

W.r.t. the version of the today obtained new Kobo's, they where all automatically upgraded to 2.0.0 by the Kobo-desktop app, but right before that installation finished, I replaced the 'image' to 2.0.1. So the 'official' release apparently still is the 2.0.0 version of early July.

The factory-version of my initial Kobo was I think 1.9.16 as that showed up in the 'version' file (in .kobo directory) following a factory reset:
N905B27316205,2.6.35.3,1.9.16,2.6.35.3,2.6.35.3,00 000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000310

Cheers,
Hans

[Splicer]

Hey guys,

Something performance related: earlier this week (right after I bought my first Kobo), I picked-up on the thread of 'kobofying' epubs (i.e. creating a .kepub.epub file out of an epub inclusive removing 'div' annotations that would spoil the adding of 'span' annotations to the xml that allow the kobo to remember at what page you where at) for 2 reasons: 1) changing pages was very slow with 2.0.0 whilst when using the kepub renderer it was fast and 2) many of my epubs where defined in such a way that they don't react on 'margin-settings' from the kobo-menu whereas with the 'kepub'ed' versions they DO react to margin-settings ..

I came a long way in creating a linux script that would make the changes (thankfully re-using the python/beautifulsoup script that was provided on the forum before) yet since 2.1.1 is available the speed isn't an issue anymore. The difficulty is in creating something thats generic enough to 'understand' the variations (one could also call it 'a mess') in how epubs are structured w.r.t. chapter-naming, split-file-naming, html-directory) etc. so came to the conclusion that this probably wouldn't make it into a flawless automated process .. so I wonder if it makes sense to continue down that path ..

Now my question is about the margin-issue with epubs .. I quickly checked both Sigil and Callibre for options to change margins throughout an ebook but couldn't find it.
Not being an epub/html expert, I expect that there's probably some margin-settings in some epub's that make them 'insensitive' for Kobo's margin-changes from the menu .. but could use some advice/help to tackle this issue (as when solved, I would be happy enough with 'epubs' and dont go after 'kepubbifying' anymore.

Thanks in advance,

Cheers,
hans

[WS64]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Now, with FW 2.0.0, this changed. Basically any change to the book caused it to be deleted. FW 2.0.2 is better. It still deletes the book unders some circumstances, but fixing spelling and grammar seems to be OK. I'm disappointed to hear that FW 2.1.1 is a back step for this. Hopefully that will get sorted when we get an official firmware update.

I cannot confirm that, for neither 2.0 nor 2.1.
When I do changes to a book and put it back to the Kobo on both 2.0 and 2.1 the Kobo will still know the old TOC, all annotations and the location within the book, no metadata get updated at all.
I need to delete the book on the PC, boot the Kobo, connect again, put it back to the Kobo to get a fresh version of the book.

PS, all my books are on the SD card, maybe that makes a difference...

[ageinghoody]

Originally Posted by MDK

• Revamped home screen makes finding books easier
• Pin books to a Wishlist so you can buy them later
• Create custom book shelves
• Get personalized book recommendations
• Find books similar to the ones in your library
...

For me these changes are simply not improvements.

I found a use for the carousel and have the Shortlist on my Homepage. I just have my library books on it to remind me which books need reading to a "deadline".

I also like the clock where it is.

I'd have thought that personalised recommendations would already have been similar to the ones in your library, otherwise why are they recommended for me?

As for a wishlist, do me a favour, there is already far too much marketing by Kobo, without me encouraging them.

Don't think I've ever changed a font and I'm perfectly happy with the current legibility.

The shelves might be useful, but I rarely have more than a dozen books on the device at any one time, so the other changes for the worse outweigh that possible change for the better.

All in all, I'll stick with my current firmware.

Now an update that let me opt out of recommendations, that would be useful.

I know that Kobo's business is to sell books, and that's fair enough.

However, these days I just won't connect my KT to Kobo's website, because I don't want it cluttering up with these worthless adverts. Or in case it updates something I don't want it to (actually, I never "sync" any device anyway, it invariably does more harm than good!).

So Kobo's marketing practice actually deters me from buying from them!

[Jaden]

I did a "test" some time ago and here's what I found out (about my Kobo's battery life):

WiFi was off in all 3 "tests" and I only read ePubs.

1.
sleep: 15 minutes
power off: never
firmware 1.9.17

ca. battery life: 2700 page turns in 12 days

2.
sleep: manually every time when putting the Kobo away
power off: 1 hour
firmware 1.9.16

ca. battery life: 4200 page turns in 24 days

3.
sleep: 5 minutes
power off: 10 minutes
firmware 1.9.17

ca. battery life: 4350 page turns in 15 days

So for me, powering off the Kobo and rebooting it when needed (was about 3 times a day) resulted in a far longer battery life (more page turns).

Don't know about firmware 2.1.1 yet (of course, not enough time to test ).