Kobo Touch standalone with WiFI

[dajames]

I've just bought a Touch as a reader for free eBooks. I have no interest in commercial or DRM protected books, I just want to be able to have something to read with me, without carrying heavy dead trees ... and there are plenty of "Classics" that are out of copyright.

The Touch appears as a USB drive, and I can copy eBooks onto it without any difficulty. I've also managed to update the firmware by copying a new version into the .kobo directory (as described elsewhere in these forums) and that worked well. What I can't find out how to do is to set up wifi to connect to my home network (I don't want to connect to Kobo's store).

The Touch has a built-in browser, and it would be nice to be able to use that (I'm not expecting great things, but it'd be useful on occasion) ... if I can just set up wifi.

The accepted wisdom seems to be that one has to connect to the Kobo desktop application at least once to set up the wifi connectivity ... I can see that you might need to do that to set up a Kobo account and to synchronize with the device, but I don't want to do that.

Surely there's an easier (i.e. more direct) way to set up the wifi client itself?

Cheers,
Daniel.

[Zimbu]

You have to do something that requires Wi-Fi access. The easiest thing is to connect to the Kobo store. You don't actually have to set up a Kobo account or anything. You just need to tell the device that you want to browse the store, and it will attempt to connect. Not finding a connection, it will then prompt you to set up the wireless network.

Kind of a pain, but I suspect they did it this way to avoid confusing people who don't know anything about wireless networks, and might not even want to use that function.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by dajames

I've just bought a Touch as a reader for free eBooks. I have no interest in commercial or DRM protected books, I just want to be able to have something to read with me, without carrying heavy dead trees ... and there are plenty of "Classics" that are out of copyright.

The Touch appears as a USB drive, and I can copy eBooks onto it without any difficulty. I've also managed to update the firmware by copying a new version into the .kobo directory (as described elsewhere in these forums) and that worked well. What I can't find out how to do is to set up wifi to connect to my home network (I don't want to connect to Kobo's store).

The Touch has a built-in browser, and it would be nice to be able to use that (I'm not expecting great things, but it'd be useful on occasion) ... if I can just set up wifi.

The accepted wisdom seems to be that one has to connect to the Kobo desktop application at least once to set up the wifi connectivity ... I can see that you might need to do that to set up a Kobo account and to synchronize with the device, but I don't want to do that.

Surely there's an easier (i.e. more direct) way to set up the wifi client itself?

Cheers,
Daniel.

Setting up an account would be the easiest way, but there is a work around by messing around with some files. I just can't remember what thread that's on.

[dajames]

Originally Posted by Zimbu

You have to do something that requires Wi-Fi access. The easiest thing is to connect to the Kobo store ... it will attempt to connect. Not finding a connection, it will then prompt you to set up the wireless network.

It works!

I had tried accessing the built-in browser but that just told me I needed to set up a WiFi connection. It hadn't occurred to me that the store would be different.

I have a dummy "user" record in the SQLite database, so it can't actually connect to the store (perfect!) but I can use the browser for a quick Google or Wikipedia lookup, which is all I wanted.

The browser itself is rather better than I'd hoped. Not as easy to read as it could be at the default zoom level (especially coloured text which comes out grey) but the functionality is there.

Thanks for the tip.

Cheers,
Daniel.