Touch Kobo Touch Review

[rahulm]

Originally Posted by witeowl

The Bebook Neo uses WACOM. Nothing I have found suggests that the Sony device uses WACOM, and the stylus which came with my Sony definitely is not a WACOM stylus.

Which is a touchscreen layer that is under the screen.

I never said Sony's x50 are WACOM screens. They just weren't under the display, if they were they wouldn't have had the fuzziness.

[witeowl]

Sorry, I edited as you posted, so I'll repeat it here: I stand by my original point: If my knitting needle works on an IR eReader, a stylus from any other device should work just as well.

Put a fork in me; I'm done. Come back with a source that says that Sony is using anything beyond IR, and I'll happily admit that I'm wrong. In the meantime, I'm going to go reread this article.

[taming]

While you all are talking about the Sony, my point was i have a capacitive stylus that I use on my capacitive phone and it does double duty on the Touch. The fat round ball makes aiming at keys, arrows, etc more likely to get the sweet spot than the small end of the the palm stylus, and it definitely is better if you want to do a swipe. You can turn a page with anything. A bad stab at the screen has, at least for me, resulted in having to double tap and if that is done in ways the reader doesn't like, you can get a freeze.

[Toastedpine]

The integration of this technology brought on a list of extras that you can do on your BeBook. First of all we want to clarify that although this is touch screen, you do have to use the pen to take advantage of the touch abilities. Your finger won’t work.

Source: http://ebook-reader-review.toptenrev...eo-review.html

Sony used to have a resistive touch screen on top, then they switched to the IR. As far as I know, Sony never put a sensors underneath the ebook reader screen, which makes sense considering putting a semi-stiff layer on top of a resistive layer would mess with its accuracy pretty badly, and a capacitive screen wouldn't work for the same reason why it doesn't work when you use regular gloves on your ipad.

Wacom's technology would work underneath a screen, but it won't sense your fingers.
Here's an article explaining how a Wacom tablet senses the pen:

http://www.tablet4u.co.uk/techinfo.html

I wouldn't blame anyone for getting the tech confused. Sophisticated sensors that we play with today aren't, well, simple. I had to get an engineer friend to explain the difference to me before I could even tell them apart. Forget about the math and theory that goes into making them work. =_=;;

[baronrus]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/23023...ncessions.html

http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/06/13...touch-edition/

Here is a couple of new review

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by baronrus

http://www.pcworld.com/article/23023...ncessions.html

http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/06/13...touch-edition/

Here is a couple of new review

Thanks for posting. Crunchgear said in their review that the Kobo supports:

ePub and PDF (and unofficially CBZ, CBR, rtf, HTML, and txt)

This is the first I've heard about cbz, cbr, rtf, html and txt being supported on the device. Is this native support? Has anyone tried these out?

[baronrus]

I read also that it suports mobi

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by dmacmart

Aha! Yes it is the way he's holding it. As he was tapping with his right thumb, his left thumb was slightly over the edge of the bezel and probably blocking the IR receiver on the other side of the screen.(?) Anyway - move left thumb, page turns.
---------------------
EDIT: No maybe that's not the whole of it - he is still having trouble with page turns using a huge font size. He dropped it by one and it seems OK now. But I have to add, I changed pages like 50 times in a row by tapping, no problem.

I find that if my hands are really dry i have trouble with touch screens from the kobo to the iphone. So i use a small amount of hand cream now it seems to have helped a lot. Dont know if that is the issue or not but it is a suggestion, you can try it and see.

Good luck
jack

[MechR]

Originally Posted by Latinandgreek

Thanks for posting. Crunchgear said in their review that the Kobo supports:

ePub and PDF (and unofficially CBZ, CBR, rtf, HTML, and txt)

This is the first I've heard about cbz, cbr, rtf, html and txt being supported on the device. Is this native support? Has anyone tried these out?

Can't speak for the Touch, but on the Wifi model...

CBZ/CBR: Support is native. The files show up in the Documents section. Images are auto-fit/oriented to make the most of the screen. No manual zooming/rotating. (Hopefully on the Touch it uses something more like the PDF UI. Anyone tried it yet?)
HTML: It's weird; What's displayed is neither raw code nor properly-formatted webpage. Again, this might be improved on the Touch.
TXT: Some dash characters don't show up, but otherwise it works AFAICT.

[Donnageddon]

Originally Posted by rahulm

I don't have a source my earlier comment. Perhaps it isn't a layer underneath the screen which detects a stylus or stylus-like object, but Sony's definitely done something different than other readers using the IR sensors.

Facepalm

[charleski]

Originally Posted by Tomac10000

- Font rendering and choices are nowhere near as legible as text found on the Kindle 3. It doesn't matter that the new Kobo Touch and the Kindle 3 share the same E Ink Pearl tech. Each character does not render completely black, which also interrupts flow. Additionally, some lines of text appear darker compared to others on the same page.
...
- Side-loaded ebooks: not searchable; words cannot be highlighted; and the dictionary cannot be utilized. The Kindle 3 does not have these issues.

Since Kobo have said they'll offer an update to allow the refresh delay to be adjusted, these are the two major issues that concern me.

Changes in text colour over the page might be related to the lack of a full refresh, and comparing the fonts to something like a Kindle would mean switching to Avenir since the Kindle's (rather ugly) version of Caecilia is purposely designed to render as black as possible. The greatest advantage of proper (i.e. non-Apple) ePub is that it is capable of rendering arbitrary fonts. I'm not a great fan of hinting, since the entire purpose of it is to distort the font to fit the pixel grid, and vectors designed for square pixels on an LCD screen wouldn't be entirely appropriate for eInk anyway.

It would be nice to see some pictures of what both fonts look like in practice, though.

The lack of highlighting on side-loaded books is just silly (I couldn't care about the dictionary) - that removes one of the major advantages of a touch screen.

[Jar Jar Binks]

Is there an adjustment for contrast and such under the font sizes. Sony has settings that you can make the font darker and the Page lighter. I just wonder if Kobo Touch might have such a thing and maybe this would remedy the Ghosting although I am not quite sure what it is. /\0/\ just thought it might be something to check. Planning to pick one up for my Mom and later one for my Dad, but my store doesn't even have a demo yet.
Jar Jar Binks