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As taming said this release seems to be targeted at bringing the firmware close to the WiFi version. It is pretty close and in some cases probably has a couple of extra features.
What that means, is that some of the often requested features did not make it. While that may be disappointing and might look to be a small change, it was in fact a huge changed.
The biggest part of it was replacing the sqlite database books with real epubs. That means, that as with the wifi version images are fully supported in the books. I have a couple of books that have graphic letter as the first character of a chapter and they look great.
This also had the biggest impact on performance. In its initial release chapter changing speed and book opening speed for kepubs (the new desktop supported format) was, quite frankly, horrible. However, normal ePubs opened quickly. In addition, changing the font size was slow to the point of maddening.
The Kobo developers released an update a week or two ago that really improved the performance. The time to open a book and change a chapter is still a little faster on the original firmware but not by much. The page turn speed feels faster than on the original. Poorly formatted books with large chapters were really bad but in this release they display pages are they are still formating them in the background. That approach works well.
Being able to read while charging is nice and the latest feature of giving the user the choice as to whether to auto power off should please almost everyone.
The change from the old format also means that a 15 page chapter in the original (at the smallest font) is probably a couple of pages shorter in the new version.
The dictionary is a nice feature I guess. I simply pretend I know what all words mean and carry on. The reason given for why it only supports the kobo desktop loaded books as to do with the parser that display the books. It uses their own parser instead of the Adobe parser. That is all I know...
Finally, the news papers and magazines. With all the clamour caused by the missed deadlines on this one I assume Kobo will be racking up the profits from a bunch of new subscriptions ;-) (Thats a joke please don't reply with "That not the point..."). The magazines are usable and work like they do on the WiFi version.
If all I had was the Kobo original to read them on I don't know whether I would subscribe. It is readable, but plugging in to USB to get the latest version would be a hassle for me. I get between 2 and 4 hours of downtime a day depending on whether I go to bed at 10 or 12. The paper is already old news by then.
Newspapers really shine on the kobo iPad app. I have neither the time nor the money to continue but I have enjoyed reading the New York times every couple of days.
All in all a solid release and Kobo really listened to our feed back during the multiple beta releases. The issues we found were addressed (or the new functionality was explained). I was impressed that a number of Kobo people responded to questions or issues even on evenings and weekends.
I provided Taming with instructions for creating a properly formatted SD card that she or I will post once the links to the SD card zip goes up. It is not for the faint of heart but if you can follow a recipe you can probably follow the directions.
For Windows users it involves downloading Ubuntu Linux and UNetbootin and making a bootable USB drive to start. If none of that makes sense, the instructions may scar you ;-)
Beta testing was interesting and a fair amount of work.
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