[dirtyvu]

I was able to buy the Kobo for really cheap due to Borders closing. It only cost me $65 out the door. For that price, I couldn't justify going with Kindle. The pros for the Kobo for me was low price, very light, great form factor (love the soft back!), and it is very flexible with regards to book formats (hacker friendly).

But if both the Kobo and the Kindle are about the same price, it's no question I would go for the Kindle. It's much faster. It has a keyboard. The page turning buttons are really well done ergonomically. Sure, I sacrifice flexibility (with Kindle, you do things the Kindle way) but performance is important. It also has a lot of other features besides better performance (MP3 player, web browser, etc).

The Kobo is fine for reading novels because you don't need to flip pages that quickly. But if you want to use your Kobo for school notes or for PDFs or for any technical documents where you have to go between pages quickly, the Kobo is less than ideal.

I do love my Kobo but I know its limits. I did load up my medical school notes onto it so that I can easily read them wherever I am. But if someone came up to me and wanted to swap his Kindle for my Kobo, I would do the swap. But now that I have the Kobo, I plan on keeping it until it dies and has no warranty. It's not so inferior to the Kindle to justify buying a Kindle for replacement.

CAVEATS:
- my only experience with the Kindle is when I play with it at the store. So I've only logged in maybe 15 minutes of hands-on experience. I also only flipped pages in a couple novels with no pictures. So that probably was a big factor.
- I mostly use my Kobo for my school notes which do have a lot of pictures. I did have to break up my notes into smaller segments so that loading and flipping pages was tolerable.
- I have tried loading novels with no pictures to see if Kobo could be as fast as Kindle and it's still noticeably slower. But again, with reading novels, unless you're a speed reader, you don't particularly need fast page turning.