Well, after my Sony started to get a bit cranky I looked around for a replacement and settled on a Kobo Aura HD.
Hardware wise, the Kobo is great. However, as a software professional, I feel qualified to declare that the software is a total POS (industry term).
The pain started on booting the device and discovering that I couldn't even start it up without connecting to the internet and creating a Kobo account. Ok, not the end of the world, I suppose. It did mean that all the software got updated to the latest version though.
I sent a few books to the Kobo using Calibre and it looked great. Ok, the book reading software makes the unaccountable decision to leave a large portion of the page blank occasionally, but OK.
So I added a large section of my collection to the Kobo using Calibre; about 1000 books. That went pretty quickly - much quicker than the Sony, so I was quite pleased. Little did I know....
The Kobo sat for the rest of the day 'processing new content'. The rest of the day! What is it doing? And what incompetent wrote this code? The rest of the day!!!!!!!!!!! How can that be acceptable?
So when I added the rest I did it in the evening so that It could process the content overnight. Ridiculous!
So, I decide to read a book. Into the library. And what do I see? Six books to the page. My collection stretches to almost six hundred pages! And no way of scrolling through the library other than one page at a time. Really? One page at a time? I guess my Xena Warrior Princess novelizations aren't going to get read too often then!
Maybe collections will help, then. I use the instructions here to set up Calibre to create them. I deleted all the content on the Kobo so that I could start clean, and sent a few of the books to the Kobo again. Overnight, obviously. I had a look at my collections. Hmmmm. This could work.
So I sent my whole collection to the Kobo. Overnight again. The following morning .............. the Kobo had hung. After much faffing about I decided that the new content processing was taking so long that it was actually flattening the battery before it finished. It would only process the content with the device connected to mains power.
So the collections were really good, right? Nope. I think I have too many collections. Turns out that the collections will only display if you select the menu option, wait for ten minutes, try to turn the thing off until the turn off suceeds then turn it on again. Outstanding stuff, Kobo! You can then see the collections! And what do you see? Ten to a page and the only way that you can page through them is to flick forward one page at a time. Not that again! But I've got sixty pages of them! That's Roger Zelazny not going to get read then.
Ok, I'll have a look at reading CBRs now. I copy a whole load onto an SD card and plug it in. 'Processing New Content'. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Open up the library and pick a CBR. Not the best CBR reader, but not the worst either. Ok. Read another. And another. And I run into the library clunkiness again. So I try the Search functionality instead. That works well - till I want to read the ninth book in the series. And what do I find? I find that the search results show eight to a page - and there's no way to page forward to the ninth result onwards. Really? Really?????
Ok, I can work around this. I'll delete the CBRs that I've read. That stops me trying to re-read stuff too. Ok - I'm actually fine with this. Till it hangs on delete. Turns out the thing hangs on about one delete in six. The only way to get it going again is to reset it with a pin in the reset hole.
I can only assume that the software testing and useability testing was only done with a small number of books on the device. This really isn't good enough, Kobo. Not good enough at all.
