Quote:
Originally Posted by evanft
Screw it, I'll try to offer a run down of the pluses and minuses of the two devices. I have an Aura HD and I've spent enough time with Kindles to get a feel for them.
Kobo Aura H20
+ Big screen
+ More open. Can read EPUB without conversion
+ Water proof
+ More text adjustments available
+ Can sideload your own fonts
+ Expandable storage
+ Light can be turned off completely
+ $20 cheaper than base model Voyage with ads
- Bulkier than Kindle
- Kobo's ecosystem is not as good as Amazon's.
- Infrared touch screen generally doesn't work as well as capacitive
- Battery life in real world is not as good as Kindle
- Slow page turns relative to Kindle
- Large amounts of wasted space without converting books in Calibre and patching the device's firmware
- Screen is recessed, which can create a shadow on the screen
- Kobo software is often buggy
Kindle Voyage
+ Thin and light
+ Screen is flush with bezel
+ Capacitive touch screen
+ Lightning fast page turns
+ Great ecosystem
+ Great customer service
+ Rock-solid firmware
+ Fantastic battery life
- $200 for WiFi ad-supported model
- Limited text customization
- Unknown if hacking will be possible
- Requires conversion in Calibre to read EPUB
- Can't sideload fonts
|
You left out under the Kindle Voyage...
- Larger amounts of wasted screen space without using modified fonts and/or jailbreaks
Amazon's margins are pretty big and the line height for KF8 is also pretty big. So those do total up to a lot of the screen going unused and you cannot fix any of this by the way you code your eBooks. You have to embed a specially modified font to fix the line height and you have to jailbreak to fix the margins and with the Voyage, it is not yet known if it can be jailbroken.
Actually, for the Kindle, I would think the ecosystem would be a - as it's more of a walled garden. If you do not remove DRM from your eBooks, then Kobo has more options where to buy eBooks then the Voyage. And if you live outside of the USA, and have access to a library that has Overdrive, you only get ePub. In the US, yes, you do get Kindle eBooks via Overdrive, but a number of publishers only put out ePub. So still, not all Overdrive eBooks are Voyage compatible. This is a big + for the H2O.
Also, we don't know yet how the battery of the H2O compares to the battery of the Voyage yet as the Voyage is not released and the H2O is not released long enough. So any talk of the battery isn't appropriate yet. You cannot go by past devices.
As for page turns, when comparing the HD to the PW2, the HD has a lot more to have to update because of the higher resolution. You now have to compare like to like given that the Voyage has the same resolution as the H2O.
So please when comparing, only compare what we know. We don't know about the page turn and we don't know about the battery. Amazon uses infrared on the Touch and it works very well. Sony has used infrared on some of it's Readers and it works very well. So please don't say that infrared doesn't work well. It does and it's been proven by Amazon as well as other companies. And another thing, capacitance touch ads another layer to the screen, so given two identical devices, one with capacitance and one with IR, the chances are the one with IR will be clearer even if only slightly so the device with the light and the capacitance touch has two layers on the screen while the IR only has one.
When you fix the things not quite right in your comparison, the H2O comes out on top.