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I have a Paperwhite and when the Kobo Aura first came out I liked the idea of the flush bezel and I went to their website to order one. I already had a Kobo Mini so I had an account but it refused to accept my order.
I tried everything I could and then I tried to find a way to contact Kobo support and no luck there either. Their support people are very hard to find. I finally emailed them and got no response.
Then after checking every day I found a way to call in an obscure area on their website. It let me leave a message with the promise that they'd call me back, I think within two hours. They did call me 2 days later, finally.
Once I got past that roadblock, and that took over a week, their help person was as helpful as he could be. He couldn't get the order to go through either, even though he and his supervisor tried a number of things. They finally suggested I open a new account and try buying it on that. I did and it worked just fine.
It took 3 weeks to get my Kobo Aura and I wasn't able to find a way to contact them to find out why and there was no tracking information. In fact they never even sent a notice that it had shipped.
I got my Aura and it's not a bad device in most ways but there are a lot of flaws. For one thing, if I hold it by the bottom where the weight of the device forces me to squeeze the base just a little so it won't drop, the page turns. Most irritating. That's a way I like to hold it. But it's small so it isn't hard to grip from the sides and that's what I have to do.
Books in the Kobo store are nearly always at least 15% or 20% higher than at Amazon and double the price isn't that unusual. Probably 30% more is typical. So I bought a couple of books but then decided to buy from Amazon and convert books for it.
The problem with that is that many of the font controls only work well, and some only work at all with books purchased from Kobo. Books from other sources often won't change font sizes or line spacing. Sometimes they will. Mostly they won't. And font weight doesn't have any affect on any of the non-Kobo books.
The screen is decent. Far better than the screen on the Kobo Mini, which isn't bad either. But it's no-where as nice as the screen on my Paperwhite. The lighting isn't as even. The contrast isn't as good. I'm not saying it's a bad screen. It's not. But I'm spoiled by the Paperwhite.
I probably would have returned the Kobo but I didn't want to spend a whole week trying to get through to them again. So I kept it and I use it to loan books to friends and neighbors and I read on my Paperwhite.
My suggestion: if you can't find any way to get a Paperwhite, get a Kobo. But only if you can't get a Paperwhite.
Barry
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