MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - First e-reader choice from a picky engineer

ElektroDragon · 02-19-2016, 01:55 AM

Look, here is what happened:

1) First Voyage was a launch unit. It kept rebooting on its own on an almost nightly basis, for absolutely no reason...for months. FW updates didn't help. Really aggravating when reading at night then it rebooted to full brightness on you. After 2 months of this, Amazon replaced it free of charge.

2) Second Voyage was free of the rebooting. But lo and behold, right at the 1 year mark, I go to wake it from sleep, and the darn thing is completely frozen, stuck, dead. The e-ink screen was NOT broken on marred in any way, it had not been dropped or stepped on, etc. It was a perfect picture of the "screensaver". But the unit kept rebooting itself trying to resume. None of the reset procedures worked. The backlight would just flash on and off every minute or so as it tried to start. I tried charging it overnight, it was still stuck in the reboot loop in the morning. In desperation, I MAY have tried to flex the unit. At the time I did not understand anything about e-ink screen fragility, I just wanted the damn screen unstuck. A short while after doing that, I noticed the screen had finally unstuck itself..... into a pattern of corrupt lines along with a partial diagonal line that kind of looked like broken glass. So perhaps I may have been responsible for the screen "breaking" but the Voyage was dead and gone well before this!!

So forget screen fragility, the underlying quality of the electronics and/or software is TRASH on the Kindle Voyage, they are MADE TO BREAK right after warranty.

I'm so happy with the Kobo Glo HD that I bought two to replace both Kindles in the house. And it's NOT just because of perceived hardware quality, the Kobo is much more open and versatile than the tightly controlled locked down Amazon environment. (I ended up returning the Fire HD and Fire TV as well for similar reasons and am proud to be Amazon-free now.)

02-19-2016, 01:55 AM	#30
ElektroDragon Member Posts: 13 Karma: 10 Join Date: Feb 2016 Device: Kobo Glo HD	Look, here is what happened: 1) First Voyage was a launch unit. It kept rebooting on its own on an almost nightly basis, for absolutely no reason...for months. FW updates didn't help. Really aggravating when reading at night then it rebooted to full brightness on you. After 2 months of this, Amazon replaced it free of charge. 2) Second Voyage was free of the rebooting. But lo and behold, right at the 1 year mark, I go to wake it from sleep, and the darn thing is completely frozen, stuck, dead. The e-ink screen was NOT broken on marred in any way, it had not been dropped or stepped on, etc. It was a perfect picture of the "screensaver". But the unit kept rebooting itself trying to resume. None of the reset procedures worked. The backlight would just flash on and off every minute or so as it tried to start. I tried charging it overnight, it was still stuck in the reboot loop in the morning. In desperation, I MAY have tried to flex the unit. At the time I did not understand anything about e-ink screen fragility, I just wanted the damn screen unstuck. A short while after doing that, I noticed the screen had finally unstuck itself..... into a pattern of corrupt lines along with a partial diagonal line that kind of looked like broken glass. So perhaps I may have been responsible for the screen "breaking" but the Voyage was dead and gone well before this!! So forget screen fragility, the underlying quality of the electronics and/or software is TRASH on the Kindle Voyage, they are MADE TO BREAK right after warranty. I'm so happy with the Kobo Glo HD that I bought two to replace both Kindles in the house. And it's NOT just because of perceived hardware quality, the Kobo is much more open and versatile than the tightly controlled locked down Amazon environment. (I ended up returning the Fire HD and Fire TV as well for similar reasons and am proud to be Amazon-free now.)