[frostschutz]

A lot of Kobo users mod the hell out of their devices. A lot of mods that are available for Kobo could not exist in this fashion if it were not for the user-replaceable SD card. With internal SD card no matter what you do you can recover... with soldered on internal memory your device is dead after you take a single wrong step.

With lots of modding comes bricking (in this case temporary)... and lots of people already opened their devices and asked for SD card image before learning about alternative reset methods like tapping the screen corners on the H2O.

With your dead microsd card you have incredibly bad luck although this should be covered by warranty... unless you modded in some way that causes lots of writes?

If possible I never want to go back to a device with soldered memory, I bricked one of my iriver Story HD - using an official firmware image too (they released incremental updates, if you used the wrong file end of story). Also that device would brick if you put books with too long filenames on... only workaround to that was to put all books on the external sd card instead.

All readers firmwares are buggy to some extent, Kobo is no exception. Without mods this line of device would be a lot less popular than it is now. And SD cards are modders best friends.