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My Aura One initial impressions.
I've had mine for about 24 hours now. (Ordered in the UK from Kobo). In that time I charged it up, set it up, transferred some books, played with the light settings and did a little reading.
I didn't get the official cover because I did that when I got an Aura HD and didn't like it, it turned what was a quite nice back into an uncomfortable to hold one. I wanted to see how the Aura One felt in my hand "raw" before choosing a 3rd party cover possibly. Anyway it is indeed light to hold though I did find in bed last night that the most comfortable position was with my thumb and forefinger in a kind of L-shape bracing the bottom, but that this only remains comfortable for so long. It's a shame the non-touch borders on the front aren't a tiny bit wider.
The new firmware is disappointing. They've taken away functionality I use (ability to hide non-downloaded books) and not added anything new that I will use AFAICS. But there's an update due so...
With the light off and in daylight/external light the screen is very nice looking. It's crisp and you really get the benefit of the extra resolution. Not a lot to say really but I loaded up my favourite extra fonts and it was nice.
My library uses 3M and Borrow Box so the Overdrive support is irrelevant atm.
Which brings me to the light. Let me separate this into the light as it should be and as it is.
So I noticed straight away that there's a kind of shadowy edge around the screen. Actually when I went back and compared it with my Glo HD I noticed it has the same effect but you don't normally see it because the raised bezel is there and that tricks the eye into thinking it's the shadow from that.
Another annoyance was that there are a couple of bright spots along the bottom where the LEDs seem closer to the edge than the others. It's less noticeable if you hold it flat but if you hold it at an angle looking down it's there.
There's also some 'rainbow-ing' but less than I've seen on some screenshots here.
So those are issues that potentially shouldn't be there.
One of the reasons I bought the Aura One was I was intrigued by the light temperature thing. I use one of those apps on my Android tablet to do the same thing and whilst I'm not sure I 'like' the effect I do feel like it's more soothing to the eyes at night. With the Aura One I was immediately aware that I don't like to read what has become black on orange. Maybe it helps my eyes but it looks ugly. I hadn't really thought this through before buying.
Again comparing with my Glo HD the One is brighter at the same %. I've got it a 2% at the moment and the Glo is at 6% I think.
To be fair I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I don't get on with the lights in ereaders. It either feels like the light is too bright or the contrast is lost. On my Glo HD and Paperwhite 2 I use Koreader with night mode. I may in time end up going back to using a bedside lamp (no partner to annoy).
I haven't noticed any battery issues. I think it charged it up to 90% when I took it off to load books yesterday afternoon. Apart from messing around I used it an hour last night reading continuously and the same this morning. The battery is currently 86%.
I don't know yet whether I'm unhappy enough with the light to send it back. I've seen worse on here and I'm wondering if that's just the state of the technology right now.
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