[astromark]

The battery concerns me. I mentioned issues last week. As it happens I had to reset mine last night - Windows kept chucking up USB errors. I'd put that down to Win10 but my work laptop, a Win7 machine, did the same.

By the time I'd done the reset, the restore, and copied some books back it was up to 100% again. That was about midnight. I read for about 20 minutes in bed. This morning at 7.30 am it was at about 80%.

After a train journey and some reading tonight - a total of, at most, 2 hours' reading, I'm now at 47%.

That's a devastatingly poor battery life. Software issues or not, this is a factory-reset device used mostly in daylight with no backlighting. This suggests two, at most three, days practical use: maybe five or six hours of reading.

I love the screen size and the waterproofing; I appreciate the benefits of the adaptive backlight and night reading modes, but a device with a weak battery is of no use whatsoever. I adore Pocket integration (that's a huge plus) and wish they'd bring back some of the games (sudoku, anyone, surely bookworms don't mind a blast of sudoku?) but a flat ereader is a dead ereader.

This fashion for lighter, slimmer devices at the expense of shorter, deader batteries really has to come to an end.

That, combined with a failure to mount in Windows necessitating a factory reset, means I've lost faith in this particular gadget right now. It will probably get better: I love my Glo HD but I didn't get mine til it was a mature device. The same may - hopefully, will - apply to the Aura One.

With regret I'll return to the smaller screen. It lacks the nicer newer stuff but at least it will probably have charge in the morning.