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Battery dead in less than 8 hours.
Picked up a new Kobo Aura One from Best Buy yesterday (they had 3 hidden on a shelf with zero exposure, nobody in the store even knew they were there). The physical hardware is by far the nicest e-reader I have used - great screen, adequate lighting (fine without any lighting on), fast enough if you are patient, PDF's are workable (once again if you are patient), and borrowing a book from the Toronto Public Library actually worked - well, more or less, as it complained with an error at the end of the process yet the book showed up anyway.
The firmware was updated to the latest greatest when the device first powered on. The battery dropped down to 50% in the first few hours; perhaps due to loading books, firmware updates, and so forth. After being charged up again, in the evening I noticed that the light stayed on even though the device was put into "Sleep" mode and the screen indicated "Sleeping". Manually shutting the light off more or less worked, but it seemed to want to come back on itself to 6-25% from time to time. By the morning the battery had drained leaving me with a dead device.
The form factor of this device - screen, size, rubbery back, weight and so forth - is so good that I'd put up with the odd problem if there was a workaround for it. However, having the battery not last more than part of a day is a non-starter; at least it hasn't hung or randomly rebooted itself yet. Having the light stuck on at night is a bit disconcerting; and suggests some fairly fundamental firmware problems are present in what presumably is a production unit with updated firmware.
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