This is my personal opinion, of course. I don't know if this is
or not, if it is please tell me so I can delete this. But, after owning a Kobo Glo HD for almost a year, I felt the need to vent here.
Instead of improving the user experience with each new update, the Kobo developers are making it
worse with every update. In order to understand this, you only have to know that I am still using a heavily-patched version of the 3.15 firmware, which was released
three years ago because I find it waaay better than the current versions. With the help of some screenshots of my device, I want to show you why.
This is the homescreen of my Kobo Glo HD as I like it:
As you can see, this is amazing. Everything is perfectly organized. All the games, the browser, the last used books, a preview of my last Pocket article are at the reach of a single touch (some icons are not the original ones, because I made them myself, but they don't affect the overall experience of the original firmware). Advertising is nearly nonexistent, just one or two black tiles that appear after a sync and can be easily removed.
If I want to play a bit of chess at the bus station, there it is, just with a tap on its tile.
And the same if I have a wifi connection and want to read the newspaper on an e-ink screen.
Please note that I have a different keyboard of that which you are using on new firmwares. It fills the screen and, although the distribution of the keys is a bit weird, I find it waaay better than the new one. It responds better to keypresses and it is, in my opinion, more visually appealing.
But what happens if you buy a Kobo now and quickly update the firmware? You will be greeted by this:
The 50% of your screen will be filled with non-removable ads telling you to buy things from Kobo. Not only have tiles dissapeared, you cannot even remove things from your screen!
The top half of the screen will show your last four reads. Period. There's nothing you can do about it. Forget about pinning the browser to your homescreen -it will be buried in a menu that you can access after three or four taps. Forget about knowing how many
notes one of your books has without a long press on its cover. Even to access
your own library, you will have to use a menu, and when you go to the library, instead of the three rows of four books that you see on the old homescreen (look at the picture below), you will see an annoying quantity of
only eight books per page.
And if you want to play chess, forget it,
the chess app has dissapeared and will never come back.
If you want to browse the web, the web browser will be slower and will react in some weird ways to your taps, which makes it almost useless for more than a quick visit to a Wikipedia page (I'm not sure if this was a problem only on my Kobo or if this affects other people, I suspect the latter).
So, after three years of updates, what has Kobo improved? Maybe the ereader turns pages some miliseconds faster. Maybe pictures are drawn better on the screen. And now Kobo will make more money selling ebooks after filling half our screens with advertising. At first sight, nothing more.
Sure, some people here will say that I'm a cinic and they now have X feature that they really like. But for me, it is better to stick to a three-year-old software version. And that tells a lot. Sure, what I'm using isn't perfect. The browser, for example, does not remember cookies (BTW in new versions it still doesn't). But in terms of functionality it is vastly superior. So I'll stick with it hoping that Kobo will, at least give the option to retain some of its funcionality with patches on future updates. Of course, that doesn't mean that Kobo is a terrible company, in fact they offer the best hardware. But that doesn't mean that they are perfect either.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for the long rambling. I just felt that I needed to write this so maybe someone at Kobo could read it. Have a nice day!
