[radius]

I bought another KA1 so I am back in the fold. I was all set to rant about some of its shortcomings until I realized that I already did last year

After reading on the KA1 for a couple of months this time around (instead of a couple of weeks last time) some of my opinions have shifted slightly.

Originally Posted by radius

- touch screen. The sensitivity seems low and it often doesn't register my touches. ... Similarly I can't consistently hit brightness and wifi etc. I can't find any way to calibrate or change sensitivity

Still crap. Maybe even worse than my original device.

- frontlight. ... Even 1% is quite bright in a darkened room. ... Also, the daylight feature isn't usable to me because at low illumination, I can see the red and green LED zones quite clearly near the bottom of the screen.

I put up with the extra light at 1% by reading under the covers. The granularity seems ok-ish now, though I only ever use the range between 1-4%.

The comfort light is better this time around. It isn't as easy to distinguish the red and green LEDs.

- weight distribution. When holding it in one corner, the device is big enough that the center of gravity is far out and produces too much moment to be comfortable long term. Also, when reading with the cover on, the only way I can hold it one-handed is by folding the cover back and I don't like to do that for a number of reasons.

I didn't buy the cover this time around and things are much better. I also mostly gave up holding the device by one corner. Now I hold it about halfway up one side. Not very secure, but more comfortable balance.

- font adjustments. ... for some epubs the controls are inoperative unless I tweak the stylesheet. ... I also can't figure out how to use some side-loaded fonts; they show in bold italic instead of regular, for instance.

The excellent Kobo dev community came to my rescue here. I am using sherman's excellent script to Koboify fonts and it takes care of everything.

For books that lock the font or line height etc, I still edit using Sigil.

- page display. The widow/orphan control seems very aggressive. I often find many blank lines at the bottom of pages. This is exacerbated by the large standard bottom margin.

Still annoying. Partly mitigated by reading epub and I will get around to patching eventually.

I don't like the "flash every six pages" thing.

Can't remember if I edited the conf file or if it was a firmware update, but now I have it set to invert less.

- UI. ... I strongly dislike the way the UI is drawn. I also don't like that on the main screen, three quarters is mostly useless to me.

I am one of the few who likes the new home screen. Overall UI polish could still use a ton of work IMO.

- limited download.

Gave up on downloading books from my cloud since typing in my password on Kobo's terrible keyboard is difficult and inconvenient anyway.

- speed.

Soup
ur
sssss
loooooow.

I still have no trouble with battery life or USB connectivity. Still enjoy cbr support (thanks AcidWeb!). Overdrive support is excellent and very transparent.

If the touch screen worked well and the device was faster, I'd be pushing these on everyone I know.