[Cootey]

Alright. I’ve had some time to play around with the update on my Clara HD.

• I agree that the task bar of icons along the bottom feels Nook-like, but that isn’t a bad thing. The menu was clumsy and time consuming to tap through. GUI complaints aside, this is faster. I don’t agree that the homepage is more cluttered now, but I understand why some feel that way. There is now a task bar of icons along the bottom that wasn’t there before. But there’s also no menu icon at the top. I’ve chosen to like this change because I found the menu odious to deal with.

• I love the much hated slider. On my Clara, the scrolling is zippy and so much more convenient. Perhaps that experience is different on older Kobos. I have none left to test it on. As for pagination, I never used pagination to remember where things where. I used relative memory to know where books were based on the books around them. I didn’t care about the numbers. They changed depending on the content. This update is faster for me. I’ve compared it to my daughter’s unupdated Clara. The thumbnails load faster, the scroll is zippy versus the clunkier page method, and, as others have already mentioned, pagination info is shown as you scroll. The new method’s performance is superior on the Clara.

• I still dislike the mostly useless text links at the bottom., but then Kobo didn’t change them in this update. If only I could choose which links were there. I liked it better in the past when I could specify a link to Pocket articles there. Yesterday, there was a link to Pocket, but today there are links to borrowing books thru overdrive and to accessing my user manual. I use Libby for my overdrive needs and I almost rarely need the manual. The links remain as Kobo’s intrusion upon my home screen. I am still very grateful that they are not ads, however.

I didn’t realize there was a patch out there to get rid of those links. I don’t usually patch my kobo. I like to keep it pristine and untouched. This is a personal preference. I just want to use my kobo to read and not treat it as a project. I’ve mentioned this before. I have done plenty of projects (like home brewing my 3DS so I can FTP into it, setting up GameCube emulation on my WiiU, or setting up port forwarding for VNC, Calibre, and web servers across my network and subnetwork). It’s not a boast. I’m trying to contrast my typical geeky whims from the need to just sit down and relax without tinkering. But I’m very tempted to apply the patch to get rid of those links now that I know it exists.

• I see that the Series sorting still lists single books. This wouldn’t be a problem if the single book was x of y in a series, but each standalone book is its own series. I wish there was a way to filter out the lone wolves from the pack. Fortunately, scrolling through them with the slider is a breeze.

• The border around the web browser might serve a GUI purpose, separating the browser experience from the book reader view. I don’t mind it since the margin is so minimal and I do my browsing on my Mac, iPad, or iPhone anyway. I do hope that they’ve tweaked the web browser’s energy consumption. I can’t convince my daughter to stop reading fanfic on her Kobo instead of her iPhone. Her Clara is constantly out of juice. It’s likely the constant WiFi connection that is draining the battery.


All in all, I’m pleased with the changes. Would somebody please clarify what change to the lists they are noticing? I must not have paid attention too closely before, and I didn’t think to look before updating my daughter’s Clara.


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