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Barty · 11-16-2021, 12:48 PM

My first Kobo! Currently have Kindle voyage. My impressions after 3 days

Pros:

- the screen is very good. Love the larger size. As even as if not more even than my voyage, which is exceptionally even (all other voyages I've seen has a slight to noticable gradient). The slightly recessed screen is a total non issue for me. The clarity is very close to the legendarily good voyage. I think if I had to pick one I'd give the edge to the voyage (more on this later). Dark mode is good. Black is still very gray but i guess this is as good as it gets for eink right now. Give me dark mode in the UI too, Kobo! Voyage has no dark mode so can't really compare.

- I love how easy it is to patch it to make it more what I want. I didn't even bother to do any reading. I knew vaguely there's a thing called Kobo patch, googled it, downloaded it from GitHub, read the readme.txt, and BOOM! got rid of wasted space on header footer, reduced line spacing, got more font size control. Shout out to all the devs (and Kobo for not locking their devices like fort knox). Compare that to having to wait years on the Kindle side for a software jail break, and for example editing jar files with a bytecode editor to reduce margins, risking soft or hard bricking your device if you mess up.

- generally the software gives you more control, even without patches, than Kindle. On the Kindle, you get 3 margin choices: reasonable, comically large, and now you're just trolling us. On Kobo, you can reduce left right margins to nearly nothing. Ditto line spacing

- pocket and overdrive integration are frankly more useful to me than Goodreads and whatever integration on the Kindle side. Calibre and plugin just make it trivially simple to port my books over. The bulk of my books are already in epub and it doesn't seem to take much work for calibre to convert to kepub.

Now the cons:

- I don't have normal hands and the form factor is probably going to be a deal breaker for me. Make a fist with your hand and try to grip the Libra between your curled up thumb and palm; that's how I hold it. Not only does the added weight gets to me after a while, the weight is distributed over a much wider device. Worse, it's tapered UP at the edge. I guess this is supposed to make it easier for people with normal hands to hold it? but it just kills it for me. And why is the wide part so damn wide? If they'd shrunk the wide part by a third and just had a normal right edge, this would've probably been fine for me. Or just make a symmetrical device; lose the buttons I don't care. I curse the day Amazon brought the Oasis to the world 😡

- with light off, white is grayer than on the voyage. This matters because it means you need to push up the front light more to get the same level of white, but doing this of course also washes out black more. This combined with the front light not being more neutral white I think make the contrast look not quite as good as the voyage to my eyes (color affects contrast perception a lot). The warm light is great to have at night, but I can't get the front light to be neutral white during the day like on the voyage. With one click, the screen goes from yellow to slight green tint.

- one thing I appreciate on the Kindle is they've made every single UI element large, easy to read at a glance, easy to tap. It looks like it was designed for a small touch screen to be useable by grandma. The Kobo UI OTOH looks like they just took a desktop mouse GUI and slapped it onto a touch screen. The icons are small, the touch targets are small. To select a check box, you have to tap inside a small square, can't just tap the label, and the check mark is faint so you have to actually look. If you make me have to focus my eyes you're doing it wrong!

- Some UI/UX stuff are just poorly thought out. During the sign up process, the on screen keyboard covered up an input field. The wifi icon is ambiguous: is wifi disabled or is there no available wifi or is signal just really weak? Wifi icon is not in reading view: I looked something up while reading and now I want to turn off wifi, I have to go home? (Luckily this can be fixed with nicklemenu). Dark mode takes too many step to get to. Why not put it under the light menu? They're kind of in the same category. (Sadly this CAN'T be fixed with nicklemenu.)

- I miss the translation feature on the Kindle.

In the end, though, it's going to be the weight and form factor that will decide it for me, which is really unfortunate because there's so much here for me to like. I'm so ready to ditch Amazon and their locked down devices.

11-16-2021, 12:48 PM	#337
Barty doofus Posts: 2,553 Karma: 13089041 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kindle Voyage	My first Kobo! Currently have Kindle voyage. My impressions after 3 days Pros: - the screen is very good. Love the larger size. As even as if not more even than my voyage, which is exceptionally even (all other voyages I've seen has a slight to noticable gradient). The slightly recessed screen is a total non issue for me. The clarity is very close to the legendarily good voyage. I think if I had to pick one I'd give the edge to the voyage (more on this later). Dark mode is good. Black is still very gray but i guess this is as good as it gets for eink right now. Give me dark mode in the UI too, Kobo! Voyage has no dark mode so can't really compare. - I love how easy it is to patch it to make it more what I want. I didn't even bother to do any reading. I knew vaguely there's a thing called Kobo patch, googled it, downloaded it from GitHub, read the readme.txt, and BOOM! got rid of wasted space on header footer, reduced line spacing, got more font size control. Shout out to all the devs (and Kobo for not locking their devices like fort knox). Compare that to having to wait years on the Kindle side for a software jail break, and for example editing jar files with a bytecode editor to reduce margins, risking soft or hard bricking your device if you mess up. - generally the software gives you more control, even without patches, than Kindle. On the Kindle, you get 3 margin choices: reasonable, comically large, and now you're just trolling us. On Kobo, you can reduce left right margins to nearly nothing. Ditto line spacing - pocket and overdrive integration are frankly more useful to me than Goodreads and whatever integration on the Kindle side. Calibre and plugin just make it trivially simple to port my books over. The bulk of my books are already in epub and it doesn't seem to take much work for calibre to convert to kepub. Now the cons: - I don't have normal hands and the form factor is probably going to be a deal breaker for me. Make a fist with your hand and try to grip the Libra between your curled up thumb and palm; that's how I hold it. Not only does the added weight gets to me after a while, the weight is distributed over a much wider device. Worse, it's tapered UP at the edge. I guess this is supposed to make it easier for people with normal hands to hold it? but it just kills it for me. And why is the wide part so damn wide? If they'd shrunk the wide part by a third and just had a normal right edge, this would've probably been fine for me. Or just make a symmetrical device; lose the buttons I don't care. I curse the day Amazon brought the Oasis to the world 😡 - with light off, white is grayer than on the voyage. This matters because it means you need to push up the front light more to get the same level of white, but doing this of course also washes out black more. This combined with the front light not being more neutral white I think make the contrast look not quite as good as the voyage to my eyes (color affects contrast perception a lot). The warm light is great to have at night, but I can't get the front light to be neutral white during the day like on the voyage. With one click, the screen goes from yellow to slight green tint. - one thing I appreciate on the Kindle is they've made every single UI element large, easy to read at a glance, easy to tap. It looks like it was designed for a small touch screen to be useable by grandma. The Kobo UI OTOH looks like they just took a desktop mouse GUI and slapped it onto a touch screen. The icons are small, the touch targets are small. To select a check box, you have to tap inside a small square, can't just tap the label, and the check mark is faint so you have to actually look. If you make me have to focus my eyes you're doing it wrong! - Some UI/UX stuff are just poorly thought out. During the sign up process, the on screen keyboard covered up an input field. The wifi icon is ambiguous: is wifi disabled or is there no available wifi or is signal just really weak? Wifi icon is not in reading view: I looked something up while reading and now I want to turn off wifi, I have to go home? (Luckily this can be fixed with nicklemenu). Dark mode takes too many step to get to. Why not put it under the light menu? They're kind of in the same category. (Sadly this CAN'T be fixed with nicklemenu.) - I miss the translation feature on the Kindle. In the end, though, it's going to be the weight and form factor that will decide it for me, which is really unfortunate because there's so much here for me to like. I'm so ready to ditch Amazon and their locked down devices.