MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Kobo E-reader Videos

ficbot · 04-06-2010, 06:44 PM

Well, I am happy to have a Toronto get-together this weekend so you can see. I spoke to my guy a little today and I think he is waiting to answer questions until I send him a whole pile at the end (for example, some people at Teleread had very specific questions about fairly esoteric things like when it will hit specific countries and whether it had support for certain languages).

Remember that this is an entry-level unit. No text to speech, no wifi, no dictionary, no on-board store etc. There is a reason it's going to be $150 and they were very upfront with me about that (I mentioned TTS and it was pretty much 'yes, but that is not one of the features we identified as most popular/necessary, so it got the boot.') There are things their techie guys may know how to implement and are choosing not to (in this model, anyway) to keep the cost down. But to give you some context, I showed it to two co-workers today and both of them were very impressed with the size, simplicity, and the price. One of them said it would be perfect for her mother. Both of them the eyes positively bugged out when they saw the pretty bookshelf view. They are not aiming this at the power user who wants to scientific manuals written in Cyrillic languages or something.

Concerns, let's see. Page turns felt a little laggy to me. Not inexcusably so, but definitely not as zippy as the Kindle (I did not feel the Sony was as zippy as the Kindle either, fwiw, and that was a very highly regarded Sony model). I think some people may raise the same issues as the Kindle regarding how to organize the books, especially since it's coming with 100 titles of clutter pre-loaded onto it (he did say these will be removeable via the desktop conduit, but I was not able to test this as the desktop conduits are not quite finished yet). And there were some epubs I couldn't zoom the font on, but I am not sure that's their fault completely.

Overall, my first impression was that it's a solid start and a good entry-level unit. Once I have had more time to play, I'll post a proper review.

04-06-2010, 06:44 PM	#38
ficbot Wizard Posts: 2,409 Karma: 4132096 Join Date: Sep 2008 Device: Kindle Paperwhite/iOS Kindle App	Well, I am happy to have a Toronto get-together this weekend so you can see. I spoke to my guy a little today and I think he is waiting to answer questions until I send him a whole pile at the end (for example, some people at Teleread had very specific questions about fairly esoteric things like when it will hit specific countries and whether it had support for certain languages). Remember that this is an entry-level unit. No text to speech, no wifi, no dictionary, no on-board store etc. There is a reason it's going to be $150 and they were very upfront with me about that (I mentioned TTS and it was pretty much 'yes, but that is not one of the features we identified as most popular/necessary, so it got the boot.') There are things their techie guys may know how to implement and are choosing not to (in this model, anyway) to keep the cost down. But to give you some context, I showed it to two co-workers today and both of them were very impressed with the size, simplicity, and the price. One of them said it would be perfect for her mother. Both of them the eyes positively bugged out when they saw the pretty bookshelf view. They are not aiming this at the power user who wants to scientific manuals written in Cyrillic languages or something. Concerns, let's see. Page turns felt a little laggy to me. Not inexcusably so, but definitely not as zippy as the Kindle (I did not feel the Sony was as zippy as the Kindle either, fwiw, and that was a very highly regarded Sony model). I think some people may raise the same issues as the Kindle regarding how to organize the books, especially since it's coming with 100 titles of clutter pre-loaded onto it (he did say these will be removeable via the desktop conduit, but I was not able to test this as the desktop conduits are not quite finished yet). And there were some epubs I couldn't zoom the font on, but I am not sure that's their fault completely. Overall, my first impression was that it's a solid start and a good entry-level unit. Once I have had more time to play, I'll post a proper review.