[zoltanmikker]

I've always appreciated the candor and openness of Kobo's people, and commend direct responses like this one. But at heart, this is a major setback that clearly handicaps the Kobo compared to the competition, especially with their recently reduced prices. Not unlike the Apple email of a few days ago, where the signal recalculation update was promised to bypass the real issue that the iPhone 4 has a faulty design, this firmware update's chief improvement is to manage the battery for you, bypassing the real issue that the Kobo drains to dead at an alarming rate when left idling. This is a battery problem that I'd wager is impossible to fix with software updates, but a less intrusive solution would've been to admit that being powered on is a major, not a minor, power drain for the Kobo, and to caution users to turn the device off themselves when not in use. I was already alerted to this issue when my ereader repeatedly died after being left unused for as little as 5 days, and I've since responsibly managed when it is on and when it is off myself, and seen a great improvement to battery life: close to the advertised two weeks. Now, when I upgrade my unit I'll no longer have the option to leave the Kobo on and drain the battery -- an annoying but sometimes acceptable trade-off when you want to work at your set pace -- when I break for 30 minutes after focused reading sessions; I'll have to boot at its discretion.

I appreciate the delicacy of the situation: new product, bad battery, lots of complaints, good rapport with customers to date. And I understand that this change is meant to be user friendly for grandma who forgets to power down when she goes out in the evening. But frankly, for even moderate users who spend afternoon sessions with the device with periodic breaks, this shift changes the Kobo from a serviceable but bare-bones ereader to a painfully clunky device that takes as long to boot up between short reading sessions as a brisk laptop. An ereader, mind, is not a laptop, and the more it approaches the laptop's load times while offering none of its versatility, the more attractive comparably priced pieces of hardware that can stay idle without draining the unit will be.

One last thing. To reiterate, I appreciate that Kobo was proactive in getting this information out directly to its most active/discerning users in this forum. But the explanation for why powering off is now set by the device is not convincing, and I'd hope most early adopters like me would also expect better. It's nice that Kobo is concerned that users don't prematurely kill their batteries by going through a lifecycle every week, as I was in my example up there, but any company could issue that same rationale for any product: e.g. it's in the interest of your battery, iPhone users, that if you haven't used it in 30 minutes, it turn itself off. (Not such a stretch of a comparison when you think that both phones and ereaders are expected to be in a ready state all the time, based on how they are used.) If Kobo would need to replace my battery well before its 'normal lifespan' because I was prone to leaving the device for longer than 15 minutes unattended, something is wrong with the device's battery, not my usage of it.

Looking forward to some serious discussions about this...