[ghero]

I am a PRS--T2 owner for several months, but I also bought a Kobo glo for my mom as a christmas gift, so I got a chance to compare them both.

I bought glo for christmas because I was dissatisfied about T2 was rather a downgrade of T1. Also, when I was looking at the hardware specifications and prices, glo seems to be a better choice. However, when I actually got to use the glo after I bought it, I found that when come to actual reading experiences, T2 is still a much better choice than glo, even though glo is built on better hardware.

About reading epub:
My first issue with glo is merely a minor issue. Glo is not format-friendly with non-kobo epub books. When you read a non-kobo epub, the page number sometimes stack right on a character of the actual content (this character is usually at the end of a line.) Also, you sometimes read a weird format where the page is only half full, and the continuation of the content is displayed on the next page. Where as when I use T2, I don't encounter any of those problems.

The second issue with glo on epub is a major one, for some people, like me. When come to epub, it seems that glo does not support as much language as T2, at least T2 supports Chinese well, but glo does not. Glo can read Chinese pdf but not Chinese epub. Where sony usually also does well on Chinese epub books, but glo fails to read them (you get a screen of squares denoting unrecognized characters). However, there is a way of getting around of this issue which requires some extra work. Basically you download the font file you want kobo to support, and place it in a folder called fonts (you will have to create this file under root). And when you reading the epub, select the font you just implemented. I did get this after a little bit struggle, and I can get glo to read chinese epub nicely after that. However, there is also another problem with this, when you reset your glo, the glo will lose the ability to recognize the chinese character in epub again, even though the font file is still there. There are ways to re-fix this, which I'm not gonna talk about here, but it is quite annoying.

Also, I want to talk more about dealing with freeze on both devices. On T2, because there are physical keys, like return or home, which can force the device to respond (by clicking it again and again), so I rarely (if ever) run into freeze problems with T2. On the other hand, the glo, even though claims to have an improved processor (does not seem to be more responsive than T2), because the lack of the physical key that forces to exit freeze (sometimes even hold power does not shut down/restart the device), so I end up running into freeze problems more frequently in glo. Which I have to stick a pen in the reset hole to exit freeze. It does not seem to be a big problem to many users, but again, if you are someone who reads epubs in languages like Chinese, you will have some issues to re-fix after that.

Another thing is that for T2, you can manage your collection at PC by using calibre. But for glo, which is called shelves instead of collections, you cannot manage shelves in calibre, and have to do that on device, however, I do not consider this to be a major problem.

Now lets talk about reading PDFs, which I consider T2 to have a huge advantage over glo:

The problem of reading PDF in e ink readers is that sometimes, what do you do when the font size is to small. Of course you can change the font size, but for PDF, change the font size usually messes up with the format, which format often matters in many PDFs, also sometimes words are part of a picture instead of text in PDFs, another thing is that, for pdf, if you change the font size, then you dramatically slows down the process of page turns. so we need some better methods to deal with them.

My most favorite method used on PDFs with T2 is crop, sometimes combined with column split. It solves a lot problems. Also landscape mode also works very well with some of the PDFs (mostly lecture slides). Pinch and zoom is also quite convenient, but I don't use this feature much.

However, use glo to read pdf is not near as convenient as T2. I can't find my most favorite crop or column split feature in glo. And zooming and landscape mode is just so inconvenient in glo. The problem with zooming and landscaping in glo is that you have to manually configure it for every page on your own. And you have to exit the zooming/landscape mode before you turn into next page. Where as when I use T2, all these kind of features will be automatically applied to every page, you just have to tap or click to turn the pages without ever to worry about reconfiguring those features.

So that's much about the comparison given the time I just bought the glo in my hand. In a shorter conclusion, even though on specification information, glo seems to have a better hardware, but when comes down to actual reading experiences, I think T2 does a much better job. However I do have to appreciate glo's light feature. Even Though on internet video comparison, the light seems to be bluish against some other readers, but when you are on your naked eye, you just don't even notice about that bluish. It is the similar thing which LCDs are very blue when on video, but you just don't notice them on your eye. It is actually very comfortable to have such a light, even though you are not in dark, it just makes you eye very relaxed and comfortable.

After I compared T2 with the product of other brand, I am actually right now very looking forward into sony's next model of ereader. If there is one major feature I want the T2 to take from glo, it is not the resolution (I just don't even notice that advantage), not the better processor (I would like ereaders to be much more responsive though), it is the light that glo has, because it really tunes you up, regardless if you are reading in dark or not, it is just something which the external light can't deliver. So in the future sony ereaders, I want the models to preserve the existing amazing reading experiences (the pdf experience is a big advantage for me), keep the device open (not like some brand which attempt to bind you to their books), and yes, have a light like glo.

So that's about it.