Libra 2 Kobo Libra 2 first impressions

[Nikoz]

I have a Libra 2 (coming from a Paperwhite 1) and after a couple weeks of use I'm very happy with it. The screen looks fantastic in normal or dark modes, it's fast, and I'm getting used to using the physical buttons although I wish there was less "wasted" real estate on their side. It's very easy to create collections for each author and series (which was a real pain with my paperwhite). The battery life seems good though it's still early to tell.
My complaints so far are that I haven't found a way to zoom in on pictures (on the paperwhite you just do a long press on them), the official covers are too expensive and unofficial ones are still not available (hopefully they will be soon), and wifi has an annoying tendency to activate itself even when I don't want it to. Also the dark mode produces a bright flash when completely refreshing the screen, which is unpleasant in the dark but I guess there's no way around that.
None of that is a dealbreaker and I'm glad my decision to update my e-reader happened to come just as the Libra 2 was released!

[rashkae]

Originally Posted by Nikoz

I
My complaints so far are that I haven't found a way to zoom in on pictures (on the paperwhite you just do a long press on them),

Images can only be zoomed if the file is in Kobo's native "Kepub" format. That includes any books purchased and synched from the Kobo Store. If you are sideloading from a PC, you have to process the file into this format. From Calibre, you can install the Kobo Touch Extended Plugin to do this for you on the fly. Otherwise, there is a stand alone Kepub converter app you can find on this forum.

If you already have your books in the correct format, double tap on images to open them full screen, and pinch zoom, (or there is a zoom and pan icon in your menu bar that looks like a 4 direction compass.) Images that are already full page will already have the compass icon, and you can just pinch zoom those.

Also the dark mode produces a bright flash when completely refreshing the screen, which is unpleasant in the dark but I guess there's no way around that.

I have to give Amazon credit for this. They solved this problem a few years ago with the Oasis. The solution is to simply fade out the lights before flashing the e-ink screen. I'm surprised Kobo has not implemented this, but the technique is probably tied up in Patents.

[Josieb1]

I’ve had a estimated delivery date for the White Libra 2 from Amazon UK. It’s between the 7th December and the 16th Jan. I also have a black one on order. I only want one but it all depends on what arrives first.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

Meera, booktopia.com.au who "partners" with kobo for ereaders and ebooks, has an updated release date of 3 December (from 19 November, which itself was an update from earlier November)

Jbhifi has a January delivery date

I reckon that it's a huge delay in getting sufficient numbers of devices, and not a huge customer base. So, for example only say 200 devices may get allocated per state or whatever.

And yeah, there's still a big parcel backlog across Sydney from what I'm gathering

What about the West?

It's in stock in four Perth stores now - now listed as in stock at my local JB within the past few hours - and listed as delivering on the 18th if ordered online. Where are you?

[Sirtel]

My Libra 2 was shipped yesterday from Amazon.fr and is somewhere in Germany at the moment. Should get it this week, maybe on Friday or Saturday.

It's the black one.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

My Libra 2 was shipped yesterday from Amazon.fr and is somewhere in Germany at the moment. Should get it this week, maybe on Friday or Saturday.

It's the black one.

I think I’d prefer the black one, I have a white H20 so I don’t want to mix them up, but tbh I’ll settle for what turns up first

[Barty]

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.

[Lynx-lynx]

Originally Posted by meeera

It's in stock in four Perth stores now - now listed as in stock at my local JB within the past few hours - and listed as delivering on the 18th if ordered online. Where are you?

Southern beach in Sydney (the Shire, lol), and there's no pick up allowed still from my two local jbhifi stores, nor stock of sage or libra 2 in store.

Hopefully from 15 December onwards that will change, that's when everyone can go into non essential stores without proof of vaccination.

[FireFrog]

Does anyone have the official sleepcover for Libra 2? How are you liking it? I'm getting impatient waiting for 3rd party cases.

[Almamida]

Originally Posted by Barty

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.

I don't know the issue with the form factor, but do you think a strap would help to release some tension from your fingers / hand ?

something like that : https://www.amazon.ca/TFY-Security-L...7091701&sr=8-5

[Almamida]

Originally Posted by FireFrog

Does anyone have the official sleepcover for Libra 2? How are you liking it? I'm getting impatient waiting for 3rd party cases.

I decided to go with a pouch I already had (thick enough to protect the screen) to transport it instead.

[Lynx-lynx]

Originally Posted by FireFrog

Does anyone have the official sleepcover for Libra 2? How are you liking it? I'm getting impatient waiting for 3rd party cases.

Still waiting for my device and the sleep cover to arrive, but I can say that I've used the Kobo sleep cover for my Kobo devices since they've been available (years now for the models I've purchased) and they work extremely well.

My forma and sleep cover were purchased on release in 2018, and they've both travelled extremely well. The device itself is well protected within the sleep cover, and the cover still looks and feels reasonably new.

I rarely turn off my device, I don't have wifi turned on, and the sleep cover does what it says, it puts the forma to sleep when the cover is closed (maintaining whatever screen I left it on).

When you open the screen cover the device is very responsive and you can start reading immediately.

I've never found a battery drain on the ereader using the cover, and consider my forma at 3 years old to be just as battery efficient as new. Well, clearly I suppose there must have been some degradation, but I don't notice it, and I use my ereader on a daily basis usually (I have to think about days I don't open it, and it's really hard to pinpoint any, but surely there must be some days I don't read from the device)

My forma has the folding sleep cover that makes a stand, and that's what I've ordered for the libra 2.

As you can tell, I recommend the Kobo sleepcover

[Skydog]

@Barty

It's a shame you went to so much trouble searching when everything you need is right here in this forum and above in Kobo Developer's Corner:

Kobo Developer's Corner

[polymerwitch]

Originally Posted by FireFrog

Does anyone have the official sleepcover for Libra 2? How are you liking it? I'm getting impatient waiting for 3rd party cases.

I have the official sleep cover. It works fine. It looks nice. The branding is subtle, but I still wish it wasn't there. The device sleeps and wakes perfectly (no false sleeps detected when the cover is open, and no false wakes when the cover is closed). It is a bit heavy. It increases the weight by about 20-30% (at least that's what it feels like), and that's probably my biggest complaint with it.

[frostschutz]

I just use the official cardboard cover. It's a bit bulky but otherwise works great. Very easy to open and close since it has a proper flap and isn't just any old box as was the case with the original Aura H2O. It even has some stowage space for the cable. I'm waiting for more cover choices to appear before deciding whether to buy one at all. Until then this will do just fine for keeping the device safe while not in use.