Mini Kobo Mini best Hack/Mod

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by dani1887

Hello good!
I have had a Kobo Aura H2O for years and I always get the itch to have a Kobo Mini. Well today was that happy day. I already knew that the firmware of the Mini stopped development a long time ago.
From what I see here, can you install the firmware of another Kobo device, as long as it is mark4? Or by doing this I'm going to end up with a nice paperweight?

I've installed firmware up to 4.35.20400 on my Mini and other than a few oddities, it seems to work quite well.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I've installed firmware up to 4.35.20400 on my Mini and other than a few oddities, it seems to work quite well.

I'm running 4.28.18220 (which was current when I replaced the battery). I haven't seen any issues with it. Speed seems fine (long books load fairly slowly) but page turning speeds are not bad.

I think I'll probably stick with 4.28.xxxx.

[dani1887]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I've installed firmware up to 4.35.20400 on my Mini and other than a few oddities, it seems to work quite well.

Originally Posted by rcentros

I'm running 4.28.18220 (which was current when I replaced the battery). I haven't seen any issues with it. Speed seems fine (long books load fairly slowly) but page turning speeds are not bad.

I think I'll probably stick with 4.28.xxxx.

Thank you!

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I've installed firmware up to 4.35.20400 on my Mini and other than a few oddities, it seems to work quite well.

I just picked up a Mini (again). What oddities do you encounter with that firmware?

[DNSB]

Basically, every so often the display will glitch when turning pages. Closing the sleep cover and re-opening it, so far, has cleared up the issue.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Basically, every so often the display will glitch when turning pages. Closing the sleep cover and re-opening it, so far, has cleared up the issue.

Alright. I can probably live with that. Once I upgrade the SD card and make a backup of it, I’ll be up for some experimentation.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by _fact0tum_

Hi all,
I'm new of the forum and I hope this is the right section.

I have a Kobo mini and I want to know the best mod/hack I can find for this device. (I sow the kobo-nightmode searching on internet).
The most important thing for me is "speed". I want a decent expirience when I use my e-reader.

Thank you and sorry for my english; I'm not a native speaker

I just upgraded my Kobo Mini from a 2GB internal SD Card to an 8GB SD Card.

I used the “dd” command in a terminal shell to clone the SD card to a disk image, then “dd” again to clone the disk image to the 8GB SD card. This has the unfortunate side-effect of turning your 8GB SD card into a 2GB SD card (the original Kobo Mini SD card size), but it’s an exact copy of all three partitions (including the two hidden ones.) Then I used gparted on Linux to repartition the KOBOeReader fat32 partition to utilize all the storage available.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by Cootey

I just upgraded my Kobo Mini from a 2GB internal SD Card to an 8GB SD Card.

I used the “dd” command in a terminal shell to clone the SD card to a disk image, then “dd” again to clone the disk image to the 8GB SD card. This has the unfortunate side-effect of turning your 8GB SD card into a 2GB SD card (the original Kobo Mini SD card size), but it’s an exact copy of all three partitions (including the two hidden ones.) Then I used gparted on Linux to repartition the KOBOeReader fat32 partition to utilize all the storage available.

dd is such a great command. Just be careful never to mix up if= and of=…

[Cootey]

What size SD Card have people successfully installed into a Kobo Mini? Does anybody know? Kobo devs on this site said 8GB had worked fine in their tests, so I went ahead and successfully tried it, but I never heard if 16gb or more was compatible.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Cootey

What size SD Card have people successfully installed into a Kobo Mini? Does anybody know? Kobo devs on this site said 8GB had worked fine in their tests, so I went ahead and successfully tried it, but I never heard if 16gb or more was compatible.

If it works with 8GB, it's using SDHC so you should be able to use a 32GB card. The next step to 64GB would require SDXC support.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by DNSB

If it works with 8GB, it's using SDHC so you should be able to use a 32GB card. The next step to 64GB would require SDXC support.

Thanks. I'll make that my next project. Honestly, for what I'm doing with it, 8GB is more than enough. I think I'll play around with newer firmware on it first.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cootey

Thanks. I'll make that my next project. Honestly, for what I'm doing with it, 8GB is more than enough. I think I'll play around with newer firmware on it first.

If you want faster, get an A2 microSD card instead of an A1.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you want faster, get an A2 microSD card instead of an A1.

From my searches, 32gb microSD cards don't come in A2. Only 64GB cards and up offered that. If they exist, I can't find them. Do you know where I can get an A2 32GB microSD card?

I haven't been able to find specs on the microSD card slot inside the Kobo mini. However, since the original 2GB microSD is formatted FAT32, not exFAT, the slot probably only supports SDHC with a maximum capacity of 32GB, just like FAT32.

EDIT: Come to think of it, FAT32 supports up to 2TB.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[Quoth]

The speed of the card won't make much (if any) difference to a Mini. It does to a DSLR that can do HD video and especially 4K video.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The speed of the card won't make much (if any) difference to a Mini. It does to a DSLR that can do HD video and especially 4K video.

Actually, the speed of the card can be quite important to a Kobo ereader. Sadly, it is not the sequential write speed which the one most heavily advertised but the small block write speed that is critical. Over the years, I've found that Samsung and SanDisk cards tend to have the best small block write speeds.

To quote a message I wrote back in 2014:

Originally Posted by DNSB

In my rather limited testing, I've found that the SanDisk and Samsung 64GB cards are consistently among the best for small block performance. The problem is that most high capacity cards are optimized for reading/writing large blocks (large files, multimegabyte images, videos, etc.) and their performance on small blocks is pathetic.

If you have a Windows computer, I'd suggest trying CrystalDiskMark to test any card you purchase. Take a close look at the 4K and 4K QD32 results.

The reason for the earlier recommendation was that some Class 10 cards would have incredible large block read/write results but drop to using kilobytes to measure their performance on small block read/write operations.

This originally came up when people were modifying their Nooks and wondered why some cards worked well and others make the Nook almost unusable. It turned out Android on the Nooks was doing a lot of small block read/write operations. When I tested some cards I had on hand, a SanDisk class 4 card gave me a 1.81MB/sec write speed while a Kingston class 10 card gave me a 0.019MB/sec write speed -- and, yes, that was not a typo, it was 19 kilobytes/sec write speed.