Aura NEW Kobo Aura Impressions Thread!

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by jiminrussell

Another new thing in the 2.9.0 firmware on the Aura seems to be that it will at least occasionally download a preview of a book when doing a sync without me asking it to do so.

Not new, that happened on my Aura HD a while back. Don't remember where the setting is, but someone here on MR pointed out how to stop it from happening. (At least I'm assuming it's the same thing)

[Tony1988]

Originally Posted by jiminrussell

Finally got mine this afternoon (ordered on Aug. 27 and got the order confirmation right away, got invoice and my CC was charged on Sept. 13, but still no shipping notice, not sure why they can't send a simple shipping notice email when they ship the devices).

My first Impressions:

The look and feel is nice. It feels great in the hand, nice and light and small (without case it is almost exactly the same size as my mini in a case), I like the edge to edge plastic over the screen and bezel.

I am not sure the front-light is any better than the glo but it definitely can be set to lower brightness which will be nice when reading in the dark. And being able to change it with a quick swipe up or down with two fingers is going to be very handy.

With the light off the screen on the Aura is darker than on my glo, not a lot but it is certainly noticeable.

As I have seen mentioned in some reviews there is a bright line right at the very top of the screen, only about 1mm but it is noticeable if the light is set to high brightness, but I will never read with it that bright so likely won't bother me.

I took it outside to read for a few minutes in the sun and very disappointed to see a horrible hash mark type pattern (almost like thousands of scratches) on the plastic cover, not sure if it is on the underside of the cover but assume that it is and has something to do with the low gloss feature, there is no way I could read on this in the sun, it would drive me crazy!

I have two tiny light spots on mine in the bezel on the right side, Thankfully not on the section of screen where there is text. They are right at the spot where I rest my thumb on the side while reading so don't think it will bother me but disappointing that the quality control is so bad with kobo devices, these light spots are obviously scratches on the underside of the edge to edge plastic that covers the screen, it should have been rejected as defective before shipping it out.

Firmware changes:
The addition of Pocket which everyone here is likely already well aware of, seems to work great so far, I will find this very handy to use.

A new Automatic Sync setting, by default on mine it was turned on with selection of night (I assume this means it will sync every night even if I have it in sleep mode, I assume it won't sync if I have it powered off).

A new game called Unblock It in the Beta Features (formerly called extras in older firmware on my other devices)

The ability to zoom pictures in at least Kepups and pocket documents even if there is text on the screen, don't recall being able to do this before.

Beyond the book feature needs some work, I only tried a couple of books so far, one had nothing (feature wasn't there to select) and one book had 7 items I could select and the first one I selected gave me an error message "Oops! Sorry we're unable to locate the content you were looking for...."

The new waveform that allows full refresh every chapter, there does seem to be a bit of ghosting when using this setting, likely fine for shorter chapters but not sure about a chapter that might be a 100 pages, and not clear yet how it handles this in epups that kobo really treats as just one big chapter, will have to see. In any case the other options are full refresh in 1, 5 or 10 pages.

That's it for now, undecided yet if I want to go through the hassle of doing a return to see if I can get a better device without the light spots on the bezel and perhaps doesn't have the hash marks that would make it difficult to use in the Sun though I suspect this is the same on all of them.

Wow another device with light leaks. This isn't sounding too good to me right now. I definitely am holding off on this device for not just a few weeks but probably a few months now. If they don't have it sorted out by than, its a no buy from me.


You should definitely return yours. A $150 item shouldn't have a flaw in one of its biggest selling points. Plus more returns hopefully will put a fire under kobos ass to get quality control improved.

[Ripplinger]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Poop. The preview shows so little as to be useless

Except... in the Kobo Desktop I see the same issue on the "In Gratitude" page.

The first paragraph is in a small font, and the second one

I'm not overly sure why this is happening though. The 1st paragraph is marked up with <p class="p1"> and the second with just <p>, however the definitions of the two CSS's is identical apart from a text indent setting.

    p { display: block;
 font-size: small;
 margin-top: 0em;
 margin-bottom: 0em;
 margin-left: 0em;
 margin-right: 0em;
 text-indent: 20pt;
 }
    .p1 { display: block;
 font-size: small;
 margin-top: 0em;
 margin-bottom: 0em;
 margin-left: 0em;
 margin-right: 0em;
 text-indent: 0em;
 }

Opening the material in Sigil or ADE all displays correctly. (This is all from just working with the Preview from the website).

I am going to pass this on to Kobo...

I just decided that it was a case of the software handling p and .p classes differently since like your examples, the code was identical for each. The same book did the same thing on my Sony readers if that's any help to you.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by PeterT

The 1st paragraph is marked up with <p class="p1"> and the second with just <p>, however the definitions of the two CSS's is identical apart from a text indent setting.

    p { display: block;
 font-size: small;
 margin-top: 0em;
 margin-bottom: 0em;
 margin-left: 0em;
 margin-right: 0em;
 text-indent: 20pt;
 }
    .p1 { display: block;
 font-size: small;
 margin-top: 0em;
 margin-bottom: 0em;
 margin-left: 0em;
 margin-right: 0em;
 text-indent: 0em;
 }

I wonder what would happen if you changed that code to this:

    p, .p1 { display: block;
 font-size: small;
 margin: 0;
}
    p { text-indent: 20pt; }
    .p1 { text-indent: 0; }

I mean, both should produce identical results on any compliant CSS renderer, but the different structure may make a difference...and if it does, that may point to the underlying bug.

[PeterT]

I've got the attention of Kobo on this and will just have to wait and see what happens.

[mr_nihilism]

These first impressions are dampening my enthusiasm. Light leakage, markings on the plastic screen that are apparent under sunlight, ghosting issues. Sigh...

[filmo]

I wonder if the pattern seen under screen in direct sun light is from front light diffusion layer? Still might be ok if it isn't so delicate and easily damaged as Nook with glow light.

Would love to see test review that documented if this plastic screen is more rugged than glass screen.

[tlaine]

This is certainly no Aura HD, I have to say I am disappointed at this point.

[tls]

Originally Posted by jiminrussell

Another new thing in the 2.9.0 firmware on the Aura seems to be that it will at least occasionally download a preview of a book when doing a sync without me asking it to do so. I just did a sync and found a preview of Night Film extended sampler (by Marisha Pessl) on my homepage (it had bumped the book I was reading out of the top left tile. I don't think I like this "feature", needs to be a way to turn this off but don't see a way to do it so far.

To make it worse the preview is all of three pages of the prologue, some extended sampler that is, what a waste of time.

There is an option in settings for displaying news and offers from Mono on the home screen. Have you switched that off?

[extremescramble]

Originally Posted by tlaine

This is certainly no Aura HD, I have to say I am disappointed at this point.

Glad I have waited. There seem to be some significant quality control issues. 😒

[tls]

Another weird thing - Japanese ePubs crashed the device, even when system language was set to Japanese. Puzzles me as Rakuten is Japanese and the ePubs work on Android ereader apps and Duokan OS on Kindle.

[Candiana]

I just want to know one thing: anyone received/seen the pink Aura yet??

[samhy]

Originally Posted by jiminrussell

The look and feel is nice. It feels great in the hand, nice and light and small (without case it is almost exactly the same size as my mini in a case), I like the edge to edge plastic over the screen and bezel.

That is nice since it's becoming close to our awaited Mini Glo

[Iefmathias]

Tony1988, are you talking about this pattern? (yeah, it's very hard to take a decent picture showing the problem)

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...39#post2400739


I had that on my Glo. There is just no way I could read comfortably with this pattern etched on the upper part of my screen, it was just too distracting.

I didn't bother sending it back so I sold it to a less demanding friend of mine, but I'm pretty sure you can send it back if your display has this sort of thing, it is simply unacceptable for a Ereader!

Anyway, how's the contrast ratio with the light turned on? Bought an Aura HD last week but side by side compared with my 'old' gen. Paperwhite, the light settings do wash out the darkness of the fonts quite a bit. Not that much improvement from the Glo actually... Too bad, would have been the ideal Ereader if it didn't. Paperwhite wins easily on that regard. Aura any better?

[tls]

I personally find the blacks to be less dark than the Paperwhite..