Aura NEW Kobo Aura Impressions Thread!

[Tony1988]

Originally Posted by neil74

Mmm not good, that's 2 people on here already. If mine has these issues then considering I'll have to post it back I think I'll leave it at one and stick with my PW.

Yeah its stuff like this that I am glad I decided to wait. I was going to get the sony T3 and than changed my mind because this one seems to have more bang for the buck. I am not a big fan of lighted ereaders because of pinhole light leaks. Every lighted ereader pretty much have had this issue so far. I am wondering if this is one of the reasons sony decided to forgo it for now. Think I am gonna wait a bit more. I may just get a used PRS 650, nook str or maybe even the glo for for now. I want a 6" reader to replace my prs 350. Or I may just wait a few weeks to see where this is all going.LOL Its not a necessity right now. My 350 still works.

[dieterpops]

Looks like it's pulled from the site. You can still read about it, but there is no option to buy.

[Uschiekid]

Originally Posted by tlaine

149.99 in Canada, so about 155.65 AUD

plus tax...i think it's come up before that aussie prices include tax, but canadian ones don't.

[tlaine]

Nope, and the convoluted RST systems here vary from province to province, so for me that's HST at 13% on top.

[Uschiekid]

Originally Posted by tlaine

Nope, and the convoluted RST systems here vary from province to province, so for me that's HST at 13% on top.

exactly what I meant. The AUSSIE price (of 189$) has the tax already, whereas the CANADIAN one that you quoted doesn't....so it doesn't change from 149$ canadian to 155$AUD, since that would be without tax....you would have to convert with the canadian tax added....so more like 168CAD becomes however much AUD.

Just trying to point out that it's deceptive if you quote the canadian price without tax to people from countries where tax is incorporated into the prices.

(and i'm from canada too...)

[tls]

Originally Posted by gargoyle67

Well I canceled my online order and picked one up in the WHSmiths store, got home fired it up and found I had a couple of black dots on the screen Don't know if there were dust particles trapped under the plastic top screen or something else. I took the Aura back and got a replacement that looked ok in store (no back dots) got home and noticed two light leakage dots when the screen went to a black screen So took that one back and had to get a refund as they only had the two in stock, prob not a bad thing considering the QC on these things

Yesterday I posted that I tried 4 x Kobo Aura's in WHS and they had white spots.

Today I went to another WHS that had them in stock. I checked it out before buying and it looked good, but soon afterwards found 2 x white spots and one dark spot.

The dark spots is like a stuck pixel, but it's stuck at about 50% grey and so isn't really noticeable with the ghosting between pages.

The white spots - one is right at the edge, almost under the black border. I don't mind it at all as it's a bit of a quirk. The other is almost in the center - but it's very small and only noticeable when you look for it.

For the moment I'm holding on to this one to see whether I can live with the spots - eg, whether I find them noticeable when reading in bed. As this is the 5th Aura I've tried and all had spots, and as you've had the same experience as me, I don't think getting another from WHS will help.

One reason I'm seeing whether I can live with it is because the rest of the lighting is so good. I gave my wife my Paperwhite because I hated the patchy lighting so much - see the photo comparing with the Paperwhite. If I want a 6" reader at the moment, it's probably got the best light.

Here are two photo links:
1. Paperwhite vs Aura, both at max settings. See how much better the Aura is:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2021.31.26.jpg
2. Ghosting on the Aura.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2013.20.40.jpg

Re the Ghosting - I tried a Simpletouch once and the Ghosting was horrible. On the Aura it doesn't bother me.

[tls]

Chat with Kobo about the white dots to see what they said - love the "Have you tried any type of reset to your device?" question...

Kobo: Hi, my name is Marta M. How may I help you?

Me: Hi - I bought an new Aura. It has bright white spots on the screen - I think it's a fault.

Kobo: I apologize for any inconvenience caused. I will be more than glad to assist you with that.

Kobo: Can you please verify the email address for your Kobo account and what country are you chatting from?

Me: .......@....com UK

Kobo: Thank you.

Kobo: Have you tried any type of reset to your device?

Me: It's a problem with the coating on the surface of the screen letting light through. Resetting wont help.

Kobo: Can you please take a picture of the device?

Me: It's kind of hard to take a picture of it because the light spots are small - they are bright dots. Is this the first time you've heard of this problem?

File attachment upload has started.
The file 2013-09-18 21.34.21.jpg (58.25KB) was received.

Me: The photo isn't great. It shows one white dot - but there are more.

Kobo: Where and when did you buy your device?

Me: I bought it today from WH Smith.

Kobo: In that case I would recommend you to go back to the store and ask them to replace the device for you.


At least I now have a registered case with Kobo I can refer to WHSmith with if I get any problems refunding.

[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.

[tls]

Originally Posted by jiminrussell

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

For what it's worth, I also noticed that marking.

From what I can see there are 3 different patterns:

On the outside there is the diffusion pattern - similar to an anti-glare iPad protector. Lots of little dots that break up the light.

On the backside of the plastic there seems to me the scratches that you mentioned. These appeared to be slightly circular on mine and it made me wonder whether it's from a circular cutter slicing the plastic - unlikely probably.

The eInk screen itself is like lots of little diamonds. If you look at the ghosting picture I posted zoomed in to pixel detail, you can see that. I wonder if that's part of the light distribution - the Kindle has vertical lines instead of diamonds on the eInk screen.

In any case, just thought I'd mention that mine has a similar pattern.

[PeterT]

Don't forget... Shelves are renamed Collections!

[robko]

Originally Posted by jiminrussell

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).

That would be correct, except that you also need to leave the WIFI on for the sync to happen. There are options for night, morning, afternoon and evening sync time.

[SeigneurAo]

Alright, I've read almost all posts of this thread and the only question left I have about this device :
Is the screen quite "glassy" as it shows in some videos ?
I'm worried about daily use, especially outdoor and with sunlight, reflections and all.
Seems to me the surface is different altogether from previous readers.
Thanks for your feedback.

[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.

[speakingtohe]

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.

Ereader SPAM.

Helen

[PeterT]

I've always found the amount of the actual book in the preview to be next to useless.