New Kindle Oasis on the horizon?

[applesauce]

I went to buy a Kobo, and found it crazy clunky. So passed. I needed a big screen so I had to, what I thought settle for this obscure shape. Within 10 minutes I was so in love with the shape. It feels like it was made for my hand. I never use the buttons I tap with my thumb.

I have had it for 3 years now. It would not turn on today, I actually cried. Worked out the issue, it was dead flat. No idea how that happened as it was fully charged when I went to bed. So fingers crossed it was a fluke as I want to wait for the next Oasis when it appears. I hope for Christmas but am not getting my hopes up yet.

Now if I could go back to books as lists I would be so happy. I still hate the new GUI, all be it has been around ages. I hate covers!!! so hard to read with vision problems

[Pjama]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Is it being supplied by your local newspaper, or is it created/formatted by a third party?

It’s the official Washington Post kindle newspaper edition. But I also have website and iPad app access, so if I want more info, pictures, etc., I can get it.

[han_32]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I have no issues with word search on my Kobos.

On the kobo, if I do a word search:

- I can only search book by book. I can not search all books at once, just book by book. But on the kindle if I select "all text" it shows me (and rather promptly) all books with that word by frequency order. This is really handy both for fiction series and reference books

- the search results usually show one line, a snippet which can be as little as 4 words. It does not help much to remember the context of a name or whatever. On the kindle is shows 3 or 4 lines, a much bigger snippet which is much more useful to me to remind me of what something is or who some character is.

- probably not a kobo problem, likely just the way epub handles page numbers or the formats I am using, but on the kobo on the search results the location of a word is given in percentage of a chapter, like the word is at 14% into chapter 2 or 67% of chapter 8 and so on, which is not very meaningful for references. On the kindle one gets chapter heading in bold and then exact page number which is so much more useful to me. I prefer the kindle approach.


Is there any setting, option to make kobo show bigger snippets of a word search or give a reference in page numbers? All text search seems impossible from what I researched already.

As it is, I find the kindle word search much more useful and powerful. But mileage may vary.

[Josieb1]

I have an Oasis 3. I never use it now as I hate the new home page and OS. I put all my kindle books on my Kobo.

[han_32]

The kobo home page and discover tab are not much better than amazon. Both on the kobo as the kindle, I live and stay always on "my books". About OS, it is a pick. The oasis is faster which I really appreciate. My ideal OS would mix things from both. Kobo is much better at filters, series building, sorting books, building collections from calibre. But for actually reading a book, I prefer the kindle search. And I miss things from the kindle, like the hint about book size while on list, and I hate the much praised book progress data on kobos (they are all too fussy for me).

Pity we can not mix and match.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by han_32

- the search results usually show one line, a snippet which can be as little as 4 words. It does not help much to remember the context of a name or whatever. On the kindle is shows 3 or 4 lines, a much bigger snippet which is much more useful to me to remind me of what something is or who some character is.
.

You do know that when you click on a result, it will take you to the word or phrase in question? Personally I see no need for bigger snippets, when you can very easily look up the context yourself.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by Pjama

I had a Libra 2 and liked it very much. I just sent it back in the end as I couldn't justify having two readers which were so similar. Plus I do quite often read the newspaper on my kindle. I am looking forward to seeing the Libra 3, if and when it comes out.

How do you read the newspaper on the oasis, and is this not possible on the Libra 2?

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by mbrisco

The new Oasis will almost certainly have better battery than the Libra 2. Other than that, agreed on the rest. Unless you want to run KOReader, in which case the Libra 2 is utter trash and it’s a shame the new Oasis will be shipping with yet-unjailbreakable firmware, because it would be the ultimate KOReading device.

Koreader trash Libra 2? How so? I thought the consensus was koreader is great on a kobo. I have only used it on a kindle, and it was excellent. It made the device excellent despite the default UI that I found very hard to use, even with JB.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

Koreader trash Libra 2? How so? I thought the consensus was koreader is great on a kobo. I have only used it on a kindle, and it was excellent. It made the device excellent despite the default UI that I found very hard to use, even with JB.

From what I've read (I don't use KOReader myself) the Libra 2 crashes and freezes often while using KOReader.

[han_32]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

You do know that when you click on a result, it will take you to the word or phrase in question? Personally I see no need for bigger snippets, when you can very easily look up the context yourself.

A longer quote allows you to not go back and forth, and trust me it is much easier to navigate on a kindle than a kobo, because you can at a glance see what is the reference you want (or even see all of it!) rather than have to navigate back and forth to several.

And it is not even like the kobo quoting much less allows it to show more results per page. It shows 4/5 always including empty lines, kobo includes 3/4 snippets of several lines, with no wasted space.

You might think the search ability perfectly fine for your needs, and that is excellent, but for the way I use search, kindle search is so much better. I use search a lot, in case it was not obvious.

I prefer a lot of things on kobo, but it is worth pointing what it does badly (hopefully they will improve with feedback) even if in comparison to kindle.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

How do you read the newspaper on the oasis, and is this not possible on the Libra 2?

Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Washington Post. I guess there's a Kindle edition? I do seem to remember it is free to read on Fire tablets. (Never used it, so didn't pay much attention.)

In the Kobo thread for firmware 4.34, someone mentioned they read daily news articles on their Kobo, but didn't go into details. Maybe via Pocket?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

I think the Libra 2 is an amazing device and much much cheaper than the oasis. Apart from the metal case, and the amazon ecosystem if you're bought into it, I see no advantage of the Oasis over the Libra 2. And the Libra 2 has a better OS/interface, better light, a great battery (better? ) , as well as being much cheaper.

In short, the amazon offerings look lacklustre in comparison.

Ironically, the last two Kindle releases (Paperwhite and Basic) were so much better than expected (for their price point) that now the luxury Oasis is the weak sister of the group. That's why I suspect there will be a new Oasis soon (not based on the post that started this. That was obviously just an error).

Assuming Oasis already uses Carta 1200 (I think it does?), would switching to USB-C, more default storage and putting an even faster processor in it (so that it is even faster than the zippy Paperwhite) be enough to justify calling it a new model?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by han_32

A longer quote allows you to not go back and forth, and trust me it is much easier to navigate on a kindle than a kobo, because you can at a glance see what is the reference you want (or even see all of it!) rather than have to navigate back and forth to several.

And it is not even like the kobo quoting much less allows it to show more results per page. It shows 4/5 always including empty lines, kobo includes 3/4 snippets of several lines, with no wasted space.

You might think the search ability perfectly fine for your needs, and that is excellent, but for the way I use search, kindle search is so much better. I use search a lot, in case it was not obvious.

I prefer a lot of things on kobo, but it is worth pointing what it does badly (hopefully they will improve with feedback) even if in comparison to kindle.

Not arguing that Kindles do searching better, it's just that I don't find the Kobo way all that bad. It's fine for my personal needs (I do use search occasionally, but not very frequently. And I have used the search feature on both Kindles and Kobos - for me there's no big difference). YMMV, of course.

For me one of the most prized features of a Kobo is customizability. I'm very fussy about how I want the text to look, and Kobo allows extreme fine-tuning of font-sizes, line-spacing, margins and font-weight. Kindles don't offer that much, even with the FONT_RAMP hack and editing the book css. For this reason and for the ability to manage my books with Calibre I strongly prefer Kobos to Kindles, at least as things stand now.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Assuming Oasis already uses Carta 1200 (I think it does?)

No, it doesn't. There was no Carta 1200 when the Oasis was released in 2019.

[Quoth]

But faster CPU may not be really needed and battery life would suffer. Doubling physical battery size would be more use. There was already 32 G option on gen 9 Oasis. There comes a point were maybe all you can do is add maybe home, back, forward, menu buttons, bigger battery. Or maybe bring back real 3.5mm jack and SD Card slot, real mp3 player & FM radio that works while reading or bigger screen. In terms of actual reading the screens reflectance without front light haven't improved significantly in years. The only advances are larger sizes of 300 dpi, which hasn't extended to ereaders of 10+ inches?

Even 8G is enough Flash, 32 G plenty for regular