Touch Kobo Touch Speed and Wi-Fi Compatibility

[Zimbu]

I'm thinking about upgrading to a Kobo Touch to replace my first generation Kobo eReader (the one that does Bluetooth only). I have two specific questions I was hoping someone could help answer for me that are a bit difficult to try out in a store:

1) Wireless Compatibility

My wireless network is using WPA2-Personal with WPA-TKIP/WPA2-AES encryption with a rather complex passphrase (63 ASCII characters, including a variety of special punctuation symbols such as @#$[]\;<>{}). I've had some difficulties with certain wireless devices (such as the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS) not being able to connect to the network using this complex key.

Can anyone verify for me that Kobo Touch is able to handle complex wireless passphrases properly?

2) Performance

I've been extremely happy with my first gen Kobo when reading standard novels, mostly purchased from the Kobo bookstore. However, I have several DRM-free ePubs purchased from O'Reilly that are rather complex, and the first gen Kobo simply chokes on them. It takes over 10 minutes to detect each of these ePubs, and opening them or changing chapters takes almost as long. The files open flawlessly on my PC and Galaxy Tab.

I saw in a thread here that there are a few hacks that can be done to simplify the CSS in the O'Reilly ePubs, but I'd rather not have to do anything more complicated than drop the ePub on my device, so I'm curious how good/bad the performance is. The Touch seems significantly faster than the original Kobo from playing with it in the store, but it's hard to tell how much better it is when looking at only the included samples.

How is the Kobo Touch at processing complex ePubs such as the ones from O'Reilly?

Thanks.

[ottdmk]

Haven't tried such a long WPA2 passphrase myself (mine is only 13 characters: upper, lower, numerical, special) but mine works just fine.

As for complex epubs: After the .17 upgrade I ran into trouble with a really long epub (>2000 pages) but that's been the only thing so far.

[Zimbu]

Thanks for your response ottdmk.

I ended up purchasing the Kobo Touch tonight. The Wireless Key was no problem (other than being a pain to type in), and the device connected to the network without any problems.

The O'Reilly books, on the other hand, do not perform well at all. I copied two O'Reilly ePubs to the device, and it took 23 minutes to process the two files. Once on the device, they could be opened and page turns were reasonably quick, but trying to navigate with the slider was ridiculous.

I ended up following the advice in this thread and converting the .MOBI file to .EPUB using Calibre, and the books in this format are actually quite good. Not an ideal solution, but works fairly well.

The Touch is a nice upgrade compared to the original Kobo. It's signficantly faster, and the screen is much easier to read.

[Matth79]

Yes, have WPA2 personal AES (I found that allowing TKIP/AES was unreliable) and a max length, fully randomized key.
https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
And my immediate advice would be NOOOO! It is such a pain to type (and I thought I'd only ever have to type it once, doing a cut & paste from a text file subsequently).

The "password haystacks" article is also interesting, in showing how the total search space expands - NOT the actual strength of a password.
Looking at the analysis, a 12 character, upper/lower/numeric/symbol mix looks pretty robust (estimated 1.74 centuries vs massive cracking array).
Using just lowercase alpha, it still takes only 17 characters to reach that level.

So long as the key is not a common dictionary word or common non-dictionary key, then the faster attacks are neutralized - since the most classic is using a rainbow table of common SSID names hashed with common passphases, it also helps if the SSID is not the default, or a common one like "home".

Using just lowercase (far easier to enter on a device that does not have a real keyboard) seems wrong, but a random sentence from a random page in a book, would not be that bad - best to collapse all spaces, as it some devices handle spaces incorrectly.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by Zimbu

I ended up following the advice in this thread and converting the .MOBI file to .EPUB using Calibre, and the books in this format are actually quite good. Not an ideal solution, but works fairly well.

Do you mean the books were in MOBI?

[Zimbu]

Originally Posted by The Terminator

Do you mean the books were in MOBI?

The books are available from O'Reilly in a variety of formats, including ePub, Mobi, PDF, and a couple others, all DRM-free. The .EPUB files from O'Reilly are overly complex, and the Kobo chokes trying to process them.

However, if you take the .MOBI files (which are also available when you purchase a book) and convert them into .EPUB via Calibre, the resulting converted .EPUB file is much simpler than the .EPUB you can download from O'Reilly and the Kobo is able to process it much more quickly.

There are a few minor variations in formatting that I've noticed between the original .EPUB and the .EPUB that is generated from the .MOBI, but nothing so far that makes the converted book significantly worse.

It's a bit annoying having to download and convert the books when the .EPUB provided should work, but it's better than not being able to read them at all, or waiting 10 minutes to load the original .EPUB.