Hands-On with the New Kobo Aura

Earlier in the year Kobo had released the Aura HD, which was a 6.7 inch e-Reader that bucked the trend of the standard six inch device. It was said when it was first released that this model was a limited edition and would not see the same sort of mass market push as the Kobo Glow. The Canadian company has gone back to the drawing table and just announced the new Kobo Aura. Hardware The Kobo Aura maintains the standard six-inch approach that the company made famous with their entire product line. It currently has a super high resolution e-Ink "Clarity Screen" with 212 DPI and sixteen levels of grey. This e-Reader has the exact same front-lite technology that was found on the original Kobo Aura HD. This will allow readers to adjust the brightness settings to suit their environment. Currently, Kobo has the best front-lit screen in the business and has surpassed Amazon in terms of quality. To turn the screen light on, there is a button at the very top and then a virtual slider bar to control the brightness. It is powered by the quintessential Freescale i.MX507 1 GHZ processor and has 1 GB of RAM. There are 4 GB of internal memory, which can be enhanced via the Micro SD Card. It seems that Kobo e-Readers still have expandable memory, which makes adding books to your collection fairly easy and painless. It also has over two months of battery life, which is ideal. Kobo has maintained the same rear panel that they debuted on the Kobo Aura HD. Instead of using the quilted back cover as they have always used for their three previous generations of e-Readers, they have moved to a more wavy design. When we talked to Kobo about this move at BookExpo America, they said they wanted to mirror how the pages of a real book looked, once it got lots of usage. If you maneuver a book and press towards the spine, you will see the pages on a diagonal angle, and this is the essence of the new rear shell. There are no manual page turn buttons, instead everything is done via the software. The only two buttons on the device are the power and light. There are only two colors available at launch, black and pink. Software Kobo maintains the same general user interface found on most of their modern day e-Readers and did not re-invent the wheel for the core user experience. The new screen has three main segments that display icons for everything done over the last twelve processes. This provides shortcuts to the user's most commonly accessed features, such as the web-browser, custom shelves, Reading Life, and ebooks. The Sync feature to fetch new content is now on the main screen, too, which is the only element that remains persistent. I actually like the more effective use of screen real estate. Rather than browsing four different sub-menus to access the internet browser, it will appear on the main screen if it has recently been used. I really like the dynamic nature of the new home screen, especially how common tasks and recently accessed elements from games to comics will appear as virtual shortcuts. One of the drawbacks is you can't long-press to move them around or save them as persistent pseudo-widgets. It would be amazing to organize your home area the way you like so it didn't change automatically, unless you wanted it to. Not only has the main screen changed, but most of the UI has undergone subtle enhancements over prior models. The Kobo Glow had a black area on the bottom of the screen, and when you initiated the scroll bar to find the illumination levels, the black bar would often show artifacts or ghosting from images. The new UI is completely white and most of the other sub-menus and headings are also pure white, which is a small but noticeable feature. One thing that Kobo does really well is provide a lot of customization options in the main settings menu. Users can set the page refresh rate for e-ink from one to six pages, providing the ability to set up different swiping motions to turn pages. This is optimal for people living in Japan and Asia, where the character layout is right to left and page turns are left to right. There are new games as well, such as a Words with Friends clone and a few others. Of course, users have a scrapbook to take advantage of the touchscreen and internet browser. There are enough options to get the most out of this e-reader, but not too many to overwhelm the average consumer. Kobo has made headlines from the beginning with their aggressive international expansion efforts. This allows customers to easily read books in their native languages. The Aura has core support for the UI and dictionaries for English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Brazilian, Portuguese and Japanese. All of the dictionaries are basically links which users can download them as needed, without having them all loaded on the device by default. This helps with memory and storage capacity. e-Reading Experience Kobo has debuted some new features that enhance the overall reading experience and aid readers in eBook discovery. The most exciting element is called Beyond the Book, and it allows readers to dive deeper into what their reading by tapping on highlighted words to discover related books, authors, articles, and more. They also showcase new Collections, which are pre-curated bundles of related authors, books, and articles based on themes. Kobo's entire line of e-Readers provides a tremendous flexibility in crafting a unique reading experience. There are eleven fonts bundled on the Aura and twenty-four different sizes. Advanced users can load in their own fonts that can be downloaded or purchased online. Kobo also has TypeGenuis, which offers further advanced options to adjust the weight and saturation. All of this comes with a before and after rendering on how the changes will look, comparing it against the existing settings. Kobo currently has a massive online bookstore with over 3.5 million titles where readers can easily purchase magazines, newspapers, bestsellers, comics, and kids' books. Wrap Up I am live at the Kobo Launch event in New York City and will be updating this post with videos, interviews and more pictures. I wanted to give you a preview of everything this new device brings to the table from press briefings and quick interviews ahead of the formal announcement. Hands-On with the New Kobo Aura is a post from: E-Reader News

URL: http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/hands-on-with-the-new-kobo-aura?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hands-on-with-the-new-kobo-aura