| The Kobo Touch 2.0 is an entry level e-reader that has just been released in Canada and should hit international markets shortly. It is retailing for $89 Canadian or $61 US, which will be quite appealing to people on a budget. This device was designed to battle the Kindle Basic Touch, and does a fairly adequate job. Today, we would like to give you our comprehensive hands on review of the Kobo Touch 2.0. Hardware The Kobo Touch 2.0 features an e-Ink Pearl display with a resolution of 800×600 and 167 PPI. It uses the same IR-based touch technology that’s found in the Nook Simple Touch and many other e-readers in the Kobo portfolio. It works well; the screen was generally responsive to my commands. In order to make this device has cheap as possible Kobo decided to forgo an illuminated screen, which has been a mainstay of almost every single e-reader for the last four years. The last Kobo model not have a front-lit display was the Kobo Mini, which was released in 2012. Underneath the hood is an 1 GHz Freescale i.MX6 Solo Lite Processor and 4 GB of internal memory. You can remove the angular back plate to reveal a hidden SD card that has the operating system and critical software features. You can swap this out to increase the memory further, but you need to have somewhat advanced knowledge of how to use cloning software. The Touch 2.0 uses the same shell housing as the Kobo Glo HD, which was released earlier in the year. The only difference is that the GLo has a perforated back panel, while this model has a smooth surface, with two angles on either side. I like this design a bit better, because it tends not to get food particles and is somewhat resistant to the oil from your hands. The big question with the hardware, is how does the resolution come into play when you are reading e-books, manga and PDF files? You have to admit that on paper, the specs are poor. Software The Kobo Touch 2.0 features the same operating system that has been a mainstay of the companies hardware portfolio from the past few years. The thing I really like about the home screen is that it dynamically changes based on the books you buy or functions you access such as the web-browser. This provides shortcuts to books you are currently reading or tasks you regularly access, which saves time on jumping through a few sub-menus. I noticed right away that with the diminished resolution that all of the UI elements are much larger than the Kobo Glo HD or the Kobo Aura H2O. The battery icon, settings menu and so on are much more pronounced. This is short of like your PC if you have a poor video card, or none at all. All of your icons are much bigger to make up for the lack of resources. One of the things I like about the Kobo Bookstore that is bundled on the device is the ability to recommend titles based on your past purchases. For example, our review unit came with the e-Book Girl on a Train and it gave about 10 recommendations, such as All of the Light we Cannot See. You can also access articles from your Pocket – Formally Read it Later account, to turn your Kobo into a virtual news reader. e-Reading Experience The Kobo Touch includes 10 fonts, such as Amasis, Avenir Next, Caecilia, Georgia, Gill Sans, Kobo Nickel, Malabar, Gothic, Ryumin, and OpenDyslexi. If you happen to have a favorite font, such as the new Kindle Bookerly, you can easily import the fonts into your Kobo. All Kobo e-Readers offer line spacing and margin adjustment for your digital books. There's also the option to choose full justification, left justification, and you can turn justification off. When you are reading an e-book and hold down on a specific word it opens a dictionary window. From there you can choose different dictionaries and translation dictionaries. 19 different dictionaries are available in the settings menu. You can also make notes or highlights and then share specific passages via Facebook. Reading e-Books is very solid, and unless you put the Touch 2.0 side by side against higher resolution models such as the Kindle Voyage, or Kobo Glo HD you don’t notice the diminished resolution. It is only apparent when you read image heavy content such as manga and PDF files. The overall reading experience when reading PDF files is utterly abysmal and is easily the worst thing about the Touch 2.0. When you are pinching and zooming there are big problems with the PDF rendering engine. Instead of being fluid, the entire screen gets pixelated and starts to flash uncontrollably. This occurs both with small files, around 1 MB and large ones. In the end, the biggest advantage of Kobo e-readers is the sheer multitude of formats that it reads. It directly supports EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, Adobe DRM; Images: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF; Text: TXT, HTML, XHTML, and RTF; Comic Books: CBZ and CBR. You are not limited either to buying books from Kobo, but you can easily load in your own. It has support for Adobe DRM, so you can easily shop at other bookstores. Wrap Up I would only recommend this e-reader if you are new to reading on an e-ink device or if you have an older Kobo model and are looking for a cheap upgrade path. PROS Affordable CONS Internet browser is woeful Rating: 6.5/10
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Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Kobo Touch 2.0 e-Reader Review
Houston Library Develops a Digital Library Card
| Thousands of libraries all over North America issue physical cards that patrons can use to checkout materials at the branch or to use online. In a world of e-readers, smartphones and tablets this is counterproductive and the Harris County Library in Houston Texas has just developed the first digital library card. The program is dubbed iKnow, doesn’t offer all of the amenities of a full-service library card. It only allows you to borrow audiobooks, e-books, music and video online via Overdrive and can’t be used to check out hard copies of books. Many people who want to use the library to read books, newspapers and magazines might not live close to a branch and if they do, parents are juggling a job or two. This iKnow program is perfect for the smartphone generation or kids who just want to read. Since the launch on September 1st, over 300 people have registered for a card, including 10 children. “The goal is more reading,” said Michael Saperstein, multimedia selection librarian with Harris County Public Library. “We really want to reach those residents who we know may not ever come into physical spaces by providing as many options as we can. Whether they’re accessing digitally or physically, they’ll still be using the library.” I think this iKnow program is very intuitive and makes perfect sense for the digital world we live in. It allows adults and children who live far away from a branch to be able to read e-books on demand and there is no excuses anymore to not read. |
Read an eBook Day Occurs on September 18th
| Overdrive, the juggernaut of the digital library space invented their own holiday last year called Read an eBook Day. The premise is to encourage the adaption of reading, while promoting their own services. This year, they are encouraging librarians to share graphics they have made for their own branches, which include flyers, stickers or handouts. The best of the bunch will receive free credits for the Overdrive Marketplace. If you are feeling especially creative or have a few interns who are footloose and fancy free, simply take a picture of your promotional content and share it with Overdrive on social media using the hashtag #eBookLove. They will be sharing some of their favorite submissions throughout the day on the OverDrive for Libraries Facebook and Twitter accounts. |
Kobo Touch 2.0 Review and Video Demo
| Review Date: September 2015 – Review unit purchased from Chapters.Indigo Overview The Kobo Touch 2.0 is Kobo’s latest entry-level ebook reader. It’s very similar to the Kobo Glo HD, but it lacks a frontlight and it has a lower resolution screen. As the name implies, the Kobo Touch 2.0 is a second generation model. It […] |
Waterproof Kindle Paperwhite From Waterfi Now Selling on Amazon
| I came across a new listing for a waterproof Kindle Paperwhite over at Amazon today. The product isn’t new but it’s the first time it’s been available from Amazon’s website, and there are a few things you should know before buying. The waterproof Kindles aren’t sold by Amazon. They are an aftermarket product sold by […] |
The Eagerly Awaited Raspberry Pi Display
| You’ve been incredibly patient: thank you. The official Raspberry Pi touch display is on sale today, priced at $60 (plus local taxes and shipping): you can buy it at the Swag Store, at RS Components/Allied Electronics and at Premier Farnell/Newark. Other sellers will be receiving stock later this week. We gave one to Alex Eames of RasPi.TV a couple of weeks back so that he could give us one of his famously clear video introductions: Two years ago, I began the process of looking for a simple, embeddable display for the Raspberry Pi. I honestly believed it would only take us six months from start to end, but there were a number of issues we met (and other products diverted our attention from the display – like Rev 2.1, B+, A+, and Pi 2). But we've finally got there, and I thought you might be interested in learning about our journey. Display Technology First of all, here’s an overview of the technology involved in the different types of display that the Raspberry Pi can support. Currently the Raspberry Pi can support the following display interfaces: HDMI
DPI
DSI
DBI
So our solution to this problem was to employ both DSI (to avoid using up all the GPIOs) and DPI (easily available screens in suitable resolutions) and a bridge chip/conversion board to convert between the two. We got in touch with many display manufacturers to try and get a display that would tick the following requirements:
Of course lifetime is one of the most important requirements, because if a display only has a lifetime of a few months (or the manufacturer is uninterested in guaranteeing a minimum lifetime), we would have to repeat the whole development cycle once more. So we can't just buy a display that's used in your standard iDevice, because it is likely to be cancelled when the iCompany decides to move to another manufacturer! When looking for a device, we needed to look for what are termed 'Industrial' LCD displays. These tend to have better-quality metrics and guaranteed availability. In the end we chose an industrial-quality display from our friends at Inelco Hunter based in the UK, who were able to create something very special:
Our first PCB to do the DSI to DPI conversion was completed back in mid-2013. The board used a Toshiba bridge chip to convert the DSI signals to DPI ones. I spent quite a bit of time getting the Raspberry Pi to talk to the bridge device, and then got it working and displaying an image (yay). We then took it to our local EMC test facility to investigate how easy it would be to pass CE and FCC electromagnetic compliance. A little word on compliance… When electrical currents flow around a circuit board, they create electro-magnetic fields, which can be picked up by other electronic devices. Maybe you remember what used to happen to your CRT television when your mum turned on the hoover (sorry for those of you without any experience of analogue television). This was becoming a problem for television and radio receivers; when I was a kid and plugged in my Spectrum 48K, the radio wouldn't work properly any more. So the powers that be introduced new rules about the amount of energy a device can output at various frequencies from 25MHz up to a couple of GHz. You have to make sure your electronic devices do not cause interference, and are not susceptible to electronic interference. The best way to reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI) is to keep your high-frequency signals short and close to a nice continuous ground plane, reduce the frequency and drive of the signals (reducing the high frequency components), and reduce the maximum swing of the signals to reduce the signal power. Looking at modern communication systems, that's exactly what they do: for example, DSI has a signal swing of only 0.2V and only has two or four actual signal lanes. Unfortunately, DPI is 1.8V signal swing, and although much slower, it needs 28 signal wires, meaning 28x more paths with the same edges switching up and down at the same time. This gives us an output looking something like: The green line is the class A line, and the black is class B (we need to reach Class B). You need to be below the black line if you want to sell the device to be used in the home. Back to the drawing board The next step was to understand why the EMI is so bad, so we tried redesigning the board so it looks like a HAT (it's not actually a HAT because there is no EEPROM for device tree information), and added an Atmel device to control the power/reset and PWM for the backlight. We also went through three different iterations of adding chokes to improve the noise conducting down the power supply cable, and manipulating the route of the DPI signals to improve the path of the ground return. In the end we did reach our goal of a class B EMC pass which is a great achievement considering where we started! Building the display from scratch The first displays are supplied as a kit which requires some initial construction. Alex Eames from RasPi.TV has helpfully provided a video showing how to do it. Connecting the display The display module integrates the LCD display with a conversion board that should be plugged into the Raspberry Pi through the display connector. Be aware that the connector is the same as the camera connector, but the two are not compatible, so be careful to correctly identify the display connector first. The 15-way FPC connector should already be plugged into the display conversion board with the silvered contacts face-up. You can then plug the connector into the Raspberry Pi with the silvered connectors inboard (facing towards the USB connectors). Powering the display There are three options for powering the display: 1) Separate power supply Just add a separate uUSB power supply rated for at least 500mA, and plug into the display board where it says "PWR IN". 2) USB link Attach an official 2A Raspberry Pi power supply to the display board "PWR IN" connector, then attach a standard uUSB connector from the "PWR OUT" connector to the Raspberry Pi. 3) GPIO jumpers Attach two of the supplied jumpers to connect 5V and GND from the Pi. Using the display To use the display the user just needs to do the following: $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade $ sudo reboot The Raspberry Pi will now automatically detect the display and use it as the default display (rather than HDMI), although HDMI will still be initialised. If you'd prefer for the HDMI display to stay as default then add: display_default_lcd=0 to the config.txt file. Dual display usage It is possible to use both display outputs at the same time, but it does require software to choose the right display. Omxplayer is one application that has been modified to enable secondary display output. To start displaying a video onto the LCD display (assuming it is the default display) just type: # omxplayer video.mkv To start a second video onto the HDMI then: # omxplayer --display=5 video.mkv Please note, you may need to increase the amount of memory allocated to the GPU to 128MB if the videos are 1080P, adjust the Display numbers are: DISPMANX_ID_FORCE_LCD 4 DISPMANX_ID_FORCE_TV 5 DISPMANX_ID_FORCE_OTHER 6 /* non-default display */ Touchscreen The Raspberry Pi display has an integrated 10-point touchscreen (a bit of an overkill, but it does seem to work well). The driver for this touchscreen outputs both standard mouse events and full multi-touch events, and therefore can work with X as a mouse (although not brilliantly – X was never designed to work with a touchscreen!). Kivy Kivy is a Python GUI development system for cross-platform applications. It is designed to work with touchscreen devices (phones and tablets), but also runs on the Raspberry Pi. To install Kivy onto your Pi follow the instructions at http://kivy.org/docs/installation/installation-rpi.html I'm fairly sure that these are the instructions that worked for me, although I make no claims that it's an easy task! This short, soundless video shows off the possibilities of Kivy with multipoint touch nicely. Raspberry Pi’s Matt Richardson has been experimenting with using Kivy to allow the touchscreen to control Raspberry Pi’s GPIO, and vice versa: From the videos you can see how capable the interface is. I'm in the process of developing a touchscreen application for an installation at home to control a safety and heating monitoring system, so you’ll probably hear more about that at some point! Last of all, if you’d like a stand for your display, you could do a lot worse than to take a look at the 3D-printed one that Matt Timmons-Brown has designed; we like it a lot. You’ll find his model on Thingiverse. Have fun, and make something awesome! Gordon The post The Eagerly Awaited Raspberry Pi Display appeared first on Raspberry Pi. |