Kobo Touch Edition eReader Review no comments
Kobo has updated its line of ereaders with the Kobo Touch Edition which, as the name implies, features a touchscreen. The zForce touchscreen from Neonode that it uses is the same as that of the Nook Simple Touch and the current generation of Sony ereaders.
I’ve been using my Kobo Touch for about six weeks now. I’m a bit late getting my review out, but I’ve had time to read a couple of ebooks on the ereader and to see three software updates already. Each of the updates from Kobo has brought new features — not all of which are documented, like the new drawing program I found while making the video. While I have found the Kobo Touch to be a relatively basic ereader in terms of its present features, I expect it will evolve rapidly if Kobo continues to release updates this aggressively.
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The packaging of the Kobo Touch Edition, while not as stylish as the boxing of the Nook Simple Touch, is practical and easy to open. The ereader exposed by the unboxing looks good, though it is a more squarish design and somewhat less elegant looking than the Nook Touch. 
The batteries arrived with about an 85 percent charge. There is no AC adaptor, so you need to charge it over the USB cable with your computer. The manual says you can use a generic USB wall charger as well.
To register and set up the Kobo Touch you need to use the USB to connect it to a computer that has the Kobo desktop application installed on it. I don’t much like this “feature” — setup should be accomplishable from the ereader itself. It does have Wi-Fi, after all. This requirement means more software to load onto one’s computer and it will make the ereader less suitable for those who are not computer savvy.
The Kobo PC application installed easily enough and I got my new ereader connected and set up with no glitches to report.
The Kobo Touch does feel good in my hands. I really like the way the quilted back feels and it is even a tad lighter than the new Nook ereader. Construction seems to be pretty good. The front and back are covered with the by now familiar nonslip rubberized coating. This makes the ereader more comfortable to hold, but it does collect dust.
There are no hard page turning buttons — only swiping or tapping the touchscreen is used for turning pages. The bezel is also rather narrow and it took me a while to find a comfortable position in which to hold this ereader one-handed without inadvertently touching the screen with my thumb and causing unwanted page turns. As I got used to the Kobo Touch this became a non-problem, but I prefer the presence of page-turning buttons as it does help to find a more comfortable way in which to hold and operate an ereader with one hand.
Other than the power slider switch at the top edge, the only hard button on the Kobo Touch is a chromed button on the bezel below the screen. This takes you to the Home screen.
The Home screen displays the five most recently read and added ebooks. 
At the bottom of the Home screen are virtual buttons to access the settings of the ereader and to sync to your Kobo account (and other Kobo apps). If you are reading a book and want to change settings, including turning Wi-Fi on or off, you will have to close your book and do so from here. The web browser is also accessed via the settings page.
At the top of the Home page are status icons for the battery and Wi-Fi connection. Battery life seems to be mediocre for an e-ink based ereader. With Wi-Fi on I only got about 10 days. With the Wi-Fi mostly turned off the battery lasted approximately 2 1/2 weeks before needing recharging.
Also at the top of the Home screen are buttons to take you to your library, shop at Kobo or go to the Reading Life page. Reading Life is Kobo’s social ereading platform. You will notice whilst reading that there will be an occasional message at the bottom of the page making you aware of a new award you have just earned. The Reading Life page lets you see your awards and various reading stats and share them with friends.
In your library you can choose to sort by Books, Periodicals, Previews or the Shortlist. The Shortlist is a kind of category you can place your favorite titles into to make them easier to get at. Of course, finding your ebooks would be easier if Kobo had thought to include the ability to create your own categories or bookshelves, but this feature is absent — at least as of yet. Books are added to the Shortlist by tapping on a heart icon beside the ebook’s thumbnail when viewing your library in List View. You can also add a title to the Shortlist while you are reading it.
Besides List View you can display a grid of book covers only or one cover per page. You can sort by Title, Author or Recent Reads. There is also a search tool, and you can delete titles from the device from within the library.
I’ve had the Kobo Touch Edition long enough to read a couple of ebooks on it and I’ve also opened and scanned through a few more. I have noticed some formatting inconsistencies that are rather worrisome.
Kobo’s approach to ereading seems overly chapter-centric to me. Kobo ebooks on the Kobo Touch display the page number in terms of your position within the chapter. For example, Chapter One – Page 7 of 29, where the same ebook on the Nook Touch might show Page 78 of 329. This is no big deal, but showing your position in relation to the total book would seem more useful to me.
More troublesome is that when you turn the last page of a given chapter there is a small spinning whirligig at the top of the page with a loading message. The last page turn of a chapter takes slightly longer than a normal page turn as the ereader launches the next chapter in your ebook. This is not a good thing.
Even less of a good thing is the occasional dropping of a line of text I experienced when reading a Kobo book. This probably happened 10-15 times
while reading an ebook of almost 400 pages. The missing line of text could be induced to give up its game of hide and seek by resizing the font — but this is definitely something that needs to be fixed. This appears to be a problem with the Kobo Touch ereader itself — the same Kobo ebook, when sideloaded to the Nook Touch did not suffer any dropped lines of text. The photo shows the line of text on the Nook Simple Touch (left) that is missing on the Kobo Touch. I have occasionally noticed dropped words when reading ebooks on other ereaders, but this was a bit excessive.
The second ebook I read on the Kobo TE was a library ebook that I sideloaded onto the ereader with Adobe DE. This ebook displayed the page numbers in the more conventional manner and didn’t suffer from the dropped line of text syndrome.
Hyperlinks to other locations within a book do not seem to be supported by the Kobo Touch Edition, even with an ebook purchased from Kobo. The hyperlinks worked fine when the same ebook was read on the Nook Touch or the Sony Touch ereaders.
One thing that bugs me about the Kobo Touch is that only automatic bookmarking is available at the moment. Unlike other touchscreen ereaders you cannot tap the upper right corner to set your own bookmarks whenever you want. The lack of this common feature is exacerbated by the lack of an effective ‘Back’ function and is going to be very frustrating if you are reading a title with endnotes or a bibliography you need to refer to while reading the text. You are going to have to manually find your way back and forth between the notes and your current reading position.
Tapping the center of the page while reading brings up a status bar at the top of the screen with a battery indicator and a toolbar at the bottom with a Home button (which is a waste, since there is a physical home button) and buttons for Menu, Navigation and Font selection.
The Menu button lets you go to the TOC, add the book to your Shortlist, Mark as Finished, open a Dictionary search page where you can type in a word to look up and a link to the Advanced Settings. I like Kobo’s Mark as Finished feature. This gives you the option of closing an ebook when you get to the end so that next time you open it you will start at the front rather than at the end page of the book.
The Advanced Settings page contains two items currently. First is a control that lets you set how often the e-ink screen does a complete refresh. The settings are from every page turn to every sixth page turn. This control would be appreciated on the Nook Touch, where occasional ghosting is evident. On the Kobo Touch Edition I never experienced any ghosting until I took the ereader outdoors and read in the sunlight for awhile.
After reading in the sun for 20-30 minutes I noticed not only artifacts of lines of text from previous pages, but a few dark black lines extending across the margins from the text to the edge of the screen began appearing. Changing the refresh rate made these effects go away, but this made me suspect that the Kobo Touch Edition has some heat dissipation issues.
A second Advanced Setting that was added in Kobo’s most recent software update (v1.9.6) gives you the ability to remove those annoying (to me anyway) page numbers that you sometimes see in the side margins of some ePub books.
Update 10/16/2011: Software update v1.9.12 has added an additional Advanced Setting: The ability to change where on the screen you tap to page forward or back. This update also brings the ability to make notes and highlights to the Kobo Touch.
The Navigation button gives you a slider to quickly navigate through the pages of the book, as well as arrow keys that will take you one page at a time in either direction or to the beginning or end of the current chapter. There is also an attempt at a Back function here. A recurved arrow icon (Kobo calls it the Snap Back icon) is supposed to return you to your original place, but in my experience it works very erratically and is not to be trusted. There is no Go To Page function.
The font button lets you choose between seven font styles, and you can easily add your own fonts as well. There are sliders to adjust font size, line spacing and margin width. You can also fiddle with the justification here.
Tapping and holding brings up the study tools, which at the moment consist of highlighting and dictionary lookup for Kobo ebooks, and a dictionary search page (and sometimes lookup) for sideloaded ebooks. Highlighting works for some sideloaded ebooks.
Reading PDF files on the Kobo Touch Edition is actually somewhat better than I anticipated. You can switch to landscape mode and you can zoom with a slider or by double tapping. Panning works pretty smoothly for an e-ink based device. Generally tablets work better for PDFs that you need to do a lot of panning and zooming with, while an e-ink display will be easier on the eyes and probably better for reading text-only ebooks in PDF format. The Kobo Touch ereader does not yet provide any annotation tools for PDF files — at least none where available in the PDFs I tried. You can open the dictionary search tool to type in a word for definition in PDFs.
To launch the Web browser on the Kobo Touch you have to go to the Home screen and then tap the settings icon and then Wi-Fi Connection and finally the Launch Browser button. The web browser on e-ink devices is never a first choice for me, but it is nice to have it if you don’t have another better suited device handy. The browser on the Kobo Touch seems very basic and I found it very frustrating to use. I could not find a way to get the browser to display in landscape, which would improve the experience. The keyboard is too small for me to use in portrait mode for entering addresses and other information without lots of frustrating mistakes.
The zForce touchscreen on the Kobo Touch does not seem quite as responsive as it is on the Nook Touch, and it really does not work well when using the browser. At times I had to tap a button a number of times to get a response. The touch screen also does not seem very accurate in the browser, which makes using the small keyboard in the browser make you want to bang your head on the wall.
Kobo Touch Edition vs Kindle 3 vs Nook Simple Touch
The Kobo Touch Edition is not a bad ereader, but it is overshadowed by the Nook Touch and the Kindle 3. I do expect it will get better, as Kobo has already released several updates that have brought improvements.
Compared to last year’s Kindle 3 the Kobo Touch Edition still seems rather basic and its feature set is relatively sparse. The Kindle 3 is thinner and more comfortable to hold and use one-handed. The Kindle 3 also seems faster to me, except when performing tasks where the touchscreen has obvious advantages over the hard keyboard and five-way controller. The Kobo Touch also, of course, does not give you access to the Kindle Store.
Neither is the Kobo Touch enticing when compared to the Nook Touch. The Kobo TE is not as pleasing to either the eye or the hand as the newest Nook. The Nook Touch is faster and features a better designed navigational system that is more intuitive to learn and more friendly to use. And while the Nook Touch may not have quite as many features and capabilities as the Kindle 3, it does have most of the features most readers will need and definitely more than the Kobo Touch Edition ereader.
Another thing to consider is that the Nook Touch will allow you to buy and read ebooks from Kobo and other ePub bookstores. While the Kobo Touch will let you read ebooks purchased from other ebookstores like the Sony Reader Store, you cannot read Nook Books on it because B&N uses their own variation of Adobe DRM. This will mean access to fewer titles with the Kobo ereader.
One advantage the Kobo Touch Edition does enjoy over the Nook Touch is that it is available internationally. Kobo is also opening new international ebookstores with local content.
I like the Kobo ebookstore as they often have coupons and discounts. In spite of the agency model fixing most ebook pricing you can sometimes find a better deal at Kobo. But I would recommend the Nook Touch (see my review) or the Kindle 3 (review) ereader as my first choice. Perhaps if the Kobo were priced at less than $100 it would be more appealing. But the Kindle Wi-Fi with Special Offers is only $114, so I’m not sure how much below $100 Kobo would have to go.
The Kobo Touch Edition eReader is currently priced at $129.99 and is available at Best Buy and Fry’s in the US. In Canada it is sold by Chapters Indigo Coles, Future Shop, Best Buy, Walmart, Sears (in stores only) and online only at Staples.
Kobo Touch Edition covers & cases
CaseCrown makes a variety of covers and cases for the Kobo Touch Edition that are under $20.
The Verso ereader covers from Lightwedge are marketed primarily for the Kindle 3 ereader at Amazon, but Lightwedge designed these covers to fit any ereader that is 4.5 – 4.9 inches x 6.7 – 7.7 inches. These covers are compatible with the Kobo eReaders and range in price from $39.99 to $49.99. I have one of these — see my review.
DecalGirlmakes skins to fit the Kobo Touch Edition, with currently just over 100 designs to choose from.
