Kobo Mini
Kobo Mini
I went to Indigo/Chapters some weeks ago and I was looking at their e-book readers. I really wanted to get one but still felt undecided. I don’t really read much but I have a lot of e-books and PDFs that I’ve tried reading on my phone, computer and even an iPad but they just aren’t good for doing lots of reading and I get easily distracted just for the fact that those devices have internet. I decided to check Kijiji, a Canadian website similar to Craigslist, thinking a low price would make me get one. I saw many people selling readers (I hope is not a bad sign) at really good prices. I found a guy selling a brand new Kobo Mini for $50 bucks. I saw it at Indigo for $80 + taxes so I thought the price was good to finally get one. It was completely new, in a sealed box.
So I got a Kobo Mini! Kobo is a Canadian company who sells e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barns & Noble’s Nook. They are pretty popular here. The name Mini is because of the size, it is really small. It has a 5-inch display. At first I was actually hesitant about the size since my phone’s screen is 4.65" and when I first compared them at Indigo side by side my phone was actually a hair taller and the screen a bit longer. But since it was cheap I could just try it and if I liked it I could always upgrade to a bigger one in the future.
I think it was a great buy. Obviously the e-ink display is awesome for reading even in sunlight and unlike a heavy tablet, I can take the Mini anywhere just like my phone. I’ve been trying to fully discharge the battery since I bought it and I haven’t been able to.
To do some real estate comparisons, I downloaded the Kobo app on my phone and used one of the included books on both devices and as you can see in the picture, the same amount of text looks better on the Kobo. My phone has really nice pixel density so fonts are really crisp, and its OLED screen produces really black text, but still it just doesn’t feel good to read on it.
For some reason I find there’s something futuristic about the display. Even when there are tablets with ultra high-res colour screens, there is something about this black and white display which is awesome. The refreshing it does when skipping pages looks to me like from a futuristic movie, I guess because content looks so real like printed text that you don’t expect it to turn into something else, even pictures. When I turn off the Kobo, the display switches to the cover of the book I am currently reading and stays like that until I grab it and turn it on again. It makes it feel like it really is a book.
PDFs work really good. If the PDF has one, you can access its table of contents to jump through chapters. Using the touchscreen you can type and search words. The only thing I wish it had is text reflow on PDFs like some apps on my phone do but I’ve converted a few PDFs into EPUBs and they work fine. If I just want to read the PDF I can use the touchscreen to zoom and pan, and even with the e-ink display it shows when I am panning in real time. If I switch to landscape I get a wider view as well. Still, PDFs probably shine on bigger screens. Also magazines, which feature lots of color images and not too much text are better on a tablet.
The only problem I have now is that I want to read so many books at the same time!
Check it out here:
Looking good outdoors.
Size comparison - As tall as my keyboard.