Contents
The Device
The Kobo Mini is a very small eReader made by Canadian company Rakuten. It has a 5" glare-free touch screen, and comes in white or black, with coloured snap-covers for the back in a variety of shades. Plus, you can also get decals from Decal Girl, if you like. It weighs 134g, and is 0.4 inches thick - about the same as a pen. It is monochrome, and does not light up.
From personal experience, I can tell you that it easily fits into a coat pocket, and, a little more snugly, into a jeans pocket. The screen is perfectly visible in bright light. On the downside, I have found the touch screen to be a little unresponsive sometimes so I've had to tap twice or tap with a nail rather than a fingertip.
Price
I got my Kobo Mini for £49.99 with a free snapback case (pink). They generally retail for £59.99.
Selection
Kobo's website has a huge amount of books available. However, many are also available in the Kindle store for the same price or cheaper.
Rakuten is very much of the opinion that "your ebooks are YOUR ebooks", and it's very easy to put non-Kobo files onto your eReader. I generally use Calibre to convert them and/or strip the DRM and upload them, but you can also just drag and drop the files onto your device when you've plugged it in. This means that you can download free books from Obooko.com and all sorts of other places - including the Kindle Store.
Battery Life
I read for 2-3 hours or more a day, and I doubt that the Kobo Mini would last a week on a full charge at this rate. However, it recharges quickly. It uses a USB charger which plugs right into the wall plugs I got for my iPhone.
Wi-Fi
You can sign into wi-fi hotspots, or edit your library using the desktop application. If you don't have wi-fi at home, I fear that this could be a problem due to the buggy nature of the desktop app.
Apps
The Kobo desktop app is disappointing. It's extremely slow and prone to freezing
It does make it easy to specify which books you want downloaded to your device, and which you wish to keep archived. You can read books on it too, and, theoretically, get your recommendations or search for other books and buy them. However, it's so prone to freezing that I don't actually do any of that.
The iOS app works a lot better. You can choose which books you want downloaded and which you want archived, separately to what you keep on your device or PC.
Page Count
The Kobo Mini (and, presumably, other Kobo devices) will tell you how many pages there are in the current chapter, and what percentage of the way through the book you are. You can't tell how many pages are left in the entire book.
By 'pages' I mean screens in your current font and size, rather than the real page count you may be used to with Kindle devices.
Text
You can choose to display text in a variety of fonts, and resize the text, margins, and line spacing. You can also change the justification.
The variations in size, margins and line-spacing are all done on a sliding scale, so you won't see the results until after you've changed it. This is in comparison to Kindle devices, in which you choose from a variety of sizes/spacing/margins which are shown clearly before you click on them.
Menu
I love the Kobo's menu screen, ie, how it displays your library. At first it will show you four book covers, in order of most recently opened. When you click on 'library' it will show you either your entire library, or only items currently downloaded to your device, in either list format or tiled covers. The list format also shows you how big the file is, how much of it you've read, what kind of file it is, and a small image of the cover. You can only see five items per screen in list format, or six per screen in tile format. You can organise items by title, author, or recently read.
Archiving/Downloading
You have the choice of either archiving books or keeping them on your device. On your menu screen, you can choose to view all the books that you own or only those currently on your device. I generally split this into books I've read and books I haven't, so it's handy for me. It takes a minute or two for a book to download.
Interactivity
The Kobo has numerous awards you can earn for various things, which are very sweet. They're like the X-Box achievements, and you can see the list of the ones that I know about here. Unfortunately, Rakuten appear to have lost interest in updating and supporting them.
Rakuten frequently run competitions on KoboBooks.com, offering money and Kobo Glos as prizes. These have typically taken the form of ten questions, with a new one released per day. Answering correctly nets you a money-off code for between 10-75%, and answering all ten correctly enters you into the prize draw. You can answer all questions on the final day, rather than checking back every day if you prefer. So far, Kobo have been running competitions like that every six weeks or so. You can't use these codes on every book - typically, they're used to push the slightly less best-selling ones, which are often very good.
They also ran a rather fun competition recently where they released three free short stories a week or so apart. The idea was to use clues in the text and illustrations to locate a website, and finding all three would get you the information you needed to find the entry form. I did try to take part in that, but it was too hard for me. Stories were good though.
Subscriptions
The Kobo subscription service does not currently work in the UK.
- The Device
- Price
- Selection
- Battery Life
- Wi-fi
- Apps
- Page Count
- Text
- Menu
- Archiving/Downloading
- Interactivity
- Subscriptions
The Device
The Kobo Mini is a very small eReader made by Canadian company Rakuten. It has a 5" glare-free touch screen, and comes in white or black, with coloured snap-covers for the back in a variety of shades. Plus, you can also get decals from Decal Girl, if you like. It weighs 134g, and is 0.4 inches thick - about the same as a pen. It is monochrome, and does not light up.
From personal experience, I can tell you that it easily fits into a coat pocket, and, a little more snugly, into a jeans pocket. The screen is perfectly visible in bright light. On the downside, I have found the touch screen to be a little unresponsive sometimes so I've had to tap twice or tap with a nail rather than a fingertip.
Price
I got my Kobo Mini for £49.99 with a free snapback case (pink). They generally retail for £59.99.
Selection
Kobo's website has a huge amount of books available. However, many are also available in the Kindle store for the same price or cheaper.
Rakuten is very much of the opinion that "your ebooks are YOUR ebooks", and it's very easy to put non-Kobo files onto your eReader. I generally use Calibre to convert them and/or strip the DRM and upload them, but you can also just drag and drop the files onto your device when you've plugged it in. This means that you can download free books from Obooko.com and all sorts of other places - including the Kindle Store.
Battery Life
I read for 2-3 hours or more a day, and I doubt that the Kobo Mini would last a week on a full charge at this rate. However, it recharges quickly. It uses a USB charger which plugs right into the wall plugs I got for my iPhone.
Wi-Fi
You can sign into wi-fi hotspots, or edit your library using the desktop application. If you don't have wi-fi at home, I fear that this could be a problem due to the buggy nature of the desktop app.
Apps
The Kobo desktop app is disappointing. It's extremely slow and prone to freezing
It does make it easy to specify which books you want downloaded to your device, and which you wish to keep archived. You can read books on it too, and, theoretically, get your recommendations or search for other books and buy them. However, it's so prone to freezing that I don't actually do any of that.
The iOS app works a lot better. You can choose which books you want downloaded and which you want archived, separately to what you keep on your device or PC.
Page Count
The Kobo Mini (and, presumably, other Kobo devices) will tell you how many pages there are in the current chapter, and what percentage of the way through the book you are. You can't tell how many pages are left in the entire book.
By 'pages' I mean screens in your current font and size, rather than the real page count you may be used to with Kindle devices.
Text
You can choose to display text in a variety of fonts, and resize the text, margins, and line spacing. You can also change the justification.
The variations in size, margins and line-spacing are all done on a sliding scale, so you won't see the results until after you've changed it. This is in comparison to Kindle devices, in which you choose from a variety of sizes/spacing/margins which are shown clearly before you click on them.
Menu
I love the Kobo's menu screen, ie, how it displays your library. At first it will show you four book covers, in order of most recently opened. When you click on 'library' it will show you either your entire library, or only items currently downloaded to your device, in either list format or tiled covers. The list format also shows you how big the file is, how much of it you've read, what kind of file it is, and a small image of the cover. You can only see five items per screen in list format, or six per screen in tile format. You can organise items by title, author, or recently read.
Archiving/Downloading
You have the choice of either archiving books or keeping them on your device. On your menu screen, you can choose to view all the books that you own or only those currently on your device. I generally split this into books I've read and books I haven't, so it's handy for me. It takes a minute or two for a book to download.
Interactivity
The Kobo has numerous awards you can earn for various things, which are very sweet. They're like the X-Box achievements, and you can see the list of the ones that I know about here. Unfortunately, Rakuten appear to have lost interest in updating and supporting them.
Rakuten frequently run competitions on KoboBooks.com, offering money and Kobo Glos as prizes. These have typically taken the form of ten questions, with a new one released per day. Answering correctly nets you a money-off code for between 10-75%, and answering all ten correctly enters you into the prize draw. You can answer all questions on the final day, rather than checking back every day if you prefer. So far, Kobo have been running competitions like that every six weeks or so. You can't use these codes on every book - typically, they're used to push the slightly less best-selling ones, which are often very good.
They also ran a rather fun competition recently where they released three free short stories a week or so apart. The idea was to use clues in the text and illustrations to locate a website, and finding all three would get you the information you needed to find the entry form. I did try to take part in that, but it was too hard for me. Stories were good though.
Subscriptions
The Kobo subscription service does not currently work in the UK.
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