Kobo Touch review
Design The Kobo Touch is smaller and
lighter again than the Wireless,
making it the most compact (if
not the lightest) six-inch reader
on the market. It's done this by
minimising the number of buttons on the device; now there
is only one, a single bar for home
button placed at the bottom of
the device. Even the side buttons
are gone, and the power button
is a discreet silver slider set in the top edge. The face of the device, in hard
matt plastic, is clean and
unadorned apart from a small
Kobo logo, and it's available in
both black and white. Kobo's
signature quilted back is still there, set into the back rather
than wrapping around, and you
can get your white reader with a
silver, lilac or blue back; for the
first time, the black reader has a
black back. A micro-USB port for charging
and data transfer is on the
bottom of the e-reader, and a
micro-SD slot is in the left side. A
tiny charge indicator light is
nestled near the power button on the top, which isn't very
convenient for a quick glance,
but at least it's there. Features Like all Kobo e-readers, the
eReader Touch is light on
additional features, choosing to
focus on reading. The Kobo
eReader is still what it has
always been: a single-purpose, single-minded device. This is not a bad thing;
concentrating on one purpose
can deliver a very well thought-
out product, and that is what we
have here. As enhancements to the reading
experience, the Kobo eReader
Touch has a built-in dictionary; a
range of viewing options,
including font type and size, and
line and margin spacing; page numbering and a new go-to
page feature; landscape
orientation for PDFs; and the
ability to mark a book as read. There is also a web browser,
although it's still being tweaked;
we couldn't get it to go directly
to URLs typed in the address bar.
It would only recognise links
typed into the Google search engine home page, although we
did manage to access web mail
in that fashion. Still notably absent is multiple
bookmarking, although buried in
the settings menu, you can find
Kobo's experimental
"sketchbook" if you feel the need
to jot down a note or smiley face or two. This Kobo also allows
highlighting — although you can
highlight passages by pressing
and holding a word, then
dragging the marker to your
chosen end point. A store link, available on Wi-Fi, is
also included; tapping "Store" on
the e-reader's home screen will
take you directly to the Kobo
store. Probably the most notable thing
is Kobo's new social application
for reading. Called Reading Life, it
integrates a couple of fun
features into your reading;
namely, awards in the form of badges and the ability to share
your badges on Facebook. These
can be for achievements such as
reading at certain times of the
day, the number of books added
to your Kobo library, and the number of books read. You can also check out your
stats. This screen tells you how
far you are in your current book
and how long it has taken you to
read it, as well as a bunch of
overall stats, such as how much of your library you have
managed to get through, how
many books you have finished
and how many hours you have
spent reading on your Kobo. If you don't care for the
occasional pop up on the bottom
of your screen while you are
engrossed in a book, you can
turn these off from the advanced
options menu. Reading Life on the Kobo
eReader Touch doesn't offer as
many options as it does on, say,
a PC or smartphone application;
you can't, for example "meet"
the characters in books via Reading Life's Check In or share
passages of your book, but it
does emphasise Kobo's
philosophy that reading should
be, overall, a fun experience ...
and we're completely on board with that. Performance From the instant you turn it on,
the Kobo eReader Touch is head
and shoulders above the
Wireless, and probably the most
user-friendly e-reader interface
we've encountered. Although it looks different, it's super-easy to
navigate, and the home screen
manages to package all the
information in a light-hearted
fashion while keeping it easy to
find, displayed on what is easily one of the crispest E Ink displays
on the market. Four book covers
are displayed in the middle of
the screen, and menu options at
the top take you either to your
library, the Kobo ebook store or Reading Life. Icons at the bottom
of the screen take you to
settings, a help page or allow
you to sync your Kobo to a Kobo
account. As all nav buttons have been
removed, this all takes place
using the Kobo's infrared
touchscreen, and it's the best
such we've seen so far. The
device boasts an 800MHz processor (compared to the
532MHz processor found inside
the Kindle and the Kobo
Wireless), so it's a lot zippier; it
responds quick-smart to taps,
and tapped items are highlighted immediately even if the e-reader
has to think for a moment, so
you know straight away not to
try tapping again. Of course, that powerful
processor also means that the
Kobo's boot time is about as
quick as it gets — we timed it at
23 seconds from pushing the
power button to having an ebook open and ready to go. Of
course, you can also set the e-
reader never to turn off; from
sleep to reading is only a hair's
breadth from turning a page, and
turning a page is a blink. And never fear that the Touch's
battery can't handle being in
constant sleep; we had it either
on or sleeping for three and a
half weeks straight before the
battery needed a charge. It's not quite the month of battery life
claimed, but it's the longest
battery life we've seen in an e-
reader so far. Even better, unlike previous
Kobo e-readers, when the
battery puttered to a halt, the e-
reader managed to remember
the last page open — which
means no more having to wade forward through an entire book
to finish the last four pages. Navigating the store (a direct link
to the Kobo store, rather than the
Borders store on the Kobo
Wireless) is likewise a pleasant
experience. It takes a minute to
get itself going, but once you're in, it's fast and easy to navigate,
with a bunch of different
browsing options to help you
find a book quickly and easily:
you can search by genre and
bestseller; check out the free books available; browse through
the bookstore's top picks; "cheap
reads" for the budget-conscious;
and there's even a "hidden
gems" section, for great titles
that seem to have been overlooked. If you have a specific title in
mind, the search engine is easy
to use as well. Because the
processor is so fast, the text input
isn't nearly as laborious as we've
seen on previous e-readers, and a predictive list allows you to
quickly find an author or title
without having to tap out the
entire search term. 3G would
have been a nice addition, but
the experience is still more enjoyable than trying to
navigate Amazon on a Kindle.
