Kobo eReader Touch Edition: Inexpensive Touchscreen E-Reader Makes Few Concessions

Updated: 11/22/2011

It's rare to find an inexpensive product that also introduces innovation into its category. And yet that's exactly what Kobo Books' Kobo eReader Touch Edition did. The company's third-generation e-reader, this model is among the smallest and lightest 6-inch E Ink e-readers currently available. The market has changed since Kobo introduced this model in June 2011, though; Then, $130 made it the cheapest e-reader with a touchscreen. Since then, Kobo has introduced an ad-supported "with offers" version for $100, same as the ad-supported price for Amazon's Kindle Touch, and Barnes & Nobles ad-free Nook Simple Touch. But at $130 for an ad-free version, it still brings something to the e-reading table--namely, a solid, better integrated, and more social e-reading experience than Amazon's ad-free Kindle offers, at $9 more.

It's compact, too--the eReader Touch Edition is the same height as the Nook, but it measures a half-inch narrower, and a smidgen (0.07) of an inch less deep. Not bad places to shave off a bit of a bulk: I found that the slimmer profiles--and the resulting narrow bezel, which measures about a half-inch--made the eReader Touch Edition very natural to hold. It's the easiest e-reader to hold in one hand, and flipping pages by tapping on the touchscreen was somewhat simpler for me just because my fingers didn't need to travel as far across the bezel to tap (or swipe) to the next page.

The chassis has a smooth, rubberized feel and a quilted texture on the back (as available on the previous Kobo Wireless eReader, which now costs $100). With this model, however, you get a choice of four colors: a black bezel with a black backing, or a white bezel with either a lavender, blue, or silver backing.

To turn on the eReader Touch Edition, you simply slide the power button on the top edge to the right; this is far more convenient than the button press at the bottom of either the fourth-generation Kindle or the Kindle Touch, or on the Sony Reader Wi-Fi. The unit has just one other button: the thin, metal home button centered beneath the display. Along the left side is a MicroSDHC card slot for adding up to 32GB of storage; at the bottom is the Micro-USB port for charging and for sideloading content via a computer. The built-in battery is rated for about one month, which is one month shy of Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's promises for the Kindle and Nook, respectively.

Kobo Touch: Navigation Basics

The eReader Touch Edition boots up from sleep very slowly. The central hub is the home page, a simple interface with tabs on top for your library, Reading Life, and the Kobo Store. The home page shows the covers of up to five books, newspapers, documents, or magazines you're in the midst of reading; or, it will show new content added to the eReader. Along the bottom of the home page are three simple icons, one each for accessing the user guide, changing the settings, and syncing to the Kobo library cloud. Oddly, the syncing button is, for now, the only apparent way to change the wireless network; you'll find no way to refresh networks under the wireless-networks option in the settings--which is where you'd expect the feature.

Navigating by touch is simple and responsive. Tap the screen to open a book, turn a page, or select a menu or option. You can also swipe to turn a page. Press and hold a word to call up the text-selection menu: You get a start point and an end point around that word, and the ability to look up the word in the dictionary. Alternatively, you can drag the stop and end points to underline a passage and save that highlight. I found it annoying, though, that not all books work with text selection, a limitation that I encountered on some of my test ePub books. Kobo warns as much in its otherwise thorough user manual, but doesn't explain when or why text highlighting and the dictionary may be available on some books and not others.

In PDFs, double-tap works to zoom in to a page and make it bigger, or to zoom out of an already enlarged page. Once zoomed in, you can drag about the page by tapping and holding down while moving your finger. Unfortunately, you can't change text properties on PDF files.

The library is divided into Books & Docs, Shortlist (defined here as a shortcut to current faves), News & Mags (for any periodical subscriptions), and Previews (which shows samples of new books). Shortlist works as a convenient shortcut for cutting through lots of material stored on your eReader; it has three views, it and makes finding things easy and visual. If that's not enough, you can also search the eReader Touch Edition for what you seek.

Kobo uses Neonode's zForce infrared touch technology, the same as on the Nook. Overall I found the touchscreen suitably responsive for navigation and typing on the virtual keyboard. However, the on-screen keyboard sometimes had difficulty keeping pace with my speedy fingers, and I was prone to errors because of the tight, cramped layout: The keys are small, with no spacing in between. By contrast, the Nook's virtual keyboard has island keys that make typing simple.

The Kobo has improved its text handling, social capabilities, and annotations (you can now do both highlighting and notes).

Kobo: Display Variances

The eReader Touch Edition uses the same 6-inch E Ink Pearl display as on the Kindle and Nook (and Sony's much more expensive Reader Touch Edition). That isn't to say, however, that words looked identical here as on other e-readers; text looked good, and darker on the whole than on the Nook, but not as good as on the Kindle. On this model the E Ink background actually looked a bit brighter, and less flat and gray, than on the Nook. That appearance didn't last, though. Instead, as I paged through books, I often found that the background got a bit muddied with echoes of previous pages. Eventually the effect would go away, but while present it would detract slightly from the clarity of the display most of the time; occasionally it affected readability. At the time of my original review, Kobo said it was looking into why this might be happening; unfortunately, the issue is still there, even with the most recent firmware updates (it was especially obvious on the font menu).

I also had the sense that the eReader Touch Edition's page turns are neither as fast or as flicker-free as on the Nook, but they are still far better than on the previous Kobo--and they even beat out the Amazon Kindle (third generation). They are smooth, and competitive with the newest Kindles, too. Kobo claims that its unit has the same six-page turning cache that the Nook has, but I felt that the updated eReader Touch Edition lagged behind the updated Nook Simple Touch's page-turn abilities.

Kobo's simple and streamlined interface is appealing, and makes it easy to accomplish tasks. Everything about the eReader Touch Edition is more responsive and more usable than what we've seen from any of the previous iterations of Kobo e-readers. I really liked how reading-centric Kobo's menus are. Kobo put some pleasing touches on the navigation, though. For example, the navigation display accessible at the bottom of a book screen has an icon to jump to the table of contents, add the book to your Shortlist, or mark the book as finished (relevant for your Reading Life statistics). It also displays a static progress bar that shows where you are in the book. To move among locations, you have to tap to first call up the menu, then tap again on the bidirectional-arrow icon, which calls up the page number and chapter number out of how many total pages, a slider that you can use to move ahead (as you slide your finger, the chapter and page info change accordingly), and page and chapter forward and backward buttons. Even though the page numbers here track along with the print counterpart's page numbers, when you reach the start of a new print page, tiny numbers appear in the right column to signify the top of the new page. Kobo's firmware updates have added some additional home screen personalization options, as well as automatic last page bookmarking, word translation via one of the on-board international dictionaries, and the ability to search, even in an ePub.

Kobo's Social and World Network

One of the distinctive aspects of the eReader Touch Edition is that it incorporates support for Kobo's Reading Life, which the company introduced earlier this year in its apps for mobile devices. Reading Life tracks your reading patterns, such as how long you're spending reading your current selection, how many pages you've turned, and how many books you've finished reading. The social networking platform allows you to share your Reading Life status via Facebook, as well as to earn awards for your progress. Although you don't get many options for what Reading Life does and doesn't track, you do have a choice as to whether to keep the feature enabled.

Kobo is trying to shrink the world in other ways, too. The company bills its e-reader as the first international e-reader, in that it will let you buy books domestically or while abroad.

For those less familiar with Kobo, the company's bookstore carries more than 2.3 million e-books. And the company syncs your e-reader to its mobile versions, available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. I found the store underwhelming, however. Books were slow to download and slow to browse. It's better than having nothing on the unit, but I found myself wishing for a more dynamic experience.

The eReader Touch Edition supports ePub, PDF, and Adobe DRM books. It also supports borrowing e-books from libraries.

The Kobo eReader Touch Edition, the company's third e-reader, is its best yet. My biggest gripes are that I'd like the menu text to be darker and more distinct than it is, and for the shopping interface to be more responsive. Other than these points, the eReader Touch Edition is a very competitive reader, with a responsive, easily navigable interface, and a lot of functionality. At $100 with ads, it's worthy competitor to Amazon's Kindle Touch, especially if you prize weight and size, wish to purchase books overseas, or enjoy the social nature of Kobo's Reading Life environment.