Kobo Adds Color To Its E-reader Lineup For the First Time (arstechnica.com) 47
Kobo, a leading e-reader company, is set to release its first color e-readers on April 30: the Kobo Clara Colour ($149.99) and Kobo Libra Colour ($219.99). These devices feature colorful screens, waterproofing, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth, USB-C, and an adjustable frontlight.
The Clara has a 6-inch screen, while the Libra boasts a 7-inch display and supports the Kobo Stylus. Both utilize E Ink's Kaleido 3 technology, offering 4,096 colors and improved resolution. Kobo's competitive pricing undercuts other color e-readers, which typically start at $300. The company is also updating its black-and-white Clara model, now called Clara BW, with a faster processor at a lower price of $129.99.
The Clara has a 6-inch screen, while the Libra boasts a 7-inch display and supports the Kobo Stylus. Both utilize E Ink's Kaleido 3 technology, offering 4,096 colors and improved resolution. Kobo's competitive pricing undercuts other color e-readers, which typically start at $300. The company is also updating its black-and-white Clara model, now called Clara BW, with a faster processor at a lower price of $129.99.
Is this an ad? (Score:1)
This is hardly "news."
Anyway, a crappy product in color isn't much improvement over a crappy product in black & white.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
oh wow, its the exact same thing from 14 years ago for the same price, they should get a effin Nobel Prize for their innovation!
Re: Is this an ad? (Score:2)
It's the same price? Cool, now adjust for inflation.
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The Nook Color was an LCD screen, not a color e-ink display.
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If you're not familiar with e-readers, why are you posting? E-readers use a different sort of screen than a tablet. It's a easier to read (or different, at least) and uses less battery. Yes, you can read a book on a tablet with an LCD screen, but that's not the same thing.
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He just said "this isn't an LCD", the Nook Color was. Of course there *have* been e-ink color displays already, but the Nook Color was not it. Color eInk has only been available sort of since 2019, and the iteration Kobo is going with is only a few months old, and aside from Kobo, has largely been ignored by the more prominent eInk device manufacturers. The manufacturers have had good reason to be reluctant, it comes with some heavy compromises for black and white display mode for the sake of relatively lo
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Oh wow you don't even have a single clue as to what you're talking about, while trying to be snarky and condescending about it.
Color LCD != color e-ink display. Also, the particular variant of display in the product being talked about here was only launched from the manufacturer a year ago. [eink.com]
So basically you're an idiot trying to make a false equivalence that can be disproven as absolute shit in 20 seconds of googling. Congratulations.
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What the heck are you talking about? The device in OP's article is a *COLOR* E Ink device. The first Nook was black-and-white E Ink device with a tiny color LCD screen.
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If you don't want to be imprisoned by Amazon's ecosystem...
There are ways to extract your books from the Amazon ecosystem.
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"There are ways to extract your books from the Amazon ecosystem."
Not any more.
It used to be possible to convert them to epub using Calibre with the right plugins, and load them onto Kobo, but that is no longer the case. There are now very few (and no current) Amazon books that you can read on anything but Kindle, either the app or a physical reader. If you value being able to read on the device of your choice, the Kobo store is clearly the superior alternative.
The other valuable thing about Kobo is that y
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Re:Is this an ad? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to disagree for one very important reason, this device could have potential in the education market specifically because it's not a full-featured computer.
One of the problems with general purpose full-featured computers in the hands of students is the ability to get off-task. The student may have one assignment that they're supposed to do, but that student may have dozens of things that they would like to do for their own entertainment on said device. It requires self-discipline for the student to stay on the required task, and many students simply don't have that discipline.
When the electronic device has only a very limited number of functions then this makes it harder to go off-task due to the nature of the device itself.
And for those who are skeptical, think back to the days of using a simple calculator or even a scientific calculator versus switching to a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. After typing in 5318008 a few times there wasn't a lot of off-task use of the simpler calculators, but for the graphers we had even rudimentary text-based computer games as far back as the mid-nineties.
A color e-ink reader with some basic applet capability that doesn't support side-loading could make for a useful educational tool if textbooks are loaded on it and if it can do basic worksheet editing and submission.
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The advantage of computers is how much else they can do. Yes that's
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The well-to-do school districts like to show off fancy shit to parents so that they don't take their kids to a private school.
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I couldn't tell you exactly what kids use computers for, but I spent 20 years in IT for a K-12, and spreadsheets were not part of the curriculum for K-8 grades. High school students used spreadsheets for proper spreadsheet things (ie, not as a glorified database flat-file) as a primary function only in business-applications classes.
It would be difficult to type a term paper on a device without a keyboard, but we've already seen keyboard dock solutions for other tablet devices including those that don't run
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This is fantastic news for textbook revisionists! We can quietly change embarassing or immoral details immediately, what do you mean we said something different last week student? where is the proof?
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Kindle Fire is cheaper (Score:2)
You can get a Kindle Fire HD 10 for less than a hundred bucks these days
Re: Kindle Fire is cheaper (Score:2)
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There are people who genuinely like the months long battery life of eink readers. But, this strongly reads like a slashvertisement.
I still have a couple of e-readers, and I usually take one with me when I go on vacation because it's much easier to read sitting out in the sun and I can read all afternoon without having to worry about the battery life.
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it's much easier to read sitting out in the sun and I can read all afternoon without having to worry about the battery life.
Unlike a book which can be read in the sunlight and you never have to worry about battery life.
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Ahh yes, I also love lugging around *checks calibre library for just the books I have that are NOT from any store*.... 806 books with me everywhere I go.
Hmmm, and last I checked, my e-reader was still significantly smaller and lighter than even the 2-3 books, much less my entire library, that I might want to read while away from home or on vacation.
Oh, and good luck reading that paper book in dark / dimly lit areas. My e-reader lasts weeks / multiple books on a single charge, even using the backlight at low
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And for people that don't read at the speed of a 2nd grader, books have a "mass" and "volume" problem when you're talking about travel - for every book you bring, you add a linear amount of mass and volume to your limited packing space.
eReaders with digital storage do not have that problem, while having sufficient battery to last multiple days without charging. But good job ignoring the given constraints.
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Re:Kindle Fire is cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you just compare a device with a 13hour battery life to a device with a battery life measured in months? The Kindle Fire HD 10 is not an e-ink reader. It's like comparing playing Baldur's Gate 3 with getting a bunch of friends around a table with dice to play D&D. Two very different things to achieve only a tangentially similar thing.
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It's bad enough when people mention the battery life in "months" without saying how many minutes of daily use it assumes, but even worse when comparing one device's actual use with another one's nearly all standby.
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how many minutes of daily use it assumes
It doesn't assume any minutes of daily use. Battery life of these devices is measured in interactions. The e-ink reader batteries last a lot longer for me than my girlfriend because I read slower than she does. Yet stats would show that I use it more.
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It doesn't assume ONLY minutes of daily use, it assumes many things, like indeed a certain reading speed, general usage (indexing, serch, etc.), how WiFi/bluetooth/back/frontlight is used and so on. Specifically Kindle at some point had a pissing contest with some competitor where they were counting 60 minutes of use per day as opposed to 30 for the competitor and at some point they said, ok we are going to count 30 minutes ourselves too, now your Kindle has double battery life, from two weeks to a month.
In
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Someone already replied about battery life, I'll add that Kobo makes it super easy to side-load content you already have (through whatever means.) They don''t force you to buy everything through their store. Also works well with public library systems.
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What?
That's not E Ink, silly.
Kobo when offline (Score:2)
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You can use a kobo e-reader completely offline and even bypass registration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Kobo when offline (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know anything about the Kobo app but have had several Kobo E-reader devices over many years. I always have Wi-Fi turned off on these devices. I sideload my books and so have no need for internet connectivity. They work fine without internet.
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Funny, I sideload everything too, and I keep the wifi on all the time, because I use KoboCloud to load my epubs wirelessly (and because I added google translate to the list of search engines).
What keeps a tablet, such as (Score:1)
...an iPad, from serving the same function? If I'm paying extra for color, I might was well browse & troll the web also to take a brake from an e-book.
Is the text easy on the eyes? Anyone here tested? I thought advantage of gray-scale is one doesn't get the rainbow fringe around characters typically found in color screens because you can't make white without mixing color sub-cells. Do they just use smaller sub-cells?
Re: What keeps a tablet, such as (Score:2)
Been using Kobo and Kindle for a long time. Can't say if it's easier on the eyes. Main advantages seem to be lighter weight, battery life and easy viewing outdoors in sunlight.
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Some people just want a solid device for displaying printed material, and being the absolute most power efficient possible while doing it so that the battery lasts for weeks instead of hours.
That's why eInk still exists, and is used for devices like this.
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Also, LED displays still suck out loud in direct sunlight. eInk does not have that problem.
Finally (Score:2)
I used to use my Kindle 3 a lot, 13 years ago. It was a great reading experience at the time when LCD technology was fairly bad, but I would find that, without a physical copy, the book was missing something. I would forget about the story much more quickly than I would a real printed book. It would just fade from my mind, and finishing an ebook was no longer an achievement, just momentary entertainment. Maybe it's the lack of a physical artifact to associate it with, or the lack of the physical reminder on
Not Kobo's first color device (Score:2)
I was QA on ereaders and the desktop apps at Kobo from just after they spun off from Indigo (and changed their name from Shortcovers) until just before they were acquired by Rakuten, and I worked on the first few ereader models.
This is the first color eink device Kobo has made but there were these things called "Lookbooks" and something else I forgot which were these really crappy looking cheap Android tablets made by some OEM. For a while all the ereader companies had Android tablets (B&N Nook probably