Kobo Aura HD

E Ink-based readers are beginning to take a back seat to color tablets, but they're not going away anytime soon. Too many people like the non-glare screens, weeks-long battery life, light weight, low cost, and reading-focused experience you get with ebook readers. And with the advent of edge-lit models, you can even use them in the dark. The Kobo Aura HD ($169.99 direct) is the company's best ebook reader to date, to the point where Kobo is calling it the 'Porsche of eReaders.' We won't go quite that far, but it's certainly the ebook?connoiseur's?reader. It may not pull many Amazon or Barnes & Noble fans into the fold, but if you're new to ebook readers or already have an earlier model Kobo, the Aura HD is a compelling and extremely capable choice.

Design and Display
The Aura HD measures 6.91 by 5.05 by 0.46 inches (HWD) and weighs 8.5 ounces. You can get one in white, black, or brown. It's made of a somewhat flimsy-feeling hard plastic, which isn't as nice to hold as the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight's soft-touch surfaces. The Aura HD is also an ounce heavier than the Paperwhite, and an ounce and a half heavier than the Nook, which is something I noticed while reading. It's still lighter than a color iPad mini (10.9 ounces) or a Google Nexus 7 tablet (12 ounces), but it's getting up there.

The top edge features a sliding power switch and a button that activates the ComfortLight edge lighting. The bottom panel holds the micro USB charger port and a memory card slot. The package contains the Aura HD, a small printed manual, and an especially nice woven cloth-covered USB cable that should prove more durable and resistant to tangling than others. There's no AC adapter in the box, though, so you'll need to either use a laptop or desktop PC, or order the optional $30 AC adapter.

The display is the best feature of the Aura HD, and it's a beauty. At 1,440-by-1,080 pixels and 265 dpi, it's the densest E Ink display you can buy. Driving the screen is a 1GHz processor, which helps speed up page turns. I'm a fan of larger screens; even an extra 8/10ths of an inch over a Kindle is significant, because it brings the Aura HD closer to the size of a comfy trade paperback.

The ComfortLight is the best edge lighting I've seen on an E Ink device. Parked next to a Kindle Paperwhite in a dark room, the Aura HD gets significantly brighter, and it's also more evenly lit, both on the display and especially along the bottom edge, where you can see the light from individual LEDs bleeding a bit on the Paperwhite; the Aura HD is even all across the four edges. At its lowest setting, the Aura HD is quite dim, but still a bit brighter than the Kindle Paperwhite.

Reading, Kobo Store, and Apps
In just about all respects, the Kobo Aura HD is a pleasure to read on. The built-in fonts look incredibly sharp, just as you'd expect given the screen resolution. The font options are phenomenal: You get 10 different fonts to choose from, plus seemingly infinite control over size, line spacing, and margin settings, along with center, left, or no justification. Tap the Advanced button, and you'll get additional options for configuring default size, weight (or ink darkness), and sharpness for each font. And thanks to the sharp screen, smaller fonts look clear and crisp to a degree you can't achieve with the Kindle Paperwhite (at least at similarly small sizes).

Page turns are fast and unobtrusive, thanks to the Aura HD's caching ability that reduces full-screen, all-black E Ink page refreshes to every six page turns. With a few page refreshes, sometimes the fonts didn't sharpen completely, and looked a bit jagged; then I'd pop up the font page and close it again, and it would refresh correctly, but this was pretty rare. Touch response was sometimes inconsistent in my tests: Tapping smaller interface elements like the icons on the bottom right of the screen, or the close box on the top right, sometimes took several tries.

Tap the Aura HD's Percentage Read indicator on the bottom left screen corner, and a window pops up saying how far you are in the current chapter, along with an estimation as to how long it will take you to finish the chapter, how long the next one is, and how many hours are left in the entire book. There's no way to display a permanent page number if the book you're reading doesn't support one. Still, I love this stuff and wish there was a way for Kindle and Nook readers to tap into the same level of customization and information while reading.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/wc-zM5T_xhM/0,2817,2417920,00.asp

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