Kobo now has a touch screen version of their eReader called the Kobo eReader Touch. It is very similar the Nook Touch, but has no hardware buttons, and is a little narrower. The key specs are:
- 6″ Pearl high contrast E Ink display
- Infrared touch screen
- 2 GB of storage
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
- SD Card slot (up to 32 GB)
- Supports EPUB, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG,BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF as well as the comic book formats CBZ and CBR.
- 7 Fonts in 17 sizes
The design looks nice, it is a little more compact than the Nook touch, and comes in 4 colors. It also has some social media features built in, and can sync bookmarks across multiple devices. I am a long-time Sony Reader fan, but am running out of patience for a Wi-Fi eReader that isn’t huge and expensive. This is another attractive alternative. List price is $129.99
Matt Miller gives a nice comparison over on ZDNet with a 14 minute video demo.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, can you manually look up a word in the built-in dictionary? If yes, can you tell me if it has the definition for the word “grok”?
Unfortunately I have not seen one in real life yet. If someone is near a Best Buy, and there are any working demos there, you can try it out on the Touch there.
I just put one of these in a box to donate to charity. It was only a month or two old and given to me by my daughter. I wanted the Kindle but got the Kobo as a gift. Now, I bought the Kindle. There is no comparison, the Kindle walks all over this thing. The battery time is way to low for starters.
@Dlozwi
Sounds like another example of why you shouldn’t buy someone a competing product when they really want the other. Are you sure you had the Kobo Touch? Saying you had for 2 months makes me wonder if you had the older model. The battery life on that one was not very good (10 days rated vs. 1 month).
For me, the lack of a touch screen, and the lock-in of the Amazon store with no e-pub makes the Kindle a non-competitor. But, as always, YMMV.