That screen’s not nice enough to cancel out other basic problems with the design. You don’t need that extra resolution to read, and it’s reached a point of diminishing returns. And besides that, pushing an E Ink screen’s resolution this high is sort of a questionable pursuit here. From the ergonomically bizarre design to its weight and size, the actual meat of the Aura HD is just not up to snuff. The Kobo Aura HD has a really nice screen, sure, but everything around that screen just drags it down. And Kobo has no lending system in place, unlike both Amazon and Barnes and Noble, so expect to pay for everything you want to read. You’ll have no trouble finding bestsellers at either store, though Amazon’s prices are occasionally a few dollars cheaper than Kobo’s offerings. The Kobo store has about 2.5 million books, newspapers, and magazines, coming out just slightly on top of Amazon’s two million Kindle store results.Over about half a week of heavier use (45-60 minutes, backlight on, brightness at 50 per cent) we took it down to about 70 per cent. Kobo rates the Aura HD’s batter as lasting two months - backlight on or off - with 30 minutes of reading a day.The downside is that it tends to bleed through the text at higher levels, and the contrast suffers. At its max, the Aura’s backlight is stronger than the Paperwhite’s, and more even around the edges.It’s ugly and uncomfortable to hold and it makes you wonder if the back’s shape was decided at random. If you set the Aura HD on its back on a flat surface and poke the corner, it wobbles slightly. The back of the Aura is just bizarrely designed. Brightness, font-size and other options are all controlled by finicky draggable bars when they’d be better suited software buttons, since it’s still using IR touch tech. Kobo’s software has been problematic in the past, and it still has its annoying quirks. There’s cloud-syncing built in if you read books across devices (in a Kobo app on a phone, for instance) and the reader’s achievement system is cute, if superfluous. The Aura also has a 1GHz processor, but you’d be hard-pressed to really notice the infrared screen effectively throttles max speed, so it’s hard to differentiate. This is compounded by the odd angles on the side of the Aura HD, which make holding it by the very edge slipperier than it ought to be. Palming it requires a bit of straining, and if you opt to hold it by the corner, its weight will get the better of you. Physically, the Aura is just slightly too wide to be comfortable for one-handed use. The extra screen space doesn’t really add enough real estate to make much of a difference - especially not at the cost of a larger body. But it’s not a massive step ahead of the fidelity of the Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Glo, really. With the backlight off, it feels like you could be looking at ink on paper, and to the extent you might scrutinise the edges of the letters in the words in your ebook, that’s nice. I’ve found this estimate to be accurate.The Aura HD has that 6.8-inch 1080×144, 265 DPI screen, and it really is world class. Oh well, at least you won’t have to worry about the battery conking out mid session, it’s rated to last up to two months with moderate use. Flipping through such pages can be a lag-filled nightmare. Just don’t expect this e-reader to render them quickly, particularly if you’re reading graphics-laden PDFs or examining high-resolution JPEGs. Like the rest of the Kobo, this model can read a broad range of document types, including CBR, CBZ, EPUB, EPUB3, HTML, MOBI, PDF, RTF, and TXT, as well as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF image files. Still, the only time that might be a concern is if your reading habits entail loading up on larger files, such as PDFs. The Kobo Aura Edition 2 provides 4GB of internal storage unlike some of the other Kobo models, there’s no microSD card slot that would allow you to add to that. The Kobo Aura Edition 2’s backlight is much brighter at maximum brightness than the Paperwhite’s at its max, but there’s not much of a difference at the lower levels that most people will actually use. I haven’t liked any of the Kobo’s backlights, which render text murky when they’re cranked up. The Paperwhite’s page transitions seem smoother, too. I read Earnest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls on both the Aura Edition 2 and the 2015 Kindle Paperwhite, and while I didn’t experience eyestrain after reading the Kobo, I couldn’t get past how poor the Edition 2’s text looked in comparison to Amazon’s e-reader. Those e-readers boast 300 ppi resolution, as do all three of Amazon’s best Kindles. It’s considerably lower than the top-shelf Kobo Aura One and the Kobo Glo HD, which costs just $10 more. The 212 ppi resolution isn’t impressive either. The Edition 2’s display is adequate, but it is neither as bright nor as legible as other similarly priced e-readers.
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