The screen offers a resolution of 300ppi with a glare-free display that means you can read it in bright sunlight without a problem. Even better, thinner borders means less plastic to hold onto or look at.
It now has a larger display being 6.8-inches. The latest standard Kindle Paperwhite feels anything but standard.
If Kobo can figure out a way to speed this tiny bit up, there's not going to be anything to complain about here.Īll the other great features that make Kobo ereaders stand apart from the Kindles is here – OverDrive support to let you borrow library books, Pocket integration so you can read saved web articles, extensive file format support and a very streamlined interface. While charging is now faster thanks to the USB-C port, the device goes into 'trickle charging' mode once it hits about 92% battery and the rest of the way is, strangely, very slow. There's even a bigger battery in the Libra 2 as compared to the Libra H2O (1,500mAh vs 1,200mAh), so you can keep reading for weeks before you're going to set it aside for a top-up. This makes text appear sharper even though the resolution is the same 300ppi shared by several older Kobo devices. Coming with the latest E Ink Carta 1200 touchscreen, there's a marked difference in not just overall performance, it's also a higher-contrast screen than anything Kobo has used before. The aforementioned firsts aside, the Libra 2 even ups the ante on performance and responsiveness. It's in no way 'cheap', but take all the upgrades into account and the value for money here is unbeatable. see where we're going with this?Īnd it does all this without costing too much more than the Libra H2O it's essentially replacing. It's the first mainstream Kobo ereader to come with 32GB of internal storage (the Elipsa was the first Kobo device with that much storage but it's not what you'd call 'mainstream'), the first to offer Bluetooth/audiobook support, the first to come with a USB-C charging/data port. The Kobo Libra 2 sets the bar really high for ereaders to come, particularly from the Japanese-Canadian company itself. With a dedicated ereader, you can even browse for new books without leaving the house. To us, that sounds like a great argument for giving ereaders their own space, away from the distractions of apps and constant notifications on our modern do-all devices. When reading from a paper book, by contrast, our brains switch to a more concentrated form of information processing – dubbed 'deep reading' – that actually helps us better absorb and comprehend what's on the page, even if it's a digital page that mimics the real thing. And ereader screens are more like the latter in important ways.Īccording to a 2014 report from the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning, we've trained our eyes to skim and dart on screens (thank you, internet), constantly hunting for specific bits of information we're after – a non-linear behavior the Stanford paper calls 'surface reading'. Sure, modern big-screen smartphones or tablets loaded with a Kindle or Kobo app serve the same purpose, but the way we read on a bright, electronic device is very different to how we read a physical page.