Kobo Touch 1.9.14

For those of you considering buying a Kobo Touch for Christmas (and as penance for yesterday's post), here are some of the features that Kobo has added to the Touch since it's initial release (my notes in italics):

• Choice of five new pre-loaded fonts (seven in total)
• Add your own fonts!
• Adjustable margins, line spacing, justification and more
• Search within a book
• Enter text for dictionary search in all supported book formats
• Select words within ePubs for dictionary search
• Set your preferred language
• Translate words in a book into other languages
• Full German dictionary now included
• Sleep and power off screens now show full screen book covers!
• Support for free ebooks from Internet Archives
• Book progress available in Library
• Customize how you tap on the screen to turn pages (including left-handed)
• Check the time while you are reading
• Revised EXTRAS page under Settings (extras include Sudoku, Sketchbook, and the internet browser)
• Make notes within a book while you read
• Browse and edit your notes with the Annotations List
• Tap the upper right-hand corner of your page to bookmark it
• Add notes to your bookmarks from the Annotations List
• Sync your notes and bookmarks to the Kobo Cloud (Proprietary ePubs only)
• Share passages and awards with your friends through Facebook
• Recieve awards for sharing your reading life
• Share book on Facebook
• Quickly preview Footnotes and Endnotes from linked text in a book (not working properly yet)

I have found the Kobo Touch to be very buggy. Each firmware release fixes some problems but invariably introduces more or resurrects old bugs. Strangely, these bugs do not affect everyone, but everyone will get a bug at some time or another.

One persistent bug which has affected my Kobo is that it will randomly not turn the page when I tap the screen. I could then wait forever staring at the same screen, the interval is not a factor, but the next time I tap the screen the page will process two taps. This means that if I tap forward a second time the reader will quickly turn two pages. If I tap in the center it will turn the page once and then bring up the menu. This problem presents more frequently under certain firmware versions than others but it has not gone away.

I still cannot recommend this device to the average user. There are plenty of alternatives on the market now such as the Sony PRS-T1. If you can find the discontinued Sony PRS-650 I'd recommend that over the new Sony. Personally, I would avoid Kindle at all costs, but they reportedly do have great customer service.

And just recently colour eInk eReaders have started to show up. . .