The missing link in Amazon’s ereader lineup

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

The missing link in

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s ereader lineup

1 / 5

Kindle Colorsoft vs Kobo Libra Colour

Kindle Colorsoft vs Kobo Libra Colour: 100 percent brightness on both screens, 0 percent warm light on both screens

Ultimately, how much warm or cool light you prefer while reading is up to personal taste. My preferences would lead me to adjust the warmth on the Kindle to be a bit higher than zero, mimicking that of the Kobo. In an unscientific poll of the Engadget staff, both in person and with device photos, everybody preferred the screen on the Kobo. I think the slight added warmth in Kobo’s screen makes colors appear a bit more saturated and more inviting overall. It also gets close to mimicking the look of actual physical pages (as much as one of these devices could, at least), and that’s the experience I’m going for when I read pretty much anything. But I could understand why some ********* comic fans would want to start off with the most ******-accurate baseline as possible, and then adjust from there to fit their preferences.

In addition to adjusting the warm light, the Kindle Colorsoft has vivid mode, which “enhances ****** in less saturated images.” For the sake of efficacy, most of my time was spent in standard mode when testing the Colorsoft. But in trying out vivid mode, I noticed that its enhanced saturation was most noticeable in warm-toned images: reds appeared ever-so-slightly more striking, while oranges and yellows had a more bronze effect and the like. But I had to turn vivid mode on and off a few times to clock the effect because it’s quite subtle.

Then there’s the question of actually reading words on the Colorsoft. Even the Kindle team representative I spoke with acknowledged that, due to the extra physical layer in the screen that enables ******, one might notice a bit less sharpness and contrast in ******-and-white text on the Colorsoft’s screen. That’s not unique to this particular Kindle — every ****** ereader will have this issue to some degree.

When comparing the text-only experience of the Kindle Colorsoft to that of the Kobo Libra Colour, I found both to be quite good and comparable to one another. Where there’s a ******* possibility for discrepancies is in a comparison of the Colorsoft to, say, the new Kindle Paperwhite. I did not have the latter device to compare to, but I did have my personal, previous-generation Paperwhite, and the difference was ever so slight, with the standard Paperwhite having the (small) upper hand in the contrast and sharpness departments.

Reading experience

Photo by Valentina Palladino / Engadget

The ****** screen is the most consequential thing about the Kindle Colorsoft, and chances are if you’ve had a Kindle in the past, the reading experience on this new device will feel quite familiar. The Kindle UI hasn’t changed much, still dividing the main screen into Home and Library options. The former is basically a space for

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

to serve you personalized book recommendations and promote new Kindle releases, while the latter shows your entire digital library including books, documents, Audible audiobooks and library loans. The Library page is striking in ****** and there is something undeniably satisfying about seeing all of your title covers in full-****** glory.

While reading a book, you can still customize and save different themes with fonts, font sizes and page layouts that best suit your preferences. You still have the option to quickly navigate within a title by page, location, chapter and even popular highlights. Page turns are speedy and will likely be an improvement for anyone coming from an older Kindle or other ereader.

Annotations and your own highlights are collected in the same place for easy reference, and with the latter, you can filter by highlight ****** as well. You have four colors to choose from on the Colorsoft — orange, yellow, blue and pink — so if you use the yellow highlighter to mark favorite quotes, you can then filter by just that ******. Note that all highlighting and note-taking must be done with your fingers because, unlike the Kindle Scribe, the Colorsoft has no stylus support.

The pinch-to-zoom feature on the Colorsoft is good for those who read a lot of graphic novels and comics.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

developed a custom algorithm to make this motion as smooth as possible, and it’s a pretty good experience, albeit not a unique one. You can also pinch to zoom on the Kobo Libra Colour, which mostly helps get in closer to comic panels to read small text or better see minute details.

On both devices, there are full-screen refreshes when you pinch to zoom on ****** images and the speed of completion is roughly the same. I also found image quality to be quite similar as well, and it’s worth noting that art style can skew your impression of an image’s quality. A comic that employs clean, distinct lines compared to one that’s more grungy and watercolor-like will always come off more crisp.

The Colorsoft, like the regular Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, also has an auto-adjusting front light that promises to illuminate the display just right depending on if you’re reading outside on a sunny day, in the dark cabin of an airplane or anywhere else. It’s a nice hardware perk to have and, with the feature turned on, removes much of manual fiddling that some might find annoying to do when they take their Kindle into different environments.

The competition

Photo by Valentina Palladino / Engadget

While we already went through the screen comparisons for the $280 Kindle Colorsoft and the $220

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, there are plenty of other differences between the two that you should consider when picking your next ereader. I’ve added a spec list below to break down the basics, and the most consequential to me are the fact that the Kobo has page-turn buttons and stylus support.

The former is really a matter of preference — you either love physical buttons or you find no use for them — but the latter is pure added value even if you do have to purchase the $70 Kobo stylus separately. It essentially allows you to turn the Libra Colour into a makeshift Kobo Sage or Kindle Scribe, which could be useful for anyone in academia (students and educators alike) or anyone who just loves the feeling of putting pen to “paper.” Meanwhile, the Kindle has the upper hand in its wireless charging capabilities and its slightly cleaner flush-front design.

When it comes to actual content available on Kindle and Kobo devices, the libraries you can purchase from on both are vast: both have ebooks and audiobooks available, and both the Colorsoft and Libra Colour support Bluetooth, so you can listen to audiobooks directly from the device with your wireless headphones. At the time of writing this review, all of the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

were available on both platforms at the same prices, with the only discrepancies being one that was on ***** as a Kindle ebook and one that was available to read for free for

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

subscribers. Both of those monthly subscriptions give you unlimited reading access to thousands of titles, but I would give the advantage to

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

on this one since Kindle Unlimited has been around for much longer.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

also has

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

subscriptions that work with Kindle devices and provide even more content to paying subscribers.

As far as borrowing ebooks from your local library goes, it might be a draw. Kobo integrates elegantly with Overdrive, making it nearly seamless to get borrowed books on your ereader. Simply connect your Overdrive account and library card in the settings menu and you can then either browse your library’s offerings directly on device, or use the Libby mobile app to borrow titles and those will appear automatically on your Kobo. My only gripe with this system is that it works best if you have just one library card, since you can only connect one at a time. I’m a unique case where I have at least three library cards and I switch among them in Libby depending on which has the title I’m looking for.

Those like me might prefer the “send to Kindle” option in Libby, which just takes a couple more clicks to get any book from any library network to your Kindle device. The biggest downside here is that my Colorsoft review unit did not show all of my library book covers in full-****** glory on the lock screen. After troubleshooting with a representative from

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, it was determined to be a title-specific issue. According to

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

: “For library books, the lock screen is taken from the designated marketing cover for the book used by the library, which may not be the same as the actual book cover.” So just know that if you get most of your reading material from your local library, there’s a chance some of the covers may not display properly on the Colorsoft.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, which earned a spot in our best ereaders guide after my colleague Amy Skorheim tested it. First, it’s imperative to know that Boox devices require a bit more tech-savvy than a Kindle or a Kobo, as well as a willingness to experiment. They are full-blown Android tablets after all, and that might be exactly what you’re looking for if you get your reading material from many different sources, since it offers access to the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Play Store and all of its apps. As for specs, the Go ****** 7 has a seven-inch Kaleido 3 display with 300 ppi in ****** and white and 150 ppi in ****** (similar to the Colorsoft), along with a warm light, page-turn buttons, a splash-resistant design and 64GB of storage (and a microSD card slot for more space!). It’s even more similar to the Kobo Libra Colour in feature set and price, so it’s another option for anyone willing to think a bit outside the standard ereader box.

The decision between Kindle, Kobo and Boox is infinitely more complicated than choosing between the Colorsoft or the standard Kindle Paperwhite — and that’s precisely because of the stark price difference. The Colorsoft is $120 more than the regular Kindle Paperwhite ($100 more if you pay to remove the lock screen ads from the Paperwhite, and $80 more than the Signature Edition) and aside from the ****** panel, it only adds wireless charging, the auto-adjusting front light sensor and doubles the storage. Remove ****** from the equation, and arguably the most useful of all of those is the extra storage but, make no mistake, 16GB of space on the Kindle Paperwhite is nothing to scoff at and will be just fine for most people. Unless you’re 100-percent certain that ****** will make a huge difference in your day-to-day reading experience, the standard Paperwhite is the better value.

Wrap-up

Photo by Valentina Palladino / Engadget

While it’s very late to the ****** E Ink party, the Kindle Colorsoft is a solid premium ereader that provides an excellent experience both in ****** and ****** and white. I focused a lot on comparisons in this review because most people will not have the opportunity to have the Colorsoft and any of its contemporaries side by side (unless you’re my dad, who buys almost every ereader and small tablet under the sun). But to be clear, the Colorsoft is a good Kindle, and in many ways,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

did pull an Apple here. If you’re already heavily entrenched in the Kindle ecosystem and have been holding out for a ****** ereader, this is the device to get — just be prepared to pay a premium for it.

Also, like Apple and its various operating systems, there’s something to be said about the convenience and ubiquity of the Kindle ecosystem. The library is seemingly endless (with discounts galore), supplemented by Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited, so it’s easy to get sucked in when you’re already shopping on

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

for household goods and holiday gifts. But when it comes to value for your money (and a pure spec breakdown), you can get more from Kobo and Boox devices. Kindle isn’t the only name in town anymore for ereaders, and it hasn’t been for a long time, and that seems to be a more pronounced fact now with the introduction of the Colorsoft. If nothing else,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

has finally filled a glaring ***** in its ereader lineup with this device.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Kindle Colorsoft vs. the competition

	This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Kindle Colorsoft	Kobo Libra Colour	Boox Go ****** 7
Price	$280	$220	$250
Display size	7-inch ****** E Ink Kalaido 3 (with custom display stack)	7-inch ****** E Ink Kalaido 3	7-inch ****** E Ink Kalaido 3
Pixel density	300 ppi (******-and-white), 150 ppi (****** content)	300 ppi (******-and-white), 150 ppi (****** content)	300 ppi (******-and-white), 150 ppi (****** content)
Storage	32GB	32GB	64GB
Battery life	Up to 8 weeks	Up to 6 weeks	2,300 mAh capacity; “long-lasting” battery life
Page-turn buttons	No	Yes	Yes
Adjustable warm light	Yes	Yes	Yes
Auto brightness adjustments	Yes	No	No
Auto warm light adjustments	No	Yes	No
Waterproof rating	IPX8	IPX8	Not provided
Pinch-to-zoom support	Yes	Yes	Not provided
Stylus support	No	Yes	No
Audiobook support	Yes, Audible audiobooks	Yes, Kobo audiobooks	Yes, via Android apps
Library support	Yes, via Overdrive’s “Send to Kindle” option	Yes, via built-in Overdrive integration	Yes, via Android apps
Wireless charging	Yes	No	No
USB-C charging	Yes	Yes	Yes
Wi-Fi	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bluetooth	Yes	Yes	Yes

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#missing #link #Amazons #ereader #lineup

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up