It looks like the new Kobo Touch ebook reader has already started shipping in Canada. Someone has gotten their hands on one and posted an unboxing and first look video on YouTube.
I never understood the point of unboxing videos—some kind of strange wish-fulfillment fantasy thing—but at least the video shows the Kobo Touch in action after the 45 second mark.
It doesn’t appear to be quite as fast as the New Nook. The video shows the Kobo taking a few seconds for books to open and for the system to react. Hopefully that’s just some early release jitters that will get improved with a firmware update.
If you happen to get you hands on one of the new Kobo’s, please lets us know what you think.
Kobo Touch Video
Via: Mike Cane
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the Kobo touch had a 800Mhz processor as well.
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX508
Thanks for pointing that out. Looks like it is indeed 800MHz. For some reason I was thinking it was 533 but that’s the old one, I think.
The video looks like it was edited to make the response times faster on the Kobo. There’s some noticeable jumps in the video and I don’t think it’s Internet latency.
Nathan, I’m looking forward to seeing your review and video.
I bought my father-in-law a Kobo Touch the day it launched and set it up for him, including a couple of books I know he wants to read. I was really impressed with how accurate and fast the interface is, and the page turns and so on are dramatically improved from the last Kobo.
I was not impressed at the many different ways the device found to hang, especially when I was showing off how easy it was to buy new books. A few times it got stuck on “Loading…”; even the spinning icon showing that it was working froze. Very annoying. I can deal with these hiccups, but my non-computer-savvy father-in-law needs things to work a lot better, at least until he’s familiar with the interface.
Still, for $139, I don’t think you can do any better. I plan to buy one for myself soon…
Had a look at the new Kobo touch in Vancouver,Canada and I’m not really that impressed. I was hoping that there would be line spacing and margin size controls, the two store clerks were utterly clueless when I brought up these issues. Didn’t even understand what line spacing and margin size even meant. I think that B&N’s new e-ink nook looks like a better choice, with it’s ability to control the look of text in it’s text-dialog box.