I finally received the Kobo Touch today. I thought I’d write up some first impressions.
First, this unit is a definite upgrade in heft over the Amazon Kindle. It is much sturdier and just feels more solidly built. This is a touch screen unit, whereas my old kindle used buttons on the side for page turning. I have to say I’m not a huge fan of touchscreens in general, I find they get matted up and worn looking from all the skin contact. I’d probably rather have a clean screen for a device like this.
One con is that the unit could not be activated until it ran the Official Kobo Software(tm), which of course only runs on Windows or Mac. Linux users are out of luck. I tried to install the Kobo software under Wine but it didn’t work. So I booted over to Windows, and initialized the software.
As soon as that was done, I came back to Linux and to my eBook collection I maintain using Calibre. I like Calibre a lot, though it is a bit clunky. I was then able to disable auto-syncing on the Kobo and upload my book collection.
So…. yay! I have an ebook reader again, and it isn’t a kindle. Both of these are wonderful things.