The Kobo Aura One e-reader is back in stock on the main Chapters/Indigo website after selling out in December. Canadian and US residents can now place online orders and have their devices shipped out right away. The Aura One is still not available on the main Kobo website after selling out in October, although the company has said that they are receiving new units sometime in the next sixty days.
The Aura One features the largest E-Ink screen that Kobo has ever produced. It is 7.8 inches and the resolution is 1872 by 1404, which works out to a crisp 300 pixels per inch. The screen is completely flush with the bezel, which gives you a wider area to turn pages in e-books or pinch and zoom PDF files.
The front-lit display is the best one that Kobo has ever produced. There are a bunch of small LED lights that project light upwards, proving even distribution. There is no cloudy areas when you turn the lighting system down to 50% and the only product that does it slightly better is the Amazon Kindle Oasis. Unlike every other e-reader on the market, Kobo is using RGB lights, instead of white bulbs.
The Aura One is rated IPX8 for waterproofing, so it can be immersed in up to two 6.5 feet of water for up to one hour. That makes it a good companion for the beach or pool.
Underneath the hood is a Freescale 1GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, the same as you get with most new Kindles. There is 8GB of internal storage and there is no publicly available SD card. Instead, the SD card is grafted to the circuit board and powers the Linux operating system.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
