Good e-Reader

Get the latest news on e-Books, Audiobooks, Digital Publishing, Manga, Anime and Tablets

Kobo Aura One e-Reader is back in Stock on the Indigo Website

By 9 Comments

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 (7743 Posts)

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about electronic readers and technology for the last four years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the Huffington Post, CNET and more. Michael frequently travels to international events such as IFA, Computex, CES, Book Expo and a myriad of others. If you have any questions about any of his articles, please send an email to michael@goodereader.com


News Items of Interest

  • John Smith

    Whole lot of dissatisfied A1 users on the Indigo website; maybe that explains the production delays as they fixed the hardware.

    In any event, I’m looking for a larger screen but, from those reviews, not *that* one. Think I’ll wait for a better soluton.

  • Yep. Two of mine had issues and the customer service is atrocious. Was on hold 45min two times, and they sent me a wrong unit (the smaller cheaper one).

    After 5 years with Kobo, I switched to kindle. The new unit is nice but the Kindle shows same amount of text on a 6inch unit if you don’t use the Kobo header hack.

  • Igor Engelen

    I’m glad I didn’t wait for the Kobo, happy Tolino Vision 4 hd user now.

  • Hi, can you tell me what dictionary it comes with please? Does it have a definition for “grok”? Thanks.

  • Igor Engelen

  • Thanks for the pics. Sorry, I meant are you able to find the definition of the word “grok” in the built-in English dictionary?

  • Igor Engelen

    I can confirm that the built-in dictionary knows the word ‘grok’
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/006cb1ee2ca2ca1e395e8867f0437a6db8a0758cda09b6795d19a308ec75b5ad.jpg

  • Thanks again, Igor — that’s wonderful news! ^^. Just so you know, you can generally measure a dictionary’s completeness by searching for “grok” (if it’s not found, then the dictionary is not very big, so not good). One reason I’ve stuck to the Kindle is because of the built-in Oxford English Dictionary, but now you made me very interested in this Tolino (too bad it’s hard to find in Asia).

    If I were to nit-pick, I would say that the formatting appears to be off (e.g., no line break before “quote-book”), and all that extra code (e.g., “|edition=|editor=|”) makes it harder to read. If you have access to a Kindle, look up the word “grok” also — the formatting is very polished and easy to read. However, if you don’t rely on the dictionary a lot then I guess you won’t mind :).

  • Igor Engelen

    Yw. I’ve been using an old kindle DX for about 6 or 7 years and was really happy with it. For my replacement I wanted an ereader with built-in light but not the bright white variants. I prefer a yellowish glow when reading in the dark so I didn’t have too many options.
    As a side note, I’m using the latest Kindle fonts on my Tolino.