Kobo has brought back their five inch Mini e-reader and is being marketed for $49. This device is only available from November 3, 2015 through November 7 and comes with a free sleepcover.
The Kobo Mini has a pint size five inch touchscreen display. The original model that came out in 2012 employed an antiquated e-ink Vizplex, but this new iteration of the Mini uses e-Ink Pearl.
The Mini has a resolution of 800×600 pixels and gives you the traditional 16 levels of grayscale. This is very small device that fits in any of your pockets and was designed to be extremely lightweight and portable. The screen may seem small to someone who has used a 6 or 9.7 extensively tablet or e-reader, but would be very ideal for someone who needs something extremely portable, a gift or a backup device.
Underneath the hood dwells a 800 MHZ processor and 2 GB of internal storage to house your e-books, newspapers, and PDF files. In an effort to keep costs low, this model does not have Micro SD support, so expanding your memory will not be possible. If you find yourself in the situation where you are running out of memory, all ebooks you purchase are stored in the Kobo cloud.
This e-reader has wireless internet access built into it. This will allow you to download e-books directly from the Kobo bookstore. Kobo also informed me that this model will support all of the latest firmware updates, making the UI and overall performance very solid. In contrast, Amazon and Barnes and Noble tends to forget about their older e-readers and hardly ever updates them.
I think Kobo did a solid job bringing back one of their most unique e-readers in time for the holidays. The entire e-reader landscape is over saturated with six inch e-readers and its refreshing to see something very affordable being marketed for only $49. If you are on the fence about buying one, check out our review from 2012, where we spend thirty minutes looking at every single aspect of the Kobo Mini.
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.
