Kobo is having a massive sale for the Nia e-Reader on the Walmart website in the United States. The regular price you will normally pay is $127 and it is on sale for $65, which is a $60 savings. This makes it the most affordable Kobo branded ebook reader in the world right now, and worth it if you want a backup e-Reader for yourself or want to pickup an early Christmas present.
The Kobo Nia came out in 2020 and is is considered an entry level e-Reader that is ideal for people who have never had one before or had an older Kobo branded device that is more than five years old. It is great to read eBooks, borrow eBooks from Overdrive or read blog articles from Pocket. It seriously lacks the hardware power to read PDF files effectively or use the experimental web browser. The resolution is not the best, it is 212 PPI, so you won’t get razor sharp fonts that the Clara 2e provides.
It has a front-lit display, with white LED lights, although it does not have warm lighting. The hardware is a bit lackluster, a single core 900 MHZ processor, 256MB of RAM and a paltry 8GB of internal storage. It doesn’t have Bluetooth, so you won’t be able to buy or listen to Kobo audiobooks. The battery is underperforming with 1,000 mAh, so you might get a week of reading every day.
The Nia seems dated by 2022 standards. Most of the entry level e-readers on the market actually don’t have a 300 PPI display, the Nook Glowlight 4e has the same resolution as the Kobo. However, the new Amazon Kindle does have a 300 PPI display and costs about the same as the everyday street price of the Nia. Should you buy the Nia on sale? I would say, no, not if its going to be your primary e-Reader, it has too many cons and not enough pros.
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.
