Kobo recently released the Kobo Touch e-reader to much acclaim and many people outside of the USA are buying it in droves. There are some enhancements that will be made through future firmware updates according to company sources.
Many people who have purchased the new Kobo Touch e-reader have been looking at a myriad of small problems. The first problem is that there is no way to highlight or look words up in the dictionary with non-Kobo ebooks. This means the only way you could access both of those functions is if you purchase a book directly from Kobo. If you load in your own books you have downloaded from the internet or loaded in via Adobe Digital Editions, you cannot look up words with the built in dictionary.
There are also some other enhancements that Kobo told us directly they would be delivering in a future firmware update. We can look forward to additional fonts and the ability to edit line spaces and margins.
The Kobo Touch by default only has 2 fonts to choose from, Georgia and Avenir. Kobo has plans to add up to six more popular fonts soon that will greatly enhance their ebook reader. Although at the moment there are not many fonts to choose from, there are around sixteen different levels of font-scaling to make text smaller/larger.
The one function the Kobo Touch does not even have is the ability to edit your margins and line spacing. This is important with PDF and other ebooks in order to fit more text on the screen. Having line spaces would also drastically help people who have vision problems to allow them to have more spaces between lines of text.
Finally one of the issues Kobo has not mentioned but we hope to see soon is the page turn speed. Considering the Kobo Touch has a faster Freescale processor than the Amazon Kindle 3rd generation and the same Pearl e-Ink display, it could be faster.
Kobo has directly told us that all of these problems and issues are going to be fixed in a future firmware update, other than the page turn speeds. What other updates or ideas would enhance the Kobo Touch? We can pass your ideas along to the programming team.
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.
