The Kobo Mini e-Reader recently saw a dramatic discount in the United Kingdom and is available through all major retailers for a paltry £29.99. Today in Canada, Indigo, Chapters, and all of their retail partners have slashed the price to a very respectable $39.99.
Kobo is betting on the new low price to push device sales, as the company will inevitably will be announcing a new product line in September. This e-reader is officially the best deal to be had in Canada at the moment and gives you a tremendous bang for your buck.
The Kobo Mini has a pint size five inch touchscreen display running an older version of E Ink Vizplex. It 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 in the past, but would be suitable for someone who has never owned an e-reader before.
Underneath the hood dwells a 800 MHZ processor, which is the same one the original Kobo Touch had employed. There are 2 GB of internal storage for your ebooks, newspapers, and PDF files. In an effort to keep costs low, this model has foregone the inclusion of a Micro SD, 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 cloud. This means you can delete them off of your reader and load them in again on a future date or sync them to your tablet or PC.
It is quite possible with this new price that many Canadians who have never considered buying an e-reader before will be picking this up. It is basically the same cost as a new hardcover book and the Kobo store has over a million free books available. It only has a five inch screen, but has the ability to augment the size of the font to provide a better reading experience. You can also shop for books via WIFI and surf the internet with the accompanied internet browser.
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.
