The Kobo Mini e-Reader is now available for customers in the USA at Best Buy. You can order it online now that the unit is visible and even pick them up in the stores. The Kobo Glo still has no estimated date in which it will be available, but at least the Mini can be yours today!
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.
This is the perfect entry level reader for the price and gives people an introduction to the mighty Kobo ecosystem. Currently this is the most well stocked ebook store in the world with over 2.5 million paid and free books available.
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.
