Welcome to another Good e-Reader Video Comparison. Today we take a look at the new Apple iPad Air and the Kobo Arc 10 HD! Both of these devices reflect the very latest and greatest in large screen displays and bring completely different ecosystems to the table.
Today we take a look at the eBook, magazine, comic, newspaper experience. The iPad Air and Kobo Arc 10 HD make very fine e-readers and we put them in a series of side by side comparisons to give you a sense on how they perform. If you like to watch movies or listen to audiobooks, as an added bonus we show you how they perform with content from Netflix.
The Kobo Arc 10 HD features a stunning 10-inch capacitive touchscreen with ten point multitouch. It has one of the best resolutions in the business with 2560×1600 pixels. To give you a sense of how great it is, the Apple iPad Air is only capable of displaying 2048 × 1536 pixels. The Kobo has the advance of a 1.8 GHZ Quadcore processor, whereas the Air only has a dualcore. Really, both devices just blaze along fine. The big difference is not the hardware but software ecosystem.
Aside from Android vs iOS, the big advantage the Air has is the pushing of HD content, such as magazines and comic books. We all hear about the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem, but what does that really mean in this comparison? Comixology pushes out HD comics for the iPad 3, 4 and 5. This is due the resolution staying the same and its easier to optimize your tablet content when you know what size screen everyone has. Android on the other hand has a ton of different screen sizes and its hard to really take advantage of the pixels. So basically you have the iPad Air with lower resolution actually having most graphic based content look better.
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.