Kobo has come out with a new e-reader, one that’s being touted as high-definition and waterproof – plus it also has a pretty reasonable price tag of about $180.
Branding its latest offering as the Kobo Aura H20, this is a follow-up to the Kobo Aura, which scored the title of “best e-reader” from the Wall Street Journal. It comes with a 6.8-inch touchscreen, with a resolution of 265 dots per inch, giving it a pretty sharp resolution and supposedly “the closest experience to print-on-paper,” according to a press release.
The Kobo Aura H20 also comes with a 1 gigahertz processor, meaning users should be able to turn the pages of their e-books pretty seamlessly. It also has four gigabytes (GB) of onboard storage, but users can add on more with a microSD card, pushing their storage up to 32 GB. That should house “thousands” of e-books, according to Kobo. Plus, the battery life is supposed to last as long as two months, if a user reads for half an hour a day with the Wi-Fi turned off.
One major improvement over the Kobo Aura, its predecessor, is that the device is also waterproof for up to 30 minutes in 1 metre of water, as long as its port is closed with a cover over top. The idea is to allow users to read if they’re in the bath or at the beach. The display of the Aura H20 is also supposed to repel dust and to prevent glare from allowing users to see their screens in sunlight.
“We are most interested in those people who put books at the centre of their lives – what they want to see next, what gets them excited. When we asked our customers what held them back from reading more ebooks, many told us they love to read in the bath, by the pool, or on the beach, but believed that devices and water didn’t mix,” said Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s president and chief content officer, in a statement.
“We designed the Kobo Aura H2O, our latest premium e-reader, so that e-books could be just as common at the beach or in the bath as they are on the bus or in bed.”
The Kobo Aura H20 will be available starting Oct. 1 in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.