The Kobo Touch (also called the "Kobo Touch eReader") is the third generation of the

Kobo Kobo may refer to: Places * Kobo (woreda), a district in Ethiopia ** Kobo, Ethiopia, a town * Kōbo Dam, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan * Mount Kōbō, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan People First name * Kōbō Abe (1924–1993), pseudonym of Japanese w ...

e-reader An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-read ...

device designed by

Kobo Inc. Rakuten Kobo Inc., or simply Kobo, is a Canadian company that sells ebooks, audiobooks, ereaders and tablet computers. It is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and is a subsidiary of the Japanese ecommerce conglomerate Rakuten. The name'' Ko ...

It was revealed on 23 May 2011 and was released in the U.S. on 10 June 2011 at a price of $129.99. The Kobo Touch 2.0, the successor to the Touch, was released in September 2015.

Hardware

This model of the Kobo Touch improved upon its predecessors by using a zForce touch-sensitive display; hence its name, the Kobo Touch. The infrared based touch interface does not require electrical conductivity, allowing for the user to interact with the device when wearing gloves. Other improvements included an

E Ink E Ink (electronic ink) is a brand of electronic paper (e-paper) display technology commercialized by the E Ink Corporation, which was co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates JD Albert and Barrett Comiskey, MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson ...

Pearl screen, a faster processor capable of smooth PDF panning,

802.11n IEEE 802.11n-2009 or 802.11n is a wireless-networking standard that uses multiple antennas to increase data rates. The Wi-Fi Alliance has also retroactively labelled the technology for the standard as Wi-Fi 4. It standardized support for multipl ...

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wave ...

capability, and reduced size and weight. The Kobo Touch is shipped in five colours: lilac, blue, silver, black, and white. It is made of a soft matte plastic. The back of every Kobo device features a quilted pattern. Like the original Kobo model, the Touch is manufactured in Taiwan. The Kobo Touch was introduced to compete with Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook. By not including a physical keyboard like the Kindle Keyboard, and leaving only a home button on the front face of the device, Kobo was able to further shrink down the dimensions of the Touch. The 2GB of memory was similar to what competitors offered; this memory allows for the storage of approximately 1,000 books. With a 32GB microSD card that can be inserted in the side of the Kobo Touch, the number of books that can be stored rises to 30,000. Battery life of the Kobo Touch is estimated to be approximately one month, assuming reading for 30 minutes a day and Wi-Fi turned off.

Variants

Three variants of the Kobo Touch were released: N905, N905B, and N905C. The first was the original Kobo Touch; the second was the model with advertisements; the third was the low-cost model introduced after the release of the Kobo Glo.

Software

Kobo Touch runs on the Kobo Touch Firmware, based on the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

kernel. The software is available in 8 languages and 2 variants: English, French, Canadian French, Japanese, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese. The main screen shows tiles that automatically update based on actions the user has performed. Tiles may appear for books, newspapers, magazines, store categories, or games the user has recently read, browsed, or played, respectively. The main screen is called "Reading Life". The main application, the digital reader, supports a variety of ebook formats:

ePub EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes styled ''ePub''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones ...

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

, Adobe DRM,

MOBI Mobi or MOBI may refer to: Companies * Mobi (company), an American wireless provider Computing * .mobi, internet top domain name * .mobi, a file extension of the deprecated Mobipocket e-book format People * Mobi Fehr (born 1994), American socce ...

RTF RTF may refer to: Organisations * African Union Regional Task Force, the military operation of the RCI-LRA, 2011–2018. * Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, a broadcaster in France, 1949–1964 * Russian Tennis Federation, the national gover ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

, TXT,

Comic Book Archive file A comic book archive or comic book reader file (also called sequential image file) is a type of archive file for the purpose of sequential viewing of images, commonly for comic books. The idea was made popular by the CDisplay sequential image vie ...

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

, PNG, BMP,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processin ...

. By flicking or tapping a side of the screen, the user may advance to the next page or previous page. Adjusting the font is possible with a feature called TypeGenius: users can change the weight, sharpness, and font size of any preinstalled fonts on the Kobo. Highlighting, adding notes, and looking up definitions in the built-in dictionaries is also possible by long-tapping a passage in any part of the book. The Kobo Touch also provides statistics about reading progress: average reading time per session, total time read, pages turned, and the percentage of books completed. Books can be viewed in a list view or grid view in the user's library. They can be arranged based on title, author, file size, file type, and when they were last opened. Users can also arrange their books into collections. Users may also download books through the use of the Kobo Bookstore. Adding books to a wishlist, purchasing books, and browsing through the library can be done on the Kobo itself thanks to the Wi-Fi chip. Once purchased, books are saved in the cloud and can be redownloaded at any time if the user has deleted the book from his/her device. This feature also allows for reading location, bookmarks, highlights, and notes to be synced across many devices. eBooks compatible with the Kobo Touch can be borrowed from many public libraries, including the

Ottawa Public Library The Ottawa Public Library (OPL; french: Bibliothèque publique d'Ottawa) is the library system of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The library was founded in 1906 with a donation from the Carnegie Foundation. Services * Information and reference servi ...

and the

Toronto Public Library Toronto Public Library (TPL) (french: Bibliothèque publique de Toronto) is a public library system in Toronto, Ontario. It is the largest public library system in Canada, and in 2008 had averaged a higher circulation per capita than any other pu ...

. These books with

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militai ...

require authentication from

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

in order to be read on the device. Books may be added to the device with th
Kobo Desktop
app or third party apps such as

Calibre In guns, particularly firearms, caliber (or calibre; sometimes abbreviated as "cal") is the specified nominal internal diameter of the gun barrel bore – regardless of how or where the bore is measured and whether the finished bore match ...

. The Kobo Touch also includes integration with the read-it-later service

Pocket A pocket is a bag- or envelope-like receptacle either fastened to or inserted in an article of clothing to hold small items. Pockets are also attached to luggage, backpacks, and similar items. In older usage, a pocket was a separate small bag o ...

. Once a user has signed in with their Pocket account, articles saved to Pocket can be read on the Kobo Touch. Four applications are included with the Kobo Touch: a web browser, sudoku, chess - now replaced by Unblock It - and a sketch pad. The web browser allows for downloading of files that can be read on the device. Kobo does not provide technical support for these applications. Originally, 15 free previews of select books were included, although Kobo ceased including books with their devices.

Reception

The initial reaction to the Kobo Touch was mixed to positive. Reviewers lauded the design of the device, and the software, most notably praising the inclusion of a touch screen, a new E-ink panel, a microSD card slot, included applications, and the minimalism of the device. Complaints included an overall sluggishness to the interface (which eventually got solved in firmware updates) and the lack of hardware buttons for turning pages.

References

External links

Kobo Touch technical specsKobo Touch at Rakuten Kobo Help Center

Filesystem support of microSD
{{Ebooks Dedicated ebook devices

Touch In physiology, the somatosensory system is the network of neural structures in the brain and body that produce the perception of touch (haptic perception), as well as temperature (thermoception), body position (proprioception), and pain. It is ...