Kobo Clara BW Review
The Kobo Clara BW's Carta 1300 display and adjustable warm light make it a better option than the basic Kindle.
The Kobo Clara BW is a classic six-inch e-reader, a throwback to the days when this size dominated the market. While modern electronics trend towards sleek and slim designs, the Clara BW retains a bulkier form factor with its plastic casing. However, in the now niche category of six-inch e-readers, the Kobo Clara BW stands out as a strong contender.
While the entry-level Kindle may seem like the obvious competitor, the Kobo Clara BW offers a compelling alternative. Though priced approximately 20% higher, the Clara BW boasts several key features that justify the extra cost. Unlike the basic Kindle, it comes equipped with waterproofing, warm lighting for comfortable nighttime reading and a sharper Carta 1300 screen. Furthermore, Amazon requires the payment of a fee to get the non-ad version of the entry-level Kindle, while Kobo Clara BW does not have ads by default.
Carta 1300 doesn’t make much difference.
One of Clara BW's selling points is its Carta 1300 screen. While the contrast is good, the latest generation of the Carta 1300 is a negligible improvement over Carta 1200.
The Kindle Paperwhite has the same Carta 1300 screen, but the contrast is noticeably better than Clara BW. Amazon’s use of an oxide backplane with custom waveforms is responsible for Paperwhite's better contrast ratio and fast page turns.
The Paperwhite’s superior contrast shows that the display's engineering is an essential factor in text contrast ratio rather than using the latest Carta iteration. Amazon’s in-house development of its devices is a cost that a smaller vendor like Kobo cannot afford (Kobo has a partnership with Netronix to manufacture its devices).
The front light is comparable to Paperwhite and even, but it has the expected shadowing at the sides of the screen. Front lights, however, are known to vary between units.
OverDrive and Kindle Plus
Amazon supports the borrowing of public library e-books in the United States. Kobo lets users borrow and read public library ebooks in thirteen countries through OverDrive. Borrowed ebooks are treated like purchased ones, and wireless syncing is supported across devices.
Kobo Plus is a subscription service that provides access to a catalogue of e-books and audiobooks. Kobo Plus has three subscription plans:
Kobo Plus Read includes access to a catalogue of e-books.
Kobo Plus Listen includes access to a catalogue of audiobooks.
Kobo Plus Read & Listen includes access to a catalogue of e-books and audiobooks.
Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's ebook subscription service) allows borrowing up to 20 eligible Kindle Unlimited titles simultaneously, with no time limit on each loan. With Kobo Plus, there are no limits on the number of e-books downloaded (as long as they are available in the Kobo Plus catalogue).
On paper, Kindle Unlimited has a bigger catalogue, but this does not mean a better choice of ebooks and audiobooks. Better choices depend on the user and the types of ebooks and audiobooks they prefer. Based on the nonfiction genres I like, I found Kobo Plus offered a wider selection of e-books from established publishers than Kindle Unlimited.
Unlike Libra Colour, Clara BW does not support third-party cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. This is a problem, as Kobo does not support wireless cloud syncing of personal ebooks. In addition, except for uploading written annotations within PDF documents, Kobo devices that support third-party cloud drives only support the wireless download of documents. There is no syncing of e-book content back to cloud drives.
Snappy performance and user-friendly interface
Kobo has designed the interface to be user-friendly and intuitive, with fast and fluid menu navigation. The home page is a gateway, showing recently opened ebooks in the top row, with ‘my books’ and the last opened collection below. In ‘my books’, content, the top menu provides access to ebooks (with the possibility to filter content), authors (if the e-book’s meta-data contains the author's name), e-book series and collections.
Kobo’s reading settings are more flexible than those of Kindle devices. A scale allows greater font size, margins, and line spacing control.
Disappointing is the absence of fonts like Malabar, Amasis, Georgia and Caecilia. The fonts are also missing on Kobo Libra Colour. It appears Kobo has decided to save on the licensing fees of commercial fonts and replace them with fonts with an Open Font License, which is free for commercial use. Instead, Kobo has made OFL fonts like Bitter and Noto Sans available as alternatives to the commercial fonts previously available on their devices. Proprietary Kobo fonts like Rakuten Serif and Nickel are still available. The replacement fonts are less appealing than classical e-reader ones like Caecilia, Malabar and Bookerly.
Kindles are better study tools
Judging from Kobo's social media marketing, the company focuses more on leisurely reading and fiction content. As a result, the support of study aids appears to be an afterthought.
Since its inception, Kobo has not offered native support for exporting organised highlights and notes into notebooks (a simple hack is available to activate the feature to export highlights and annotations in a text file). Additionally, as noted before, personal documents do not sync between devices. In contrast, Kindle devices provide these essential features, making them more effective study tools.
User repairability
A final note needs to be made on Kobo's partnership with iFixit to make their devices user-repairable when out of warranty. The idea of user repairability is part of a broader initiative to reduce e-waste.
The main problem with Kobo’s implementation of user repairability is the cost of components and the relative expertise needed to make repairs. Further, Kobo Clara BW is not designed with disassembly in mind, with no screws or notch available to easily remove the back. Other consumer electronics vendors like Fairphone do a better job developing electronics that are relatively easy to repair and replace components.
Concluding thoughts
Of the few portable six-inch e-readers available, the Kobo Clara BW is worth serious consideration. There is a colour version of Kobo Clara, but six inches is not ideal for colour content like comics. Due to Kaleido 3, the colour model also has diminished contrast.
Amazon’s entry-level Kindle lacks hardware features like warm lighting, waterproofing, and Carta 1300. Since Kobo Clara BW does not have ads by default, the cost difference compared to the entry-level Kindle without ads is negligible.
Onyx BOOX 6 is an Android-based e-reader with compromises, such as a convoluted user interface and higher energy consumption, which results in a lower battery life. In reality, BOOX 6 is a different e-reader category targeting different users. For greater flexibility in reading large PDFs, browsing the web, and installing Android apps, BOOX Go 6 is the best choice six-inch e-reader with its fast processor, more storage, and RAM.
I have one and love it. I use koreader as I hate UI and it gives many options....koreader brings this device to another level