Ebooks can be read in any of the four orientations, but the reader’s menu page only displays in portrait mode. The funny thing is, I never really noticed how cramped those smaller readers can feel until I was presented with so much screen space to show so much more text at the same font size.Īnother difference from the Clara is, of course, the gyroscopic screen orientation detector, which will flip the page so it’s upright whatever way you hold the reader. It’s like a hardcover book’s page, in comparison to the smaller readers’ paperback equivalents. This is a reading experience akin to what I had reading ebooks on the Onyx Boox Max 2, only nowhere near as heavy and bulky. Look at how much more of it there is on the Forma! Here it is side-by-side with the Kobo Clara, displaying the same text at approximately the same font size and weight. The other huge difference is the reader’s huge 8″ screen. Living in Screen Real Estate Left: the Kobo Clara. And yet for all its lightness, it doesn’t feel cheap, like the RCA Voyager II tablet did in comparison to the Fire-it’s compact and dense enough that it actually has a good heft for its size. Holding it honestly feels like I’m holding something out of a science-fiction movie–a nearly weightless display panel capable of displaying a hardcover page’s worth of print. It’s easy to use one-handed, or to place my other hand along the other edge to hold it in both.Īnd this reader is so light, it’s almost unreal. While I don’t have any experience using the Oasis, I have to say the Forma’s version feels natural in my hand the added heft on the spine side makes it easier to maneuver the rest of it. This shape largely went by the wayside as early e-ink designs focused on flat, symmetrical tablet shapes, but it’s come back in recent years. The Rocket eBook also had a thicker spine, with page-turn buttons, and so did a few other LCD e-readers of the day. But the rest of it is less than a centimeter thick.Īlthough I say the thicker spine design is “like the Kindle Oasis,” it actually harkens back to some of the earliest ereader designs. Like the Kindle Oasis, it has an asymmetric design featuring a thicker “spine” with page-turn buttons, which can be used ambidextrously thanks to the device’s built-in orientation gyroscope. The Kobo Forma has to rate as one of the thinnest e-readers I’ve ever used–or at least, most of it does. So, instead, I’ll try to go over some of the biggest differences. Indeed, I could just copy and paste large portions of my Clara review here, and they would be equally valid. I haven’t noticed any significant differences in the way the reader operates it seems to have all the same features, the same fonts, the same greater adjustability of font size and weight than the Kindle offers, the same editable configuration files, the same space-wasting page footer that can be removed via a little judicious config-file editing, the same night reading mode that tints the screen orange, and so on. So here are my thoughts.įor starters, the operating system seems to be basically the same as the one that powers the Clara, which I reviewed a couple of months ago. I’ll try to go into more detail about the reader in a later post, but I figured I should go ahead and get my first impressions down right away, before interest dies down. I haven’t had a whole lot of opportunity to play with it, what with my day job and such, but I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I opened it up to discover a review unit of Kobo’s very latest e-reader, the Forma, due to hit stores in a couple of weeks. Late last night, as I stepped out the door to release some fully charged Lime scooters, I noticed a courier package waiting on my porch.
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