As expected, Kobo has a new eReader on the way, and it’s a 7.8 inch model with premium specs. The Kobo Aura ONE will likely compete with Amazon’s Kindle Voyage and Kindle Oasis in the premium eReader space.

We learned a bit about the Kobo Aura ONE when it showed up at the FCC last week. Now a Dutch retailer has spilled virtually all the beans.

kobo aura one_002

The new eReader features a 7.8 inch, 1872 x 1404 pixel illuminated Carta E Ink touchscreen display with 300 pixels per inch. That means the Kobo Aura ONE is larger than any of Amazon’s current eReaders, but it has the same pixel density, which means text should look just as crisp.

The device measures 7.6″ x 5.5″ x 0.67″ and weighs less than 9 ounces. It has a waterproof case, a micro USB cable, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi support.

Under the hood, it features 512MB of RAM and 8GB of storage. Kobo says it should get up to a month of battery life.

Interestingly one feature I don’t see mentioned is microSD card support.

It’s likely an official announcement is coming soon: Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn pretty much promised one a few weeks ago.

via The Digital Reader and MobileRead

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18 replies on “Kobo Aura ONE eReader with 7.8 inch high-res display coming soon”

  1. as many mentioned and now seen confirmation there is no removable storage I’m jumping ship from kobo. I have large library of mix of books and pdfs plus technical ebooks with lot of black/white diagrams that would benefit from the larger eInk screen. Think I’m moving to Onyx from now on but will still use my old kobos.

    The apologists saying no current ereader has it, this only applies to current generation as all my previous ones fir oast 3 years have had them. If kobo aren’t paying you why are you defending the backpedalling removing features that were present previously. If I wanted lock-in to a system for just books I’d go kindle since I have prime and they have more choice/cheaper books. If kobo tries to copy amazon and lock-in and try and force people on the upgrade wagon a la apple they can go swivel as they were 1st rate ebook maker now they seem to be going 2nd rate kindle knockoff route. Premium model especially shouldn’t do this.

  2. No uSD slot, no sale. I’ve been watching for this because I won’t buy a Kindle because of no removable storage. Let’s hope the uSD slot was just an omission from the Dutch data.

    1. Kobo readers come with a (horrifyingly bad) proprietary OS called Nickel. It’s little more than a front-end for their ebook store. In the last version I used, just doing a title search, by default, would search their store instead of your device’s on-board library. There is no way to browse by folders or even by file name – it creates a single library based on file metadata alone. And I have a TON of PDF files without accurate titles in their metadata… never needed anything more than the file name before.

      However, their hardware is solid. I can read all day long on my H2O without experiencing eye fatigue. And more importantly, there is a pretty big community that develops open-source replacement firmware called Kmenu. It’s plain and clunky, but works like a champ compared to the proprietary system. And you can install multiple reader programs on Kmenu – I use its built-in Koreader for my own novels (tailored to my tastes in font, size, spacing, etc.), and have Cool Reader installed with larger fonts and spacing for my daughter.

  3. Are you sure about those dimensions? 11.6 inches seems a tad long for a 7.8″ screen.

    1. Why? It’s an e-reader – not a tablet.
      None of the current Kobo e-readers have SD card support – including the ‘premium’ Aura H2O model. Nor do any of the Amazon ‘premium’ e-readers support SD cards.
      With 8GB of storage (enough to hold 6,000 eBooks by Kobo’s reckoning), this new Aura ONE model has TWICE the storage of the current Kobo models. Amazon doesn’t even bother prominently specifying the amount of storage in their e-readers – they just say ‘holds thousands of books’…

        1. The Aura HD WAS a one-off limited-edition model that was discontinued well over a year ago. Again, none of the current Kobo e-readers support SD cards.

          1. ?? I just loaded a micro SD card into my H20 ten minutes ago. I doubt I was hallucinating.

          2. kobo h2o is pretty current reader and has sd card support. if we pay 200-300 for ereader, why should we not expect a reasonable amount of storage? ereaders are not just for books, you can read pdf files and cbz files (manga/comic), those files alone can amount to hundreds of MB. having 4-8GB of storage on any electronic device in 2016 is plain stupid. why? just why.. even with smartphones the trend with lowe storage options ended, now we have to deal with this on ereaders. why not just put at least 32GB of internal storage on such expensive devices. what is the price difference between 4GB and 32GB memory? I am happy to pay a couple dollars more for that extra storage. ereader makers, just give us some damn options.

      1. Simple enough. An SD slot says they are selling hardware, no slot means they are selling you a tether to their service.

        With a slot it means you put your book collection on the SD card and can instantly migrate to a different device.

      2. The HD and H2O both have MicroSD card slots. That’s the entire reason I bought an H20 in the first place, and mine has a full 32gb of PDFs on its card right alongside the novel library I have on its internal memory.

        The advantage of a reader this size is that it can handle far more than plain text books. Few people need an 8″ screen purely for novels. This would be great for more complex PDF or EPUB files like children’s books, comics, textbooks, technical publications, wargame books, or anything else with illustrations that need to render as full pages.

        But those kinds of files can easily run 100mb-1gb each. And the type of customer who has those kinds of books is likely to have a sizeable library of them… Hence the need for expandable storage.

      3. more like 6-7GB of storage. even on 4GB internal storage you have 3GB of free space.

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