Kobo's Clara Colour, and by extension, the Clara BW, proved more than capable of slaying the Amazon dragon. South Africans finally have a solid alternative to the Kindle's too-restrictive OS, a colour display that's cheaper than the Colorsoft, with some snappy page turning. A more attractive price point would have gone a long way toward cementing the lead.
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This backpack ain’t big enough for two ereaders. Okay, fine — it is — but there’s really no point in carrying more than one around, is there? Rakuten’s Kobo wants to be the ereader in your backpack, with the likes of the Kobo Libra Colour, Clara Colour, and Clara BW. We’ve spent the past several weeks in the company of the Clara family (mainly the Colour) to see if Kobo really does have what it takes to stand up to the behemoth that is Kindle.
And boy, does it. We didn’t think anything could get Kindle to falter, but Kobo has managed it with apparent ease. It’ll cost you, mind, to get out from under Amazon’s thumb, but the pay-off is worth it. At roughly R7,500, the Clara Colour is a pricey ask — particularly for anyone not consuming comics every second of the day. Whether it beats out Kindle’s Colorsoft is murkier still. It’s cheaper, at any rate.
Kobo’s colourful personality
Until you turn ’em on, the Kobo Clara Colour and BW are practically identical. A handsome bunch, sure, with both our review models in matte black, though it also comes in white. They may not be as endowed as the Colorsoft, but we still found both 6in displays to be spectacular (and the BW a little more so).
That’s because the Clara Colour utilises a colour-capable Kaleido 3 touchscreen while the BW employs a Carta 1300HD display. Don’t get us wrong — the Clara Colour is capable of living up to the 300ppi spec Kobo quotes — though that drops to a meagre 150ppi when viewing colour content. The BW doesn’t have those troubles, being just a little sharper and more responsive compared to the Clara Colour.
The point is that you’ll have a grand time with whichever Kobo takes your fancy. At 174g, it was lightweight enough to slip into virtually any bag without hassle, and slipped into a pocket just as easily. The lone blemish on the Clara’s thin edges is the USB-C charge port. A concave power button resides on the rear top-left corner, allowing your (right) index finger to easily wrap around and poke it. Lefties, not so much.
If you’re planning on reading plenty of comics, that 150ppi is an easy sacrifice to make. Kobo promises a buffet of more than 4,000 colours, and we don’t doubt the claim. It’s a (mostly) glare-free affair — helped by the display’s sunken edges, but we were occasionally hit with a bright spot from above. Nothing a little backlighting couldn’t fix. Throw in IPX8 waterproof rating, and you’ve got yourself one versatile ereader.
A proper page-turner
A lightweight and resilient ereader isn’t much without power behind it. Kobo’s Clara has that special sauce, employing a 2GHz processor that’s capable of snappy page turns. While the Colour wasn’t exactly slow, the BW model beat its sibling once again, with fractionally faster page turns. Even so, it’s something special to see the cover of your favourite ebook in all that colourful glory.
It wasn’t a wholly flawless experience, mind you. We had a bit of trouble coaxing the Clara Colour to read our comics. We had no issues side-loading The Death of Gwen Stacy or The Batman Who Laughs, but there was a noticeable stutter when we began flipping through pages. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re only sticking around for comics and their pretty covers.
A smaller body also means less storage, and with only 16GB on any version of the Clara, selecting which to cull when it’s filling up is a necessity. The Clara does support audiobooks, which is where the bulk of that storage will go if that’s your preferred way to consume books.
Kobo’s OS takes some getting used to if you’re coming over from Amazon, but let it into your heart and it’ll reward you with more customisation, a simpler homepage that puts books first, and more power to load the books you want. Kobo supports the EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, and CBR formats, with Amazon’s AZW3 nowhere in sight. That’s… fine by us.
Keep hogging all the juice
It’s difficult to monumentally screw up the battery life of any ereader, but adding a colour element does skew the playing field a bit. Even so, the Clara Colour holds its own against Kindle’s Paperwhite series, providing several weeks of life before it even lets on that its cells are running dry.
Interestingly, our black review models offer a 1,500mAh battery, while the white models up that to 1,900mAh. It might be worth some sacrifices to your ereader’s aesthetics to land the bigger battery (especially if you’re going to stick it in a cover), but in our experience, the 1,500mAh black models got by without a hitch.
Kobo Clara Colour (+BW) verdict
Where Kobo fumbles hardest with the Clara Colour and Clara BW is its pricing. As much as we’d love to convince everyone that the Clara is better than your typical Kindle — colour or no — it’s difficult to recommend at R7,500 when a 12th-gen Paperwhite can be had for a couple thousand less. If colour is a must, it at least beats out its biggest competitor, the Colorsoft, in terms of pricing. But if you’re not interested in comics or the less-restrictive OS, then sticking with the tried-and-true Paperwhite lineup is probably your best bet.
1 Comment
Where did you purchase the kobo from in South Africa?