If your chief complaint about your ereader is that it’s inconvenient to turn pages, the new Kobo Remote is probably the product you’ve been desperately (but lazily) searching for. The company announced the little page-turner at a R550 ($30) price point, with a 4 November launch date overseas.
It’ll take time to get here, if at all, but when it does, you’ll be freed from the tyranny of engaging your shoulder, elbow, and finger to poke at a touchscreen simply to read the next sentence. You may have to move your thumb, assuming the little controller is lightly gripped in your slothful fist.
Remote viewing
If it looks a little like a VR controller or something Nintendo might have made for motion games, you’re not far off. The Kobo Remote features a wrist-strap, for extra literary laziness, and two buttons. One goes forward. The other goes back. Obvious, really. It runs on a single AAA battery, which the company says is “long-lasting”. How long that is, exactly, isn’t stated, but it’s measured in months. Hopefully, your muscles won’t have entirely atrophied by the time you have to change it.
The 36(ish) gram remote communicates with the Kobo Clara CE, Clara BW, Libra Colour, and Libra 2 (among others) via Bluetooth 5.0. It’ll also handle basic control of audiobooks stored on supported Kobo models (like play/pause and volume control), but it’s mostly for getting to the next page in a written work.
Kobo’s Remote isn’t the first device of its kind. Amazon’s Kindle and other readers already have a stash of controllers for people who value working their brains over any sort of physical effort whatsoever. It’s a wonder anyone can muster up the energy to add one of these to their Amazon shopping carts.
