![]() ![]() Granted, Amazon’s Kindle Store and Kindle Unlimited are still the best option for North Americans looking for one-stop eBook shopping. Turn over the e-reader, and the display will re-orientate to accommodate your needs. Thanks to a built-in accelerometer, it’s also possible to use the Forma as a right or left-handed device. When perusing your digital library, you’ll be able to turn pages by using the Forma’s page-turn buttons or tapping at the device’s capacitative display. During testing, I discovered that going light instead of resilient might not have been the best idea. But it feels flimsy compared to Kobo’s excellent Aura One, and positively cheap when held up against Amazon’s aluminum-bodied Oasis 2. The result of this decision is that the Forma is comfortable to hold and is light enough that it’s easy to forget it’s there when tossed in a backpack or purse. Instead, Kobo opted for lightweight materials. With the amount of screen real estate that the Forma offers readers, Kobo had a tough choice to make: If they’d opted to provide the device with premium feel, through the use of heavier, more resilient materials, its large size and heavier weight would have made it unwieldy and uncomfortable to use one-handed for extended periods of time. It makes for a frustrating reading experience. This could mean that the device will mistake the liquid on its display for input from your fingers. You should know, however, that unlike Amazon’s Oasis 2, it’s not possible to deactivate the Forma’s touch controls before exposing it to water. The Kobo Forma can be completely submerged in up to two meters of fresh water for two hours at a time and continue to work just fine. Happily, thanks to the Forma’s IPX8 rating, you’ll be able to burn through a lot of the this time reading in a hot tub or at the beach. In either case, depending on on your habits, you’ll be able to enjoy weeks of reading, on either device, with a single charge. Not so: where the Oasis contains a 1,000mAh battery, the Kobo device is equipped with a 1,200mAh battery. One would think this means that the Forma packs a smaller battery. Where the Oasis sports a battery hump on one side of its chassis, the Forma is flat, both front and back. Pick up an Oasis or a Forma, however, and you’ll immediately understand that the similarities are shallow, at best. Both devices boast large displays with an oblong bezel on one side, which hosts a pair of page -urn buttons. One of the first things you may notice about the Kobo Forma is how much it resembles an Amazon All-New Kindle Oasis. ![]() The Forma’s power and page turn buttons can all be found on the device’s bezel, similar to the design of the Amazon Oasis 2. ![]() A 32GB iteration of the device is also available for a whopping $330-the same price as a 32GB iPad. So long as you’re not stuffing it full of chunky Manga, comic books or PDF files, this is more than enough storage to contain thousands of books. Hopefully Kobo gets these frontlight issues figured out because the Kobo Forma is a really nice larger-screen ereader otherwise, but at $279 for a dedicated ebook reader you’d expect it not to have these problems.In its base configuration, the Forma is available with 8GB of non-expandable storage for $280. That gives it a gradient look that goes across the screen that can be distracting to the eye while reading. The side with the buttons clearly has a darker area that goes down the side of the screen, and the frontlight is noticeably brighter on the opposite side. In addition to the screen flickering, you can see the dark strip issue in the video as well, especially toward the end of the video when the brightness is turned up. The video was taken using slow motion to capture the flickering effect, but I can see it without using slow motion at times in my Kobo Forma video review (which I’ll be posting tomorrow). I noticed the unusual flickering when I was doing the video reviews for the Kobo Forma, and then I saw the YouTube video posted below talking about the issue as well, which is referred to as pulse width modulation. The flickering might cause headaches and eye strain for some people that are sensitive to that kind of thing. You can’t see the frontlight flicker with the naked eye (not unless you’re really sensitive it), but you can see it in videos. LED frontlights are usually at the bottom of the screen instead of the side where it makes imperfections seem more noticeable.įrontlight shadows and subtle color gradients aren’t at all unusual when it comes to frontlights, but the Kobo Forma’s frontlight is suffering from a flickering issue as well. ![]()
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