The Kobo Elipsa 2E will be the great alternative to the Kindle Scribe in the high-end of e-book readers and it will be available in mid-April with many improvements over the previous model.
Reading is a pleasure and if you use a physical book the experience is unmatched. But the possibility of carrying thousands of digital books in the backpack is a great advantage and that is why eReaders have become faithful companions for many of us. There are dirt cheap entry-level models below the $100 barrier, and there are higher-end ones that offer additional writing features. This is where the new brand from the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, the top competitor of Amazon’s Kindles, fits in.
Kobo Elipsa 2E, more than an eReader
The new model maintains the 10.3 inch touch screen from the previous version, but increases its resolution to 300 ppi. Its electronic ink panel improves front lighting with ComfortLight PRO technology, which provides automatic brightness and color temperature adjustments, anti-reflective treatment and blue light reduction to increase comfort of use over long days. Its design has also been improved, betting on better ergonomics while maintaining similar dimensions: 193 x 227 x 7.5 mm and weighing 390 g.
The writing capacity, as an additional feature in the high-end readers, has been enhanced with the new kobo stylus 2 stylus, with which you can highlight, underline or write annotations, which can be converted if you want to typed text. It has an eraser and a button to highlight important passages. It can be easily stored in the reader with an integrated magnet.
As for the internal hardware, the new Elipsa mounts a 2 GHz CPU, we assume an ARM SoC with plenty of features for this type of product. Same in internal storage, 32 GBytes, which is a capability you won’t see in lower-end readers. In terms of connectivity, it supports Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth and has a USB-C port for data and charging a battery that will offer two weeks of autonomy, according to the manufacturer.
And of course reading. It supports up to 15 file formats including the main ones in eReader like EPUB, MOBI and PDF. It has 12 different native fonts and more than 50 styles to customize the font. It also supports a few audiobooks that are gaining ground, and you can connect to Kobo’s library (or use third-party ones) to download or buy thousands and thousands of eBooks.
Kobo will soon add the Google Drive cloud service to the already supported Dropbox, to import documents or export personal notebooks to share. You can also check all your notebooks on kobo.com and the reader is compatible with the third-party service Readwise and allows you to sync notes with tools like Notion, Roam or Evernote.
The Kobo Elipsa 2E can already be reserved in a good number of countries (Spain included) and will be available on April 19 with the official price of 399 euros. As an introductory promotion, the official SleepCover is 50% off if you pre-order the reader. It is certainly not of an economic range, but it is very complete in functions, and not only for reading. Safe bet if you are looking for the high range of eReaders.
