I’ve had my Kobo Aura for about a week and a half now, and while there has been a lot I have loved about it, it hasn’t been a 100% positive experience.

The industrial design is great – I love the bezel flush with the screen and the device is very light and thin.  The new UI looks good and the Pocket integration is fantastic.  Tor.com often has great snippets of upcoming books on its website and I find it awesome to be able to click a button and have those on my Kobo.

Kobo often touts its handling of PDFs, and in all fairness it’s probably better than that on the Kindle.  However, I tried to read a PDF book I have and gave up after a few pages.  I found manoeuvring around the document very cumbersome even with Kobo’s navigation tool.  For PDFs, tablets rather than eReaders are definitely the way to go.

Searching on the Kobo reader – or the website for that matter – is completely hit or miss.  For more common books or authors there is no problem.  However trying to search for Anne Robillard for example brought up every Anne under the sun except Robillard.

The biggest issue I’ve had is that the screen is very unresponsive compared to other eReaders I’ve had.  Many times I’ve had to press three or four times to change a page.  Today it became severe enough that I decided to call Kobo support to discuss a replacement.  After 10 minutes on the phone, I was left with a completely unusable eReader.  I was told to take photos of the device and am now waiting on an email with further instructions about the replacement procedure.  I couldn’t help thinking Amazon would have had a replacement device on its way to me this evening.

I will, of course, keep you updated.