One thing that is really interesting to me is battle of spec marketing and how Amazon is really managing to outdo its competitors here.
As far as I can tell the Kobo Glo and the Kindle Paperwhite use the same new display and lighting technology. However Amazon has christened theirs as the "Paperwhite" and so several sites I have read have discussed how kobo has released a competitor but it uses the "older e-ink pearl" technology. If anyone has some clarification about the displays I would happy to get more detail, but from the matching resolutions, to the similar device photos on their respective websites, to the description of how the front-lighting is achieved lead me to believe that Amazon is using commodity e-ink technology available to everyone else and christening it as a revolution.
Their other claim is that they get 8 weeks of battery life with the light enabled. Closer reading of the small print reveals that this is going by 30 minutes of reading a day, for a grand total of 870.5 = 28 hours of reading with the light. On their site Kobo claims 55 hours of use with the light on. Amazon does not say in their comparison if the light stays on for the whole 8 weeks, or just while it is being read. But either they have achieve an incredible breakthrough in battery life to allow for 8724 hours of lights or their battery life is 1/2 that of a competitor. Regardless I have seen several sites claiming that Kobo has some serious catching up to with "only" 55 hours of battery.
Anyway, just the usual specs jockeying between tech companies, but in this case as an owner of a kobo I was intrigued by the details as I have experience with one of their competitors. Always interesting to see what gets reported unchecked and what doesn't.
It's true, and I wasn't expecting them to say anything like that. Of course they would trumpet it as a revolution, it would indeed be terrible marketing if they didn't.
My post was muddled, so I guess what I was really trying to say is this: Most of the tech reporting I have seen around this event has uncritically parroted most of these claims. This bodes poorly for getting accurate information in areas where it isn't as obvious to me. It caught me off guard this time because I saw it being done by several resources which I had previously viewed as being more in-depth and trustworthy. I guess it's like reading an article in the newspaper about a topic you know quite well. It makes you incredibly suspicious of reporting on topics you don't know as much about.
One thing that is really interesting to me is battle of spec marketing and how Amazon is really managing to outdo its competitors here.
As far as I can tell the Kobo Glo and the Kindle Paperwhite use the same new display and lighting technology. However Amazon has christened theirs as the "Paperwhite" and so several sites I have read have discussed how kobo has released a competitor but it uses the "older e-ink pearl" technology. If anyone has some clarification about the displays I would happy to get more detail, but from the matching resolutions, to the similar device photos on their respective websites, to the description of how the front-lighting is achieved lead me to believe that Amazon is using commodity e-ink technology available to everyone else and christening it as a revolution.
Their other claim is that they get 8 weeks of battery life with the light enabled. Closer reading of the small print reveals that this is going by 30 minutes of reading a day, for a grand total of 870.5 = 28 hours of reading with the light. On their site Kobo claims 55 hours of use with the light on. Amazon does not say in their comparison if the light stays on for the whole 8 weeks, or just while it is being read. But either they have achieve an incredible breakthrough in battery life to allow for 8724 hours of lights or their battery life is 1/2 that of a competitor. Regardless I have seen several sites claiming that Kobo has some serious catching up to with "only" 55 hours of battery.
Anyway, just the usual specs jockeying between tech companies, but in this case as an owner of a kobo I was intrigued by the details as I have experience with one of their competitors. Always interesting to see what gets reported unchecked and what doesn't.