E-BOOK READER Kobo Aura review

The best e-reader we've ever reviewed.

The Kobo Aura HD was one of our favourite ebook readers thanks to its gloriously high-resolution screen. The new Kobo Aura is a smaller and cheaper version.

The Aura's screen is 6in with a resolution of 1024x758 pixels. Although this is less than the HD's 7in 1440x1080- pixel screen, it's still excellent. Text is crisp, with 11 additional fonts to choose from and plenty of font sizes. There's a subtle backlight that diffuses light evenly across the screen so you don't strain your eyes when reading in the dark.

You can adjust the brightness using a slider.

The Aura doesn't have a raised border, with the screen blending seemlessly into the black frame. This gives the Aura a sleek, minimalist look that's both pleasing on the eye and comfortable in the hand. It's easy to use because the touchscreen is very responsive, and the menus and settings well organised and simple to understand.

The Aura has an interesting feature called Beyond the Book, which is available on some ebooks. It gives you extra insight and information to whatever you're reading. When we read a book about the American electoral system, for example, the feature provided extra information about forecasting and predictions. This was all very interesting, but lacked sufficient depth to be truly useful.

Kobo Aura costs slightly more than the similar Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. The two are evenly matched in screen and build quality, but with the Aura you can buy your ebooks from a variety of stores while the Kindle is limited to Amazon. For us that freedom is worth extra.

With 100PPI commonly seen in a similar resolution laptop — which results in much better colour. A webcam sits just above the screen and is capable of recording 720p videos.

Talking about the performance, we would like to begin with the keyboard. It has an island type keyboard with a rubberised texture, this provides a comfortable day-long typing experience with decent response. The touchscreen is also quite responsive and supports multitouch gestures. There is a bundled user-friendly utility that makes it very simple to set up these gestures.

While measuring performance, we performed a variety of tasks like MPEG transcoding along streaming a 1080p movie, regular data processing, web surfing and music. There was no noticeable lag during these jobs. Playing games like Angry Birds is a decent experience though high end games could be a bit of a struggle at this configuration.

Overall, the ASUS Vivobook F202E is an impressive touchscreen laptop with good looks. Available at a tad over Rs 35,000, this is a one-of-a-kind product for those who who want an ultraportable decent looking laptop at a modest price.