Kobo Glo HD review

A 300ppi E-Ink screen gives this ereader the edge

Kobo Glo HD review
Kobo Glo HD review

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Battery life

It's easy to take the long battery lives of ereaders for granted. But for anyone used to reading on a phone or tablet they're a revelation, and the Kobo Glo HD is no different.

During my review I had it switched on almost constantly for a couple of days, loaded all kinds of media and performed thousands of page-turns.

By the end of the review the battery was on 89%. Conclusion? If you're going on a two-week holiday, you won't need to recharge it while you're away.

The caveat is this: Wi-Fi eats-up the battery, as always. Avoid daily Wi-Fi and the built-in battery is actually slated to stretch to at least a month, possibly two. Better still, that ComfortLight appears to have little effect on that battery life.

Kobo Glo HD Ereader review

PDFs can be zoomed-in and navigated smoothly

Media

Have you got an account with Pocket? Get one, and the Kobo Glo HD opens up a whole new world of syncing with mobile devices and browsers.

Seen an article on Facebook that you want to read later? Save to Pocket. Idly come across a long-form travel article you think you might want to read on the plane? Save to Pocket.

Almost anything you can read on a smartphone, tablet or any computer, you can save to Pocket, and then access it on the Kobo Glo HD later. Wi-Fi sync allowing, of course. It's incredibly easy, and for me easily the highlight of the Kindle OS.

Kobo Glo HD Ereader review

A web browser is also included, though it's unconvincing

Another advantage the Kobo Glo HD has over any Kindle is that it can play almost any file or format of the book you throw at it.

Primarily it's all about buying and reading Adobe DRM-locked EPUB books, but it also supports third-party files including MOBI, EPUB, EPUB3, PDF (into which it's possible to smoothly zoom-in on), DOC , XLS, TXT, HTML, XHTML and RTF files. It even displays JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF and BMP photos.

There's even a perfectly workable and readable web browser, too, though we're not convinced it's required.

Jamie Carter

Jamie is a freelance tech, travel and space journalist based in the UK. He’s been writing regularly for Techradar since it was launched in 2008 and also writes regularly for Forbes, The Telegraph, the South China Morning Post, Sky & Telescope and the Sky At Night magazine as well as other Future titles T3, Digital Camera World, All About Space and Space.com. He also edits two of his own websites, TravGear.com and WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com that reflect his obsession with travel gear and solar eclipse travel. He is the author of A Stargazing Program For Beginners (Springer, 2015),