Kobo joins the color e-readers fray with two devices

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Rakuten Kobo has finally joined the club of color e-reader manufacturers. The company’s first devices in the segment include the Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour. Both products offer E-Ink color displays to provide a more personalized reading experience. However, they don’t provide many under-the-hood improvements over the company’s previous e-readers.

Kobo’s new e-readers flaunt E-Ink’s Kaleido 3 touch-enabled color displays

Kobo’s new Libra Colour and Clara Colour e-readers utilize E-Ink’s latest Kaleido color display technology. It is touted to offer a subtle and pastel-like hue display. The tech is capable of dropping the 300ppi grayscale resolution to a resolution of 150ppi when you want to view the content in color.

The new E-Ink screen offers 16-levels of grayscale, 30% higher color resolution, and 4,096 colors. Notably, the Kobo Libra Colour model also supports a stylus for e-book annotations and highlighting. The Kobo Stylus doesn’t come bundled with the package, however.

The new Kobo readers can carry up to 24,000 e-books or 150 audiobooks

As for the other features, the Kobo Libra Colour can carry up to 24,000 e-books or 150 Kobo Audiobooks. While the Libra Colour has 32GB of native storage, the Clara Colour offers 16GB of storage. The company claims that the new e-readers are capable of lasting up to 42 days on a single charge. However, this is one condition of just 30 minutes of reading per day with 30 percent screen brightness. Also, you will need to turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

The Kobo Clara Colour is equipped with a 6-inch display, while the Libra Colour has a bigger 7-inch screen. Both are powered by an unspecified dual-core processor that has a clock speed of 2.0GHz. The connectivity features are also the same including dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB Type-C ports. Notably, both are IPX8 certified and can last up to an hour under two minutes of water.

Kobo’s first e-readers with color displays will be available starting from $150

Coming to the pricing, the Kobo Clara Colour will retail for $149.99 USD/$179.99 CAD. Due to the bigger display and higher storage, the Kobo Libra Colour will be available for $219.99 USD/$249.000 CAD. The Kobo Stylus 2 will set you back by $69.99 USD/$89.99 CAD. They will be available to pre-order on April 10 and will go on sale on April 30.

Along with its first e-readers with color displays, the brand has also launched the Kobo Clara BW. The upgraded black and white e-reader will be available for $129.99 USD/159.99 CAD.

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