Items have to be moved individually there's no drag and drop between collections (you drag the item to a hot area in the status bar and are presented with a dialog box, changing the mode of operation from direct to indirect control) and after a few days of using it, I was surprised that I was still being offered the 'Learn to Add to Collection' as a main menu option. So if you have a collection of books from the 'Warrior Cats' series, you can add the Wikipedia page to the collection, and it will show up for easier access. Calling up the 'share' button from a number of Android applications and you'll find that you can 'share items' into the Kobo collections system. From here you can sort books into your own collections for easier access and discovery.Ĭollections are not limited to books or video files. The default collection is 'Books' and simply shows all the books that are on your Arc 10HD, and you can organise these by title, author, or in order of when they were opened. These collections can be opened up to browse your own content. While it's nowhere near the level of skeumorphism that you used to find on the Apple bookshelf app, the stark nature of the columns with text rotated ninety degrees puts me in mind of a minimalist bookshelf. The home screen of the Arc 10HD is a three pane affair, with a desktop for shortcuts and widgets on the left hand screen, the central screen listing the new content on your device (with a few recommendations mixed into the timeline), and on the right hand screen you have your collections. Neither should it be a surprise that Kobo have put the software focus on reading. Once you start reading on the Kobo, you are not going to be interrupted by the hardware if you don't want to be. Bluetooth will be turned off, notifications can be hidden, sounds will not play, and you can decide if Wi-Fi should disconnect as well. Kobo's 'Reading Mode' will essentially hang a digital 'do not disturb' sign over the Android OS. Naturally the video player hides all the UI chrome and controls when playing back video, but it's in the book reading app where they have added an interesting feature. Keeping the consumption experience as clean as possible is one of the successful bits of design put in place by Kobo. The regular Android controls are shows on the capacitive screen as required, which means they can be tucked away out of sight when reading a book or watching a film. Apart from the Kobo logo and the front facing camera, Kobo have kept the front of the device smooth and unblemished. It’s a terrible shame, since otherwise the screen wants for nothing, with a respectable maximum brightness of 440cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 800:1.Glass covers the front of the device, with the soft-touch coating on the back of the device reaching around to frame the screen. ![]() Switching from sRGB to Native colour correction in the Display settings merely shifts the muddy hues to blues. The screen has a permanent sepia tinge, while reds and oranges absolutely burst from the screen, as if someone’s passed it through an appalling Instagram filter before it left the factory. ![]() While we have no complaints about its sharpness, something seems to have gone horribly wrong with the colour calibration. Reading should be a joy on a device with a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution spread across its 10.1in display (resulting in a pixel density of 300ppi). However, with only 16GB of storage to play with – 12.9GB of which is usable – and no means of expanding the storage, you can’t go mad in Google’s app emporium. Most importantly of all, Kobo gives you full access to the Google Play Store, trumping Amazon’s Appstore lock-in for flexibility. The Reading Mode, meanwhile, silences the device and hides notifications while you’re tucking into an ebook, considerably minimising distractions. Serious thought has gone into the reading apps, too, in particular the option to tap from one column of text to the next in digital magazines, which cuts out a lot of manual panning and zooming. Kobo’s customisations are more elegant than Amazon’s, however: we particularly like the bookshelf screen that provides quick access to books, magazines, articles saved in online bookmarking service Pocket and more. Like Amazon, Kobo has bastardised the Android 4.2.2 installation with its own user interface, which is designed primarily to shove you towards content sold in the Kobo store.
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