As I have written about previously in Goodbye Kindle, hello Kobo, I thoroughly enjoy my Kobo Clara BW and have no regrets about making the switch from a Kindle. That said, there are a number of UX issues and glitches that I’ve observed, which I hope Kobo addresses at some point.
The following is my non-exhaustive list of things I have observed…
Glitchy hardware
As others have reported in multiple places, the P365 variant of the Clara BW clearly appears to have some issues related to its hardware and/or the software specific to it. I now have an N365B variant, after returning my original P365, which has completely resolved the highlighting & selecting text issue, but the other input glitches still remain. Which fits with my running assumption, that most of these are simply software related, since when using KOReader, I have no such issues, even on the P365 hardware, which was terrible with the stock Kobo firmware and would have issues on every input attempt.
Input glitches
Highlighting & selecting text
This issue is incredibly easy to trigger and reproduce. It happens every time I use my Kobo, and more than 60% of my attempts to perform this action result in triggering the bug.
The behaviour is that you long-press a piece of text to start a selection, but instead of selecting the text, the device registers a tap and jumps to the next page, even though you haven’t lifted your finger.
Bookmark mis-triggered
This happens less frequently, but is still very annoying and quite a nuisance, since if you don’t notice it, your books end up polluted with bookmarks you didn’t actually create. ðŸ˜
Highlighted text context menu glitches
This one is extremely annoying. After fighting with the Kobo to highlight some text, the context menu appears, allowing you to perform actions on the selection. By default, the text is already highlighted, and you can instead search for the text, remove the highlight, or perform similar actions.
Sometimes the context menu appears in a location completely disconnected from the highlight. This often happens when the highlight spans two pages, or for other seemingly random reasons. When this happens, there’s a 60% or greater chance, based on my anecdotal experience, that tapping the screen nowhere near the context menu to dismiss it will instead register as an action to remove the highlight.
Clicking an existing highlight removes it immediately
Another variant of this, which I believe is related to the context menu issue above, is that tapping an existing highlight will sometimes immediately remove it instead of showing the context menu, as it’s meant to.
Screen ghosting from context menus and highlighted text rendering
After highlighting text, especially across a page boundary, or using the context menu on an existing highlight, the screen will often invert the colours across large portions of the page and leave significant visual artefacts. These then need to be cleared by forcing a screen refresh through the main menu.
Poor UX choices
Text selection controls
Whoever designed the text selection controls clearly has never actually used them, like literally. If you ever need to adjust the start of a selection, the control point you have to drag is above the text. Even if you’re left-handed, this is a nightmare, as your finger obscures what you’re attempting to select, leaving you flying blind.