Review: Kobo Aura H2O

Introduction and design

Does an ereader need to be waterproof? Since Sony made its Xperia devices waterproof it was only a matter of time before this impressively practical approach hit every other gadget and where better to get your feet wet than with an ereader?

It's more likely to spend time in a bath or near a swimming pool than a smartphone. Kobo's latest, the Kobo Aura H2O, isn't cheap with an RRP of £139.99 (about US$244, AU$255) at the time of writing, but its ability not only to withstand moisture but to work just as well underwater as above it is unique. Why did no-one think of this before?

The Aura H2O is Kobo's best ereader yet. It's essentially an upgrade on the Kobo Aura HD, with the same sized 6.8-inch screen. However, this incarnation has a lot of improvements.

The first is its IP67 certification, something that makes the Kobo Aura H2O completely waterproof. I'm not talking 'water resistant' or other kinds of marketing blabber, but proper, solid waterproofing that means it can actually be left under 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes.

Page turning and general functionality will still work in baths, rivers, and even in the sea.

The waterproofing comes largely from a cover on the bottom that keeps the Kobo Aura H2O's ins and outs dry. These ins and outs include a microUSB slot for charging its two-month long battery, and a microSD card slot that can increase its built-in 4GB capacity by a further 32GB.

Despite the Aura H2O's aquatic reputation, it still feels the need to proffer a "water on your screen?" warning whenever a drop of rain/splash/wet hands touches its screen.

This is a hangover from previous versions, and since it makes no difference to the health of the Kobo Aura H2O, I turned-off this recurring message in the settings menu.

It uses a 6.8-inch touchscreen e-ink Carta display that has a resolution of 1430 x 1080 pixels that achieves plenty, thanks to 256 pixels per inch.

However, even with the screen Kobo is trying to appeal more to beach bums than spec-watchers. Its display has an anti-glare coating and, as well as being waterproof, the design is also dust-tight.

So no more worries about getting sand in your ereader, though all of this only applies if you keep the flap on the bottom shut.

The H2O also has some clever edge lighting to create enough subtle illumination to read in the dark, without tablet-like brightness. Five LEDs along the bottom – invisible to the eye – fire light across the screen in an exceptionally uniform way. Is there anything the Aura H2O can't do?

Though hardly an ugly duckling, the Kobo Aura H2O doesn't quite match the aesthetics of either the Kindle family or the Kobo Aura HD, which it's effectively an upgrade of.

While the new Kindle Voyage is 7.6mm slim and the Kindle Paperwhite is 9.1mm, the Aura H2O is a slightly chubbier 9.7mm.

Its chunkier design shows mostly in the bezel, which not only measures 13mm along the sides and tip, but rises above the screen a little too much for my tastes, and certainly more than the Aura HD.

Easy to hold in one hand (it weighs just 227g), its soft-to-the-touch surface is perfect for gripping. Its basic look might seem retro, but the build quality is unbeatable and easily worth the money.

Button placement is a non-issue since the Aura H2O's touchscreen handles everything, there's just one on/off switch on the top that's nicely low-rise. That touchscreen, woken from 'sleep' mode by a press of the sensitive on/off switch, mostly responds to touch quickly, rapidly refreshing the e-ink screen.

Interface and Performance

The headline act works well. I dunked the Aura H2O in a sink; aside from the warning message about there being some water on the screen there were zero after-effects. I even managed to continue operating the touchscreen underwater, which is great news for mermaids.

Kobo's ereaders have neat, tidy and easy to use interfaces, and the Aura H2O is no different. The home page is arranged as a grid of up to ten differently-sized panels, the largest is reserved for your current book while other books you've got on the go get smaller panels. Each one has a percentage figure for how much you've read.

There are other panels populated by the Kobo Bookstore, such as recommended, new, and top 50 books, with other shortcuts to your own library. Two other tabs at the bottom of the screen for library and extras bring-up drop-up menus.

Library gives access to books, previews, my collections and articles from a Pocket account. Extras offers reading stats, awards and a dictionary.

I managed to log in to my Pocket account and load-up a panel of nine thumbnails for articles I had saved using a desktop PC, which were displayed quickly and exactly how I had set-up the font size/spacing for reading books, but with images added too.

It's a great feature, but it can be slow to sync, which is true of every online feature of the Aura H2O.

Although finding, arranging and sorting your books is made easy, the home page also includes a handy search bar across the top, which makes a lot of sense. The source can be toggled between your own library and Kobo's Bookstore.

The reading stats section is overkill, presenting figures for your current book on hours spent reading it, the average minutes per session, page turns and average pages per minute.

It's a fine user interface, but there is a slowness to it that can be frustrating. Several times I pressed something only for the Aura H2O not to respond, or had to press something a few times before it was acknowledged.

That could be the touchscreen's fault, of course, but there's that same slowness when a PDF is loaded, too. Reading books and articles is speedy, but the rest of the user interface can get sticky.

Reading, store, battery, and media

Reading

With a high contrast, high resolution screen that does a complete refresh only every six pages, reading is easy, it feels natural, and it's very fast.

Navigating a book on the Kobo Aura H2O is intuitive and nicely customisable. A tap on the left of the screen turns a page back, on the right side forwards, and a tap in the middle brings up panels at the top and bottom of the page.

This is SimpleTurn, and it's well named. The panel across the top presents a home icon, options to change the brightness, check the battery, sync or access the settings menu.

However, it's the bottom panel of customisation options that helps the Aura H2O stand up to, and beat, any kind of Kindle and every single tablet.

Someone at Kobo is clearly (and wisely) obsessed with typography, because hidden within the reading experience is TypeGenius, a chocolate box of tweaks to font sizes, line spacing and margin widths.

It's deliciously expansive, including 10 fonts – both serif and sans serif – from the classic Georgia and Malabar to the en vogue Gill Sans and one of Kobo's own, the terrific Kobo Nickel.

However, probably the biggest advance on previous Kobo ereaders in terms of reading quality is the speed of page-turns, but there's a lot more to the Aura H2O than that simple advance.

The screen itself has impressive contrast, with various shades of grey clearly distinguishable from the inky black fonts. It's possible to search within a book, move a slider to quickly reach other parts of a book, and to annotate a book with highlights and bookmarks.

It's the lack of a backlight that makes any ereader a better place to read a book than a tablet or smartphone, and although the Aura H2O does have some illumination, it's done subtly and it's manual. Still, it's no match for the automatic brightness of the Kindle Voyage.

There are some pitfalls with PDFs. I found that several PDF books I had purchased, including some Lonely Planet guides, were loaded slowly. As well as taking about a minute to load big files, page turns took as long as seven seconds.

The screen lacks pinch-to-zoom capabilities, so PDFs have to be zoomed-in on using the slider at the bottom of the screen. It's a painfully manual hit-and-miss process, even getting back to the home page from a PDF takes about 20 seconds. PDFs are much better read on a tablet.

Store

The Kobo storefront is bland. It's dominated by a carousel of book covers of random authors in random genres, and doesn't feel personalised at all.

The top billing given to the top 50 section underlines just how basic it is, though there are a few individual sections; a related reading tab that produces a carousel of books both by the specific author you're currently reading and other titles in the genre.

There's also a recommended for you section that presents one book at a time, complete with synopsis, and an option to tell Kobo that you've either read it, or you're not interested.

It's all rather time-consuming, and doesn't have a good enough interface for exploring books. Where are the comments by previous purchasers? There's just no conversational element.

Other tabs on the storefront include wishlist, categories, and reading lists, though reversing out of all of these sections is impossible, to exit necessitates going back to the home page and firing-up the storefront again. It's long-winded and seems unfinished.

However, actually downloading both books and previews is quick and easy, with the cover art for both immediately going onto the Aura H2O's home page.

It may have four million titles in it, but the way it's presented on the Aura H2O makes the Kobo Store look twee. Books also seem to cost more than on a Kindle.

Battery life

Although testing a two-month battery would take that long, I have my doubts that the Aura H2O really could keep going for the promised two months.

Perhaps if it wasn't connected to a Wi-Fi network, the brightness was disabled and all you did was plough through a book or three, the two-month claim would stand-up.

However, during my test of the Aura H2O's main functions, involving a lot of restarts, software updates, testing the full brightness and, of course, a lot of reading of all kinds of files, the device went as low as 40% in just over a week. Though I did completely refuel it with a microUSB cable in less than 30 minutes.

There's no question that the Aura H2O beats any smartphone or tablet on battery power. I would be happy to embark on a two or even three-week trip without taking a micro USB cable, though I would load-up some books beforehand and switch-off the Wi-Fi.

Media

All kinds of files are handled by the Aura H2O, from EPUB, PDF and MOBI books to TXT, RTF text files and CBZ and CBR comic books. But there's precious little media to consider.

It's impressive that virtually every photo file type we know is handled (JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and even TIFF), albeit in mono only, however, there's no option to play MP3 music or to download audiobooks.

Dive into the beta features section of settings though and there are a few games and experimental features. Chess and sudoku are slow but highly playable, sketch pad is imprecise but fun (rudimentary line drawings can be saved as PNG images). The web browser, however, is terrible.

It defaults to Google and loads mobile websites, but most pages refresh about 15 times as various content and adverts are loaded. On an e-ink screen a refresh is extremely distracting, which makes the web browser unusable. It's a beta feature for a good reason.

Comparison

Amazon Kindle Voyage

The Aura H20 goes head-to-head with Amazon's latest Kindle Voyage, both of which have illuminated screens. The Voyage is smaller; its screen measures only six inches to the Aura H2O's 6.8-inches. Both have the same capacity at 4GB, but the Voyage isn't expandable.

They use the same e-ink Carta display with the same resolution (1430 x 1080 pixels) but since the Voyage is smaller it claims the win in the pixels-per-inch wars; 300ppi compared to the Aura H2O's 256ppi. Amazon claims a six-week battery while Kobo claims two months.

The Aura H2O plays all kinds of book files, while the Voyage only Amazon's tweaked version of the MOBI standard called AZW. If you're happy to download books only from Amazon, that's fine, but those who want more freedom ought to consider something by Kobo.

Amazon's 'Netflix for books' Kindle Unlimited service might sway voracious devourers of literature Amazon's way, too, though arguably the biggest reason to choose the Voyage over anything else is its 3G connection to an Amazon account for downloading books. Kobo's ereaders have only Wi-Fi. But the main differences? The Aura H2O is bigger, and it's waterproof.

Kobo Aura HD

With the same user interface, the Aura HD is almost identical to the Aura H2O save for its lack of waterproofing.

Selling for £129.99 online, the Aura HD's screen is of a lower profile than the Aura H2O – blame the waterproofing on the latter for that – but the speed of page turns and book loading is much slower than the other ereaders on the market.

It's safe to say that the Aura HD has been surpassed, and will presumably soon be discontinued.

• Read our in-depth Kobo Aura HD review

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2013)

Although slimmer than the Aura H2O at just 8mm, Amazon's Paperwhite was the original illuminated ereader. That's now nothing special; the Aura H2O has a similar system of five LEDs that fire light across the screen.

At £109 it's much cheaper than the Aura H2O, but sports a lower 212 PPI resolution. However, the Amazon Paperwhite is available in two versions: Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi + 3G. The Wi-Fi only model will set you back £109, but a version offering free 3G access costs £169.

This six-inch ereader is 0.8-inches is smaller than the Aura H2O, and has half the capacity at just 2GB, though the upcoming new version of the Paperwhite 2014 will offer 4GB. Neither of them are waterproof.

• Read our in-depth Kindle Paperwhite review

Verdict

In making the Aura H2O waterproof, Kobo has stumbled on an ereader must-have.

Amazon might have scooped-up the declining market for ereaders with its vast range of devices, but none of them are waterproof - and with baths, swimming pools and beaches common environments for ereaders, that's surprising.

The Aura H2O is also better than any Kindle when it comes to customising the page, with readability arguably the best there is.

We liked

The waterproofing is a stroke of genius, and so is the new, bright and easy to read e-ink screen that only needs to be refreshed every six page turns.

Battery life is long and the battery quick to charge, the user interface is easy to understand and the reading experience can be customised. The inclusion of the Pocket app to read web pages works well, as does its simple LED illumination.

We disliked

There's a distinct lack of processing power that makes the Aura H2O sometimes frustrating to use, especially when it comes to PDFs, which are slow to navigate and zoom-in on.

The bezel is also noticeably raised, so does look rather retro when compared to tablets and smartphones, and even a Kindle. Some will miss the lack of a 3G model.

Final verdict

Great for the beach and the bath, Kobo's latest is the only waterproof ereader we know of. There's no 3G option, the store isn't as good as Amazon's, and there is a slight lack of processing power, but there are other unique attributes aside from waterproofing that make the Aura H2O worth considering.

Slightly bigger and chunkier than any Kindle, the Aura H2O is able to display a plethora of file formats on its precise, detailed and nicely illuminated screen, its page turns are quick, the reading experience uniquely customisable, and the arrival of the Pocket app brings offline web pages.

However, the bottom line is this; if you want a waterproof ereader, but the Aura H2O.

First reviewed: October 2014

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