Kobo Glo HD review

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.

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.

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.