Kobo Touch eReader

[quasinormal]

I bought a couple (one for my mother) of these today. My first impressions were not favourable with Kobo's set up process and the attempt to mimic Apple into locking the user into the Kobo store ecosystem. These things have 2GB of built in memory and a micro SD expansion slot. The screen looks great, but the touch screen is very laggy.

http://www.kobobooks.com/touch

I've loaded a couple of books into the built in memory, but haven't been able to get it to register the loaded SD card I inserted.

Anybody else have one? Any suggestions to lose the Kobo marketing stuff?

 

[quasinormal]

I think i have it worked out.

You'll be prompted when turning on the device for the first time to connect it to a computer and download the Kobo desktop which i assume serves only to sell books from the Kobo store. The installer formats the Touch to Mac Journaled. For some reason it needs the SD card to be formatted to Mac Journaled as well. The FAT 32 formatted card was repeatedly ignored by the reader. You minimise the Kobo krud by deleting the files in the main memory, unless you'd prefer to read the musings of Susanne Summers.
It seems that calibre does a really good job at exporting to both the 2GB of main memory and the 8Gb micro sd card. It needs to be a SDHC SD card.

This thing is beautiful to read from. It handled a 100MB PDF really well and reading epub novels on it is a dream. I'm hooked already. I'll post a picture soon of it along side an ipad.

 

[quasinormal]

Ignore the above. I was wrong.

The was the formatting of the SD card. It needs to formatted to SD standards by using this tool. I was only able to access 128MB of the 8GB of the mAc formatted card. I spotted a thread, about SD card incompatibilities in an ereader forum, which posted the link below several months ago. That was the last post.

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_3/ (the Mac link is on the left column)

The Kobo Desktop app is unstable and not required. Use calibre to transfer in the same way you'd use iTunes. The calibre app will be able to direct a file to either the main memory or the SD card. The app is linux based so may take a while to be come accustomed to.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

Edit- Some technical info regarding SD formatting.

http://www.richud.com/wiki/Kobo_eReader_touch

Some interesting links from the FCC regulatory commission including disassembly pictures and manuals.

https://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm?mode=Exhibits&RequestTimeout=500&calledFromFrame=N&application_id=894294&fcc_id=%27ZJLKOBON905%27