The Clara 2E can be purchased with its SleepCover cases (which are also made of recycled materials). I used the device for an hour over of reading and fiddling around a day for a few days. I am unable to verify this personally, as I did not have to re-charge the device through its USB-C port in my tests. The 1,500mAH cell in the Clara 2E is larger than its predecessor and offers “weeks” of use. The IPX8 water resistance is also new, which greatly enhances the draw of the Clara 2E and its use case as a portable, all-purpose reader. From what I can tell, it works only with audiobooks purchased from the Kobo Store, and requires a Bluetooth headset or speaker to function (there is no built-in speaker). The Clara 2E also supports Audiobooks, which the Clara HD did not have. A USB-C port adorn the lower width of the reader, with the requisite regulatory labels. Speaking of which, the Clara 2E supports 15 file formats natively – EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, and CBR. The latter is double that of its Clara HD predecessor, and is definitely welcome for loading non-text materials like manga and comics onto the device. Under the hood, the Clara 2E has a 1GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, and 16GB of built-in storage.

I found this outlook attractive as it made the entire set-up feel even more like paper, while reducing glare. The Clara 2E is designed with a sunken screen and protruding bezels. Glass would have increased glare under sun, and made the display less pin-sharp. (PHOTO: Esmond Xu)Ī benefit of e-ink displays is that they provide a matte, capacitive experience without requiring a glass panel on top. I have seen animated banners while loading some pages on the built-in browser, they cannot be described at fluid – but that is not what you use an e-ink screen for. E-ink displays are designed for comfortable consumption of high-contrast static material on a paper-like experience. While the better contrast is welcome, response time improvements are less meaningful. This is the exact panel and resolution on the 5th-gen Kindle Paperwhite, except that the Clara 2E has a denser and more portable 6-inch display, while the Paperwhite has a less dense but larger 6.8-inch one.Īccording to the screen maker E Ink, the Carta 1200 panel brought about a 20 per cent improvement in response time over its Carta 1000 predecessor, and 15 per cent improvement in contrast ratio.

The screen here is a E Ink Carta 1200 panel running at 1,448 x 1,072 resolution, giving 300 pixels-per-inch display density. A ribbed, matte design makes the Clara 2E comfortable to hold. This e-book reader will be among the lightest and most portable that you can find on the market. The Clara 2E comes in at 112 x 159 x 8.66 mm, and weighs 171 grams. Its back has a ribbed texture for a better grip, and while the colourway is described as dark blue, can look rather close to black. The Clara 2E has a body that feels well-made and sufficiently rugged for a day out to the beach.

It has a 6-inch screen with 300 pixels per inch resolution, 16GB of storage, IPX8 water resistance that can handle an hour underwater, and a body made out of 85 percent recycled plastics.Īs with other Kobo e-book readers, one big selling point for Singapore users is OverDrive, which lets you directly connect to, and borrow, e-books available on the National Library Board (NLB) catalogue.Īt first glance, the device bears obvious similarities to the Kindle series, not that there is anything wrong. I recently tried out Kobo Clara 2E, a S$219.90 (on Kobo’s Singapore store) e-book reader from Japanese retail giant Rakuten. When it comes to e-ink tablets – where the readout you get is crisp like print on paper, and without the glare of an LCD screen – there are decent, competitive options beyond a well-known Amazon Kindle.

Kobo clara 2e review