Well, either way, I hope you didn't go ground delivery right now.
I ended up caving and buying a Kobo Touch as it just came out yesterday so it seemed like great timing. Honestly, I like it a lot.
It ended up being about the same price as the Kindle 3, except I could use a couple of Chapters gift cards I had so I ended up paying under $100 on a gift visa for the Kobo and a book-type leather case.
The thing has a great feel to it. It has that soft, rubbery fabric coating on it, perfect thickness and weight, and the back has this sweet quilted padding that's really comfortable. The leather case is really more for protection, but it's comfortable as well.
It's actually probably snappier than any other e-reader I tried out (haven't tried the new Kindle, but apparently they're on par), which was a concern when looking at the older model. It also sports the E-Ink Pearl screen that debuted with the Kindle 3 and ships on pretty much all new e-readers. Contrast is much better than any offering from last year as a result. I guess older touch E-Readers were all resistive, and the digitizer layer really added to the gloss and degraded the screen quality. The new Kobo and Nooks got around this by creating an infrared grid over the screen that reads the x and y coordinates of your touch when you break the plane. The upside is that it's pretty responsive (well, for a electronic ink screen) AND the screen is just pure E-Ink Pearl clarity and contrast (and no glare).
The above were basically the reasons I bought it, rather than the touch interface, although I now see that it's really a good thing. It just makes navigating, selecting items from menus, and such a whole lot less clunky. I imagine it's a lot better for highlighting/selecting words as well. Although this does bring me to my main problem here: The highlighting/notes and dictionary functions are only available on books you purchase from the store. I don't know if it's a current software oversite, a method of DRM, or something else, but it's kind of a pain. Well, not that specifically but the same goes for syncing between different devices. IE, books between my E-Reader and my Kobo App on my phone will be synced, and progress, notes or whatever sync as well. BUT only on books bought from the Kobo store. Other books have to be manually loaded on each and devices won't keep track of progress on other devices. A bit of a disappointment, but syncing seems to work that way for all the major players, and not all of them even allow you to sideload without having to go through a third party converter first, so I'm happy I don't have to do that. As for the selection issue brought up earlier, apparently Kobo has a far larger selection...in Canada. Deals have to be made regionally, Kobo is a Canadian company and has a much better relationship with the Canadian publishers (you know, distribution agreements and such) or Canadian branches of international publishers. That and it supports a wider selection of formats out of the box without having to convert. Yet, I'd be surprised if there was anything mainstream that you couldn't get on Amazon.ca or if you can't just buy ebooks from Amazon.com. Plus, if the thing's been released digitally, I'm sure we could all figure out how to get it regardless of restrictions.
Overall, it seems pretty sweet. It came with a $10 credit, which I used with an online coupon code to buy the Song of Ice and Fire boxed set (If I'm going to want to sync anything, it'd probably be four big ass books in one). I haven't spent all that much time with it, but I'm impressed with both the technology and the design. I'm just worried that it might be easy to lose your progress and have a hard time finding out where you left off. You can save multiple bookmarks, and the default bookmark updates every time you leave the book (or maybe every page turn), but with the boxed set all the chapters seem to be repeating character names, so it comes down to "Was I on the first Bran or the third Bran?". And it also seems to display the page I'm on out of the chapter or book section page count rather than the total (and Song of Ice and Fire is one big, big file). Also not sure on how it would deal with things like jumping to the appendix and then jumping back (but the touch slider is a great way to jump around a book/chapter).
I'm going to look into work around for some of my problems a bit more as I'd love to be able to sync (I don't imagine it's possible) and make notes in some reference books I may acquire (I figure that's probably possible). Either way, I like it a lot.
