Optional free global 3G wireless access for Amazon ebooks, Wikipedia, and Shelfari.Better PDF support, with more features and contrast darken.Landscape mode for ebooks (Kobo only offers that for PDFs and comics).X-Ray feature analyzes a book’s contents with references from Wikipedia and Shelfari.The Kindle software runs smoother and is less prone to bugs and formatting inconsistencies.Support for Kindle Games and Kindle Apps.More consistent formatting of ebooks, both sideloaded and from Amazon.The weight difference isn’t very noticeable but the Kobo feels a lot thicker and beefier than the Kindle because of the contoured back. The Kindle Paperwhite is smaller and lighter than the Kobo Aura HD.The Kindle Paperwhite supports multitouch for pinch-zooming, which comes in handy for increasing font size, and zooming in on PDF files and when using the web browser.Reading Life feature keeps track of reading stats, with awards for reading.Option to set screen refresh from 1 to 6 pages.The frontlight can be turned off (the light always stays on with the Kindle Paperwhite even at the lowest setting).The Kobo Aura HD has a microSD card slot.There are more formatting options for line spacing, margins, justification.Kobo ereaders support sideloading ebooks in ePub format.Kobo ereaders support ebooks with Adobe DRM sold from a wide selection of ebook stores, not just Kobo.Mostly this is the same as the comparison with the Kobo Glo, but I’ve updated a few things: The lighting is a tad brighter on the Kobo Aura HD with the brightness turned all the way up, and the same holds true all the way down at the lowest setting. There is a little bit of yellowing toward the top of the Kobo Aura’s screen, but it’s subtle. The frontlighting on the Kindle’s screen tends to have more discolorations and shadows, whereas the Kobo’s screen is more uniform with very little variation in tone. This is most evident when ambient lighting is low with the light turned up under bright light both devices’ screens appear similar. The lighting is much more even and uniform across the screen, and it’s also a little whiter in tone. When comparing the frontlights between the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Aura HD, it’s readily apparent that the Kobo Aura HD is the winner.

With the higher resolution screen smaller text is clearer and more readable on the Kobo’s screen with the extra 53 pixels per inch. The Kobo Aura HD wins in the resolution category, though. Text looks about the same, but things like cover images look a little inkier black on the Kindle. One thing I noticed about the Kindle Paperwhite, and you can see it in the video review below toward the end when I’m comparing the homescreens, is that images appear darker on the Kindle than on the Kobo. Personally, I much prefer the Kindle’s way of formatting, but it all comes down to personal preference. The amount of text you can fit on the screen is the opposite of what you’d expect simply because the Kobo ereaders waste so much screen space with spaces between paragraphs and a huge bar at the bottom to display the page numbers and one at the top of the screen to display the book’s title. In the video below I demonstrated a situation where the Kobo had 1-3 more lines per page when comparing the same book, but I later found a more comparable font size that shows the Paperwhite displaying more lines per page, as the picture at the top of this post illustrates (click it to see a bigger image). In fact, comparing the same exact ebook with the same exact font type, I was able to get the Paperwhite to display more text on the screen than the Aura HD. The crazy thing about the size difference is that it doesn’t necessarily mean the Kobo fits more text on the screen at one time than the Kindle. The Aura HD’s screen is about half an inch wider and three quarters of an inch taller.

When you have the two devices side-by-side, the screen size difference does not seem overly significant. The Kindle Paperwhite uses a 6-inch 1024 x 758 resolution screen. The Kobo Aura HD is the first and only ebook reader to feature a 6.8-inch 1440 x 1080 resolution E Ink screen.

Kobo glo vs amazon paperwhite