The Kobo is a budget eReader that can only offer the basics. It displays electronic books, periodicals and documents. It doesn’t do this any better or easier than the competition, but at $150 does it at a better price. Its 6” screen uses the exact same E-ink technology as the Kindle and Sony Reader, displaying pages with an identical look and feel and with a white finish and rounded corners offers an all-too-familiar, but comfortable design. Supported by Indigo’s online book store, it uses the same ePub book format used by Sony and Apple for their devices, and so has access to a considerable selection of content from multiple stores and free sources. If there’s a catch it’s that the list of things it can’t do is considerably longer than list of things it can.

The Kobo cannot play audiobooks or music files, for example, it has neither speakers nor a headphone jack. It doesn’t include a built-in dictionary or note-taking feature or the option to highlight text. No touchscreen, just basic rubber buttons for controls, and no wireless connection to the internet. It won’t display your photographs and it won’t convert any file formats. You can give it either an ePub book file or a PDF and depending on how these files were customized when created, these will either work or they won’t. The Kobo’s battery, often good for one week, is charged using an included USB cable and a personal computer. If you wish to use an electrical wall outlet, you’ll need a wall-charger accessory, sold separately.

In design it is noticeably lighter than other eReaders on the market, but it lacks elegance, offering an injection-molded d-pad (up, down, left, right, centre-click) that looks like a blue blob on the lower right-hand corner and a quilted rubber backing for “comfort”. Both remind me of baby gadgets and digital thermometers, which is not the best association.

Four buttons along the side help you quickly activate to home and settings menus, and a hidden power light flickers alive in different colours; purplish-pink when turned on, blue when active, red when low on power. The blue blob and flickering power light both help make the Kobo easy to spot against the other white eReaders out there and I think that’s the point.

Now many people will be willing to sacrifice all these features and esthetics for a lower price as long as the basic reading experience is the same as others and it comes very close to that.

The Kobo uses E-Ink technology, a kind of black-and-white screen used only by eReaders that mimics the look and feel of paper for a more comfortable, eyestrain-free reading experience. Like paper, it doesn’t produce any light and so you’ll need to turn on a lamp if you wish to read in the dark, but like a computer display it can quickly change its text and illustrations, magically so. It is also a slightly reflective surface and, like other eReaders on the market, will catch some hint of glare from lights in your room.

It is slower at loading books and turning pages than its competitors, but offers two choices of font styles, serif and sans serif, as well as six different font sizes, the largest of which isn’t very large compared to other eReaders. Included illustrations and photographs display well and with fine detail and while turning pages with the blue blob controls takes some getting used to at first, it’s a comfortable system.

While you can move to any chapter in a book, you can’t turn to any specific page. The system will remember where you last left off, but you can’t “dog ear” or add any additional bookmarks. Books are displayed vertically in portrait mode, there’s no landscape option allowing you to read the Kobo turned sideways as some people like to do.

There is, however, a landscape mode for PDF files. The Kobo uses Adobe’s Mobile Reader software to display these and so manages to retain all the formatting and images of the original, doing a better job than competing eReaders. While you can’t change the font size, you can zoom into the page up to 200% and then use the D-pad to move around. The Kobo may lack support for Word, .txt, or other common document formats, but at least it gets PDF files right.

With 1GB of internal memory it can hold approximately 1,000 titles and through an SD memory card slot you can add up to 4GB more, but with a device that can only display books and documents, it’s unlikely you’ll ever use it.

The Kobo’s one hi-tech magic trick is the use of Bluetooth wireless. Generally the device is designed around adding new books through your home computer. You use your web browser to connect to the store, purchase and download new books to your Mac or PC, and then transfer them over to your Kobo using a USB cable. This would normally mean that travelers have to fill their reader before they leave home, but with the included Bluetooth wireless, your BlackBerry or iPhone can take the place of your home computer on the road.

A Kobo mobile app for BlackBerry and iPhone allows you to connect to the store using your cellular internet connection to both purchase and download new books, magazines, or newspapers, and then transfer them over to your Kobo using Bluetooth wireless. Since you can also use your smartphone and home computer to read books you’ve purchased, these connections also update your current bookmarks, so you can start a book on your desktop, pick up where you left off on your Kobo, and pick up again on your smartphone.

The Indigo/Kobo online book store uses the ePub book format, an open standard that allows for freedom between stores, devices, and publishers. This is the same format used by Sony and Apple for their online book stores as well as many independents, meaning that a book purchased from the Sony store will work on the Kobo eReader and a book bought from the Kobo store will work on the Sony Reader.

The Kobo online store offers more than 2 million titles, with most bestsellers priced at $9.99 each. The selection includes French language titles, Canadian publishers, a section of free books, and a list of North American magazines and newspapers (note: not available at the time this review was written).

Books that are purchased and downloaded are added to your library through two programs, Adobe Digital Editions to open the files and add them to your computer library, and the Kobo desktop software to let you read them on your monitor and transfer them to your Kobo eReader proper. Having to use two programs is a bit confusing and ungainly and I find that the Kobo software can crash or suffer glitches more than it should.

Once downloaded to the Kobo eReader, the device itself has an elegant way of organizing your titles, using a virtual bookshelf to display your books, complete with illustrated covers. You can also list them simply by text, navigate them alphabetically, and switch the bookshelf over to display your documents. Although I wish it could also filter them by category or author, it’s a better system to work with than the Kindle’s which merely creates a pile of titles.

Since value is the Kobo’s chief selling point, it comes packaged with one hundred classic books, including such titles as Jane Eyre, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Great Expectations, Little Women and Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. These are free of copyright titles, but they are clean copies with proper covers and no typos.

As a budget device, the question I have to answer isn’t whether the Kobo is the best on the market, but whether it’s worth buying at all. Yes, the Kobo delivers the same core reading experience as its competitors. It’s comfortable to use, is supported by a large online store, and through the use of ePub, will work with other stores, libraries, and services. It offers only the most basic eReader features, but does so very competently. When Apple’s iPod first arrived, it was followed by a number of low-priced imitators that proved to be digital lemons. That is not the case here. At $150 the Kobo is far lower in price than the Kindle ($259 US) or the Sony Readers ($200 - $300) and for many people this is exactly the push needed to jump into digital books.