Some people read books and sort ideas out in their heads. Others need to make actual notes on the margins to fully flesh out their thoughts. The Kobo Elipsa is designed for the latter group, allowing you to add your thoughts to each page using the accompanying stylus.
The outfit’s first ebook reader to come with stylus input, the device allows you to interact with every page like an actual printed volume, where you can mark blocks of text, jot down thoughts on the margins, and even draw random doodles when your mind flies off and your imagination takes over. Unlike actual books, you can easily remove any annotation you don’t like, so you’re not stuck punctuating a brilliant paragraph with a half-baked idea, making it even more convenient than traditional books.
The Kobo Elipsa is the outfit’s largest touchscreen ebook reader, sporting a 10.3-inch E-Ink Carta 1200 grayscale display, which boasts 1,404 x 1,872 pixels of resolution. It gets all the usual perks found in Kobo’s newer ereaders, such as a wide bezel on the right side to facilitate a secure grip, a glare-free coating for paper-like reading quality, and adjustable front lighting, so you can read in low-light settings. The reader supports 15 different file formats, from ebook staples like epub and mobi to PDF documents and popular comic book formats to a variety of image codecs.
Aside from being large enough for reading textbooks, it’s also the outfit’s first device to come with companion stylus that you can use to mark up any ebook or document you’ve got open, allowing you to annotate reading materials like you do with pen and paper. It’s not one of those fancy pressure-detecting stylus pens, although the software does let you adjust the pen type, shade, and line size with a few quick taps, allowing you to make quick changes on the fly. The stylus runs on a single AAAA battery.
Not only can you jot down markings on existing documents, you can also use the Kobo Elipsa as a digital notebook with its built-in notebook feature, so you can keep pages upon pages of notes inside the 32GB storage. They made it a faithful notebook experience, too, allowing you to use blank, lined, and grid backgrounds for each page as you prefer. Even better, you can also export all your notes as a regular text file for use with apps in other platforms, with file transfers easily accomplished either via the built-in USB or Wi-Fi connection.
Features include a 2400 mAh battery that should provide weeks of use between charges (how long exactly depends on your use), a 1.8GHz quad-core processor, and built-in support to let you read articles saved up in your Pocket account. It also comes with a detachable magnetic cover to protect the display when not in use, all while doubling as a stylus dock and a kickstand of sorts for propping the device at an angle that’s ideal for writing.
The Kobo Elipsa comes out June 24th, priced at $399.99.