It’s been close to six seven months, since I moved over from the Oasis to the Elipsa.

Here’s my list of things / experiences with the Elipsa 2e, positive and negative, in no order whatsever. Also this is not representative of a typical ebook reader¹. I, umm … have a lot of books, and the Elipsa carries most of them. So every action that it does, it does with that number of books (either physically or with its database) …

• I love it!
• It’s very light for its size. I don’t feel the weight of this 10″ device as much as I felt the old 7″ Oasis.
• It’s very fast.
• I use it just like a book. It lends itself to such use as well. Part of it is the weight, part of it, is its responsiveness.
• This is also how I broke it. I threw it on the bed and then it slipped right over the edge, and cracked the screen 😂 You can see the big chonky part that is permanantly dead, as well as the thin, dead, vertical and horizontal lines. Since I read with fat margins, the chonky part does not get in my way² and the lines are mostly invisible.
• I cannot enlarge images in a book. I tap, I double tap, I pinch to zoom … nothing. This is the one thing I miss from the Oasis. A few hours later: Of course, now it works! 😂 Double tapping an image, opens up the image where I can zoom and pan around! My fault for not noticing this earlier.
• I love it!
• It hangs loading complicated books or large pdfs, but it recovers quickly. This does not happen that often.
• It randomly hangs and/or crashes. This happens quite often. But I’ve learnt to reboot it with the power button, and it comes right back up, quickly. It reminds me of the Am386 machines, I’d assemble for use as Netware thin clients in my youth. They would run hot and crash ofen, but we didn’t mind, because they rebooted right back so darned fast 😂
• Not that the Elipsa runs hot. It just runs fast and crashes. And then comes back on and carries on as if nothing ever happened.
• Did I tell you, I love it?
• On paper, the screen specs look inferior to the Oasis. In practice, it made no difference to these old eyes.
• The user experience is not as good is it could be, but it’s miles better than anything else I’ve used. I figured out most of it intuitively. I love just running my finger along the left edge to adjust the brightness. Helps a lot when I’m reading in bed, so that the better half does not get disturbed (or grumble at me much.)
• Books on the Kobo store are a bit more expensive than the Amazon store. (New releases tend to cost the same.)
• The database that it uses, gets corrupted quite often, which then leads to it no longer being able to talk to my PC or not showing the books in the device³. I doubt, I’d love the Elipsa as much as I do, if the Calibre ecosystem didn’t support it so well.⁴
  • I can backup and restore the database at will, thanks to the awesome Kobo Utilities plugin.
  • I’m getting old and impatient and want to read a lot more. So I’ve given up on taking notes by hand and moved over to highlighting and making notes in the Elipsa. I wouldn’t do this if not for the lovely Annotations plugin, which lets me get all my notes and highlights out of the Elipsa and into Calibre. (pic below, click to embiggen) The jury’s still out on this one.
• I love it so much, that when I heard a friend was going to the USA, I bullied them into buying me another one to replace this one when it dies.

To conclude, the Elipsa 2e is wonderful.
It has flaws that I can live with.
It serves me well.
I love it!

A couple of years ago, around this time, I upgraded to the best reading experience I could afford at the time. I got me a Kindle Oasis.

I called it my Hole Hawg. And boy, has it served me like one.
And while it has done, everything it promised it would do, I found myself outgrowing it and needing something more powerful.

What I need

• A device that could handle nearly every format that I could throw at it.
• Something that was not beholden to the Bezos beast.¹
• While I love the Oasis’ speed, I want something faster.
• Something that would let me read PDF files, without making want to scratch my eyeballs out.
• A large screen, because PDFs and because I am getting old and blind as a bat.
• While also doing everything else that the Oasis did with the same aplomb
• Bonus: Being able to read comics.

A little bit of research led me to the Kobo Elipsa 2e.
It isn’t sold here in India, so a kind cousin got it for me. It has a pen and it marks up books and all that jazz, but I don’t know how much I will use that feature. What I need is what I wrote above and the Elipsa does it all. Very, very, well.

The screen is a lower ppi than the Oasis (227 vs 300), but the screen is large and I hold it farther away from my face, to notice any difference. I can also turn off that crazy Kindle full justification, to have my beloved ragged right. It’s extremely responsive, flipping orientation without that heartbeat of a pause, I would have with the Oasis.