Kobo Clara Colour

The screen and colour

The Clara Colour uses a 6-inch Kaleido 3 panel: 300 ppi for black-and-white text and 150 ppi for colour, with 4,096 colours on screen. Colour covers and comics look like a newspaper left in the sun — warm and slightly muted, and white areas carry a little noise. Text is a touch less dark than on a black-and-white reader, and colour pages turn more slowly than plain text. The frontlight is even and reaches a warm amber setting, but you adjust it by hand; there is no auto-brightness and no preset for the warmer colour tone. The screen sits recessed rather than flush, which cuts glare in direct sunlight but can collect dust in the corners.

Battery life

Kobo rates the 1,500 mAh battery at up to 42 days with 30 minutes of reading a day, the light at 30% and wireless off. One owner in r/kobo reports under 10 hours with Wi-Fi off and low brightness. The gap comes from how each figure is measured, so treat the long estimate as a best case rather than a promise.

Books, borrowing and sideloading

Kobo’s software is built around buying and borrowing. OverDrive public-library borrowing runs on the device, so you can borrow a title without a computer, though The Verge found the borrowing flow clumsy and says you can hold only one library card at a time. Kobo Plus adds a subscription library of about 1.5M ebooks and 150K audiobooks for $7.99 a month for ebooks or $9.99 a month for ebooks and audiobooks.

Your own files are a different matter. This model has no Google Drive or Dropbox send, so books go over by USB cable, and Amazon DRM does not transfer to Kobo. Pocket integration no longer works after the service shut down.

Repairs, parts and running costs

Kobo and iFixit sell part-and-tool kits: covers from $19.99, battery and motherboard at $49.99, and the display at $79.99. TechRadar lists the motherboard at $29.99 and the battery at $39.99, so prices vary by market. Kobo’s help page lists the display, battery, motherboard and covers as the repairable parts, but repairs are gated to after the warranty expires and opening the device can break the waterproof seal. Owners have self-repaired cracked screens and, in one iFixit thread, chased ghosting that split the screen into quarters after an update.

Is it worth it?

At its $159.99 MSRP the Clara Colour undercuts the $249.99 Kindle Colorsoft by about $90 while matching the core spec, and adds OverDrive borrowing and iFixit repairability. PCMag calls it Excellent, Tom’s Guide gives it Editor’s Choice, and TechRadar rates its value highly. Above about $200 the case weakens, because a colour e-reader with note-taking and third-party reading apps costs a little more. If you want colour covers, a waterproof body and a reader you can repair, this is a strong buy; if you need page-turn buttons, auto-brightness or wireless sideloading, look at a step up.

Which model this is

This page covers the Kobo Clara Colour, Kobo’s entry-level colour e-reader, model number N367B. It is not the black-and-white Clara BW/2E, the 7-inch stylus-capable Libra Colour or the Elipsa line, and it does not work with the Kobo Stylus. The Amazon listing for this model is ASIN B0FKD3QDMM.

Sources

Manufacturer:

• Kobo Clara Colour store page
• Repair your Kobo eReader
• Introducing Kobo Colour eReaders

Independent reviews:

• PCMag review
• Digital Trends review
• TechRadar review
• Tom’s Guide review
• Ars Technica launch coverage
• Good e-Reader first look
• CNET best e-reader roundup

Owner reports:

• Battery life Clara colour (r/kobo)
• Kobo Clara colour usually fine but sometimes (r/kobo)
• I bought a Kobo and I own a Kindle (r/ereader)
• I dropped my Clara colour and cracked the screen (r/kobo)
• Screen ghosting, split into quarters (iFixit Answers)