Kobo announces its first color e-readers

Rakuten Kobo is launching its first color e-readers, the Kobo Libra Colour and the Kobo Clara Colour. Both use E Ink’s latest Kaleido color screen technology, which has subtle, pastel-like hues and drops from a 300ppi grayscale resolution to 150ppi when you view content in color.

I’ll be testing both e-readers soon, but so far, they look like small upgrades to Kobo’s existing e-readers. That’s not a bad thing, though! The seven-inch Kobo Libra 2 is my favorite e-reader outside of Amazon’s ecosystem, offering the Kindle Paperwhite’s IPX8 waterproof design but with extras like physical page-turning buttons, no lockscreen ads, and more storage.

The $219.99 Kobo Libra Colour retains all of those features but is also now compatible with the Kobo Stylus 2, just like the Kobo Elipsa 2E. However, it’s $30 more expensive than the Kobo Libra 2, and you’ll have to buy the stylus separately for $69.99.

The $149.99 Kobo Clara Colour is slightly more distinct from its closest sibling, the $139.99 Kobo Clara 2E. It offers the same six-inch display and IPX8 waterproof design but now comes with 16GB of storage, as well as an improved processor. I hope so; the Kobo Clara 2E’s sluggish performance was one of my chief complaints.

Kobo also introduced an upgraded black-and-white Kobo Clara BW, with the same storage and processor upgrades, for $129.99.

All of the devices are available to preorder starting today and will ship on April 30th.