Kobo Sage eReader - 8 Inches

Reviewing the Sage itself - it's largely excellent, lovely screen, feels very well put together. Feels as snappy as I'd hoped an ebook reader to be.Nitpicks:- Backlight uniformity not perfect - I'd call it OK. There's a brighter area near the grip on the right. From reviews, this seems to vary a lot unit-to-unit.- Uploading, sorting and displaying of ebooks a bit fiddly - needed a few attempts and a few different methods to get the books on, with covers displaying correctly. I've acquired e-books from at least 4 different sources, which might account for some of the difficulty here (Adobe/Humble/random pdfs/Kobo store). If you are starting afresh, or just buying from the official store I reckon it'd be simpler. On the plus side, impressed that you can sync the ... MoreReviewing the Sage itself - it's largely excellent, lovely screen, feels very well put together. Feels as snappy as I'd hoped an ebook reader to be.Nitpicks:- Backlight uniformity not perfect - I'd call it OK. There's a brighter area near the grip on the right. From reviews, this seems to vary a lot unit-to-unit.- Uploading, sorting and displaying of ebooks a bit fiddly - needed a few attempts and a few different methods to get the books on, with covers displaying correctly. I've acquired e-books from at least 4 different sources, which might account for some of the difficulty here (Adobe/Humble/random pdfs/Kobo store). If you are starting afresh, or just buying from the official store I reckon it'd be simpler. On the plus side, impressed that you can sync the same ebook with multiple book libraries without any complaints!- Battery life OK rather than good/great. I'm used to Sony devices that last for days without charging - for an e-book reader I was hoping for effectively not having to think about charging. On the plus side, USB-C and fairly quick to charge.- Considering the above, the price is on the high side. I suspect that most people would prefer a Kindle, but nice to avoid Amazon for once!

summary: I can't recommend this product.the good:+ nice looking screen+ USB-C+ I like the "handle" designthe bad:- cannot zoom or enlarge pictures in epub (maybe other formats too)- sometimes the page turn buttons don't work several times in a row- battery life is 4-5 nights of ~1.5 hour reading (light at 20%)- does not have TTS (which was a feature that I thought it had)- the active pen experience is practically useless- if you accidentally turn off the backlight in the dark then you need to use an alternate light to find the UI element for reenabling the backlight.

This is our second sage. We each have our own and share one kobo book acccount. The sage even with the battery case is lightweight. We get 4-5 days before recharge. If we listen to audiobooks it does loose power faster.The 8 inch screen is brilliant. One of us has a lifelong eye condition. Paired with the kobo nickel font and adaptive script weight it just looks wonderful.The adaptive lighting works well.Ability to download books from Patreon, BookFunnel and the library are game changers.Nice to be able to use pen for notes.

The Kobo sage is probably the best overall ereader. I also have an Onyx Nova 3, a Kindle Oasis and a Kobo Forma. The second best ereader may be the Forma, and in some ways it is still better than the Sage. Here are some points you might consider with regards to the Sage:1. The sage has better clarity and lighting than the Forma. I think it is the nicest ereader screen I have.2. The battery life for note taking is poor, though the battery life for reading is okay. I would recommend going with the powercover to complement the sage. It sticks in the sleep cover easily with magnets so you can remove it easily. I think it will be the same with the powercover (mine has not come yet). Having that note taking option is surprisingly nice, so I am glad they integrated the ... MoreThe Kobo sage is probably the best overall ereader. I also have an Onyx Nova 3, a Kindle Oasis and a Kobo Forma. The second best ereader may be the Forma, and in some ways it is still better than the Sage. Here are some points you might consider with regards to the Sage:1. The sage has better clarity and lighting than the Forma. I think it is the nicest ereader screen I have.2. The battery life for note taking is poor, though the battery life for reading is okay. I would recommend going with the powercover to complement the sage. It sticks in the sleep cover easily with magnets so you can remove it easily. I think it will be the same with the powercover (mine has not come yet). Having that note taking option is surprisingly nice, so I am glad they integrated the feature even if it isn't perfect yet.3. The physical page turn buttons are nice, but don't have quite the ideal amount of depth, so occasionally I end up pressing the bezel instead of the button directly. This seems to be something that gets better as you get used to it, though maybe an extra millimeter of button depth might have been nice. I very much like the fact that the button presses are quiet. I don't hear any sort of click, which is great. Clicking buttons are distracting.4. The slanted bezel of the Forma is better for holding the device in one hand than the only partially slanted bezel of the Sage, but it still feels fine to hold unless it is in its case, in which case when holding the device one handed you miss the full slanted bezel (it gave you a better grip and let your fingers curl further for more support).5. The Sage's ability to use audiobooks and (especially) its ability to allow note taking are great additions. It is nice to easily take notes when in a room where people want the lights off and you don't want to use a bright screen to distract people.6. The waterproof feature is great. I don't use the device near water, but just knowing I can wash it with a really wet soft microfiber towel and distilled water without risking harm to the device makes it easy to clean my screen.7. In comparison to other devices, the Nova 3 has significantly better battery life, especially for note taking (the power cover should help with this) and can use apps to access more stuff, but the ability to customize margins and line spacing and fonts when reading Kobo books with the slightly more pleasant screen, and especially the bezel with the physical page turn buttons and automatic rotation makes the reading experience more pleasant with the Sage. The Oasis is nice (good lighting and contrast, quite responsive), but the screen isn't quite big enough and there is no slanted bezel or note taking and syncing with drop box or overdrive is harder. The Forma is better than the sage to hold and slightly better for battery life as well, and probably harder to break with a toggle button that is a little easier to push. However, the improvement to screen contrast, the convenience of taking notes about what you are reading, the faster speed, the ease of removal of the device from the cover and the more uniform lighting, in my opinion, make the Sage edge out the Forma as the new best ereader. There are areas where each of the devices I mentioned is better than the others and is the best for a given task (sometimes I still grab the Forma because I am just going to be reading something for a long time with one hand and I don't want to figure out where to put the cover, for instance), but I would say the Sage is presently the best ereader overall. It is an excellent device.

Imagine yourself sitting in a college class—let us say, History of the Far East—near the end of the semester. Finals are forthcoming, and the class has spanned a breadth of culture and history largely unfamiliar to you. Fortunately, you have diligently taken the digital equivalent of reams of notes on your Kobo Sage.Even now you are racing to keep pace with the professor as he lectures about the Tokugawa Shogunate; the word ‘the’ is a particular nuisance, as it includes a ‘th’ which, for some unfathomable reason, the Kobo routinely deletes as soon as you have written it. You take a moment to silently lament the frequency with which ‘the’ appears in English, but then soldier on. At least, you try to soldier on; because a minute later your Kobo Sage freezes entirely. ... MoreImagine yourself sitting in a college class—let us say, History of the Far East—near the end of the semester. Finals are forthcoming, and the class has spanned a breadth of culture and history largely unfamiliar to you. Fortunately, you have diligently taken the digital equivalent of reams of notes on your Kobo Sage.Even now you are racing to keep pace with the professor as he lectures about the Tokugawa Shogunate; the word ‘the’ is a particular nuisance, as it includes a ‘th’ which, for some unfathomable reason, the Kobo routinely deletes as soon as you have written it. You take a moment to silently lament the frequency with which ‘the’ appears in English, but then soldier on. At least, you try to soldier on; because a minute later your Kobo Sage freezes entirely. Was the battery low? No—this is your first class of the day and you fully charged the Sage overnight; you’ve been writing for only an hour, which means the battery has probably lost about 40% of its charge but is still well shy of total depletion. Too many ‘th’s? They delete themselves, but don’t seize the whole notebook. What could it be?After a minute or two in the electronic equivalent of a coma, the Kobo Sage reboots itself. You navigate from the home screen into the notebook section, and open your ‘History’ notebook. Only you find it blank. Empty. No notes. The entire record of your semester in this class has been obliterated, with no way to retrieve it. You wonder what you’ll need to do now to pass finals, while simultaneously using the Kobo stylus to mark the otherwise empty History notebook with your own grade for the device itself: F.This is the experience you may expect from the Kobo Sage. Substitute notes from board room meetings; personal recipes; private, poetic musings; or whatever else you like. Don’t trust notes to the Sage. I have only been using it about a week, so I have fortunately not lost a semester’s worth of notes to it, but it has already eaten one of my notebooks representing about an hour of work. I will never trust anything more important than a grocery-list to it again.It is adequate as an e-reader, but even in that mode, the battery life is laughable. A full-color, backlit tablet like an iPad gets about the same lifetime from a battery charge—this is not the experience we expect from an e-Ink device. My older Kobo Aura HD, which I’ve used for years, still lasts longer on a single charge; newer technology is supposed to be more energy efficient, not less.I really want to like this device. When it works, it works brilliantly, but even then, it doesn’t work for long. The supposed note-taking capability is useless, and my brief experience with both Pocket and OverDrive integration prove them to work for about half the articles and ebooks you try them with, respectively; the other half need not apply.I may have been hasty in grading the Kobo Sage an F; upon cooler reconsideration, it may merit a D-. In any case, there are too many strong competitors on the market to make this highly-flawed device an enticing option.

I purchased the Kobo Sage primarily for note taking and that has been my primary use, though I have done a little reading with it.Starting with the bad, I've encountered a lot of screen flickering during use, where parts of or the entire screen blacks out and refreshes. As far as I can tell, it's a random occurrence as just leaving the device untouched and idle for a minute will at times lead to a display refresh. Each time it does refresh while I'm using it, I find it distracting and the latency it introduces while writing notes disorienting.Another problem I've encountered is with the note export functionality. I have yet to actually succeed in exporting notes, it sits there "Exporting notes" without any indication that it's doing anything, and when I finally ... MoreI purchased the Kobo Sage primarily for note taking and that has been my primary use, though I have done a little reading with it.Starting with the bad, I've encountered a lot of screen flickering during use, where parts of or the entire screen blacks out and refreshes. As far as I can tell, it's a random occurrence as just leaving the device untouched and idle for a minute will at times lead to a display refresh. Each time it does refresh while I'm using it, I find it distracting and the latency it introduces while writing notes disorienting.Another problem I've encountered is with the note export functionality. I have yet to actually succeed in exporting notes, it sits there "Exporting notes" without any indication that it's doing anything, and when I finally give up and cancel, it reports a generic non-descript error.The third problem is with the Advanced Notebook. It somehow got irrecoverably corrupted leading me to hard reboot the device several times after I added some notes that it didn't know how to interpret. Given how unstable the Kobo Sage was behaving, I just ended up deleting the notebook.The fourth major issue I've encountered with notes is that I used the Kobo Desktop application to interact with Kobo Sage after I had started using the note taking functionality. What happened was it quasi-deleted the notebooks I had created. I can still see it in the filesystem when attached to the computer, but the device's notebook list doesn't know about it, nor can I create a new notebook with the same name.After narrowing my use to only basic notebooks and mostly keeping it away from my computer, the note taking functionality does work and it's quite nice to use in this limited use case. The large screen is also helpful when writing out notes. However, due to the limit of not being able to backup notebooks (no exporting and potential loss of notebook access), I've generally been avoiding any critical note taking with the device.As for reading, it's quite big and with the power cover it also has heft. Even without the weight of the power cover, I find the screen a tad large to be useful as a portable reading device, but it works well if I discount the portability issues. Other than the random screen flickering being heavily disruptive while reading, I found it quite similar to my existing Kobo Libra H2O which I stick to for reading.Given that my primary reason for purchasing the Kobo Sage is note taking. I am disappointed at the issues I've had with it for that purpose, it does fulfil my requirement for taking notes, but having to take extra precaution against losing any critical notes does sour its value to me as I was trying to conserve on paper notebooks.

I have gone through several different eReaders with both LCD and e-ink screens, and the Kobo Sage stands out as the best!The 8” screen is an inch or more bigger than most other eReaders, so it works well with a wider range of content. Sometimes the publisher default font seems too wide due to the bigger screen, but this can be easily fixed by narrowing the margins. It is nice to have the larger screen for note taking and viewing PDFs.The screen is very clear and easy on my eyes. The only time I noticed a glare on the flush screen was when a lamp was directly behind me. I did not have the same glare issue with my Kobo Libra H2O, which has a recessed screen. I do like the flush screen of the Sage better though because it is easier to keep clean and seems to ... MoreI have gone through several different eReaders with both LCD and e-ink screens, and the Kobo Sage stands out as the best!The 8” screen is an inch or more bigger than most other eReaders, so it works well with a wider range of content. Sometimes the publisher default font seems too wide due to the bigger screen, but this can be easily fixed by narrowing the margins. It is nice to have the larger screen for note taking and viewing PDFs.The screen is very clear and easy on my eyes. The only time I noticed a glare on the flush screen was when a lamp was directly behind me. I did not have the same glare issue with my Kobo Libra H2O, which has a recessed screen. I do like the flush screen of the Sage better though because it is easier to keep clean and seems to provide better backlighting.The Sage is the first eReader I’ve used where I could not see the individual lights that provide backlighting. The backlight is very even and consistent across the whole screen.It is nice to have stylus support so I can scribble notes in the margins and highlight text. I use the notebooks app to make lists of books I have read and those I plan on reading. Notebook functions and stylus shortcuts seem consistent with other note-taking apps. Taking notes does not feel as paper-and-pencil as it does with eNotes because of the Sage’s glass screen and the stylus’s rigid tip. I tried using a stylus with a softer tip and this improved the writing feel a little, but I went back to using the Kobo stylus because it has the highlight and erase buttons on the side. When taking notes, it is easy to accidentally swipe the scroll bar on the right side with my palm. It scrolls down to the middle of the page. The first few time this happened I thought it was glitched and my notes were gone, but then I scrolled up and saw that my notes were still there. I haven’t had this issue since I realized the cause, but it would be nice if it could be fixed so the scroll bar didn’t recognize my palm while I was writing.Other than that, the only negative I have found with the Kobo Sage is actually in the accessories. The only cover I have found that includes a place for the stylus is the powercover. I got the basic cover from Kobo and the stylus actually sticks to the front of it via magnets (not sure if that was by design), but it would be nice if there was a cover like the powercover that didn’t have the weight of an extra battery pack.

The Kobo Sage is a complete waste of money. It does not hold a battery life (even with the PowerCover) long enough to finish one book. It is very slow to turn pages. It constantly sticks and then changes four or five pages simultaneously. I love that you can write directly on the page, but the pen is such a horrible writing instrument that it isn't worth it - even though that is why I bought it. Also, I have to reset it so many times to get it to work. Then when I pick it up again, I have to reset it again to get it to work. I have a Kobo Clara as well - and that is amazing. Not sure why this e-reader is such a failure. It is a complete waste of money.

While a bit pricey, you absolutely get what you pay for. And you get what I have long awaited from Kobo - an e-reader that solidly beats the Amazon Kindle line, even the Oasis models. I've owned around a dozen different models of Kindle, and enjoyed them - but always had some minor (or major) gripe about them - too small of a screen, too slow on refresh, lack of customizable fonts... the list goes on. The Sage, however, blows them all away. It's amazingly fast, comes standard with 32GB of storage (my library of almost 1000 books runs flawlessly on it), has a huge screen, the backlight is nice and even across the whole surface, waterproof, the interface is smooth and fonts crisp. About my only gripe, and it's minor, is that the buttons for page turns are a little ... MoreWhile a bit pricey, you absolutely get what you pay for. And you get what I have long awaited from Kobo - an e-reader that solidly beats the Amazon Kindle line, even the Oasis models. I've owned around a dozen different models of Kindle, and enjoyed them - but always had some minor (or major) gripe about them - too small of a screen, too slow on refresh, lack of customizable fonts... the list goes on. The Sage, however, blows them all away. It's amazingly fast, comes standard with 32GB of storage (my library of almost 1000 books runs flawlessly on it), has a huge screen, the backlight is nice and even across the whole surface, waterproof, the interface is smooth and fonts crisp. About my only gripe, and it's minor, is that the buttons for page turns are a little hard to press. But aside from that, I cannot believe how great this reader is. Oh, and lest we forget, sideloading books on the Kobo line is the best. Calibre can put the books onto the device and auto-create all of your Collections and Series! I've missed this since the jailbroken days of the Kindle Keyboard. Now, when loading up the Kobo, it will automatically place all my books in their folders. That, alone, is worth a 5-star review, to me.I am now a convert to Kobo and not looking back at other e-readers. When my wife's current reader dies (hopefully not for some time), she will also be getting one.

Expensive and Glitchy

I bought this Kobo thinking the price would be reflective of the reading experience. It was not. For a $300 e-reader I was pretty shocked to see how glitchy the interface is. When turning pages, the screen pixelates and goes from white to black consistently. I was also pretty surprised to get the item home and realize that if I actually wanted to use the writing feature, I would need to shell out another $50+ for a digital pencil, sold separately. All in all, this Kobo is a lot of cash for a really underwhelming reading experience. A base model e-reader does the same thing for a fraction of the price. Needless to say, I have returned this substandard model.