Review: Kobo Elipsa 2e

About the Kobo Elipsa 2e

• Display: 10.3” E Ink Carta 1200 touchscreen (227 PPI, 1404 x 1872) **
• Front Lighting: Adjustable brightness and color temperature
• Dimensions: 193 x 227 x 7.5 mm
• Weight: 390 g
• Storage: 32GB
• Supported Formats: EPUB, EPUB3, FlePub, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR, and, Kobo Audiobooks

For those who have amassed a vast digital library from Kobo’s digital bookstore, or anyone not hip-deep in Amazon’s content ecosystem, the Elipsa 2e offers a fine balance of note-taking and e-reading. While the Kobo Elipsa 2e comes with a stylus for annotating and note-taking, you’ll have to spend an additional $69.99 on its proprietary sleep cover. Eventually, if you use your stylus enough, you’ll need to replace its tip. A pack of 10 replacement tips will set you back $30. Having to replace the tip on a stylus is a normal part of using a digital writing system.

Now that you know about the few hidden costs associated with owning this device, let’s dive into what’s great–and not so great–about it.

What We Like

Big, Reasonably Beautiful Display

The Elipsa 2e is equipped with a 10.3-inch display with a Pixels Per Inch (PPI) count of 227. By comparison, Amazon’s popular Kindle Scribe comes with a 10.2-inch, 300 PPI display. What’s the difference? Not much: you’ll find that text and photos are just a bit sharper on the Kindle Scribe. But you’re not going to go blind by reading a book on the Elipsa 2e.

During testing, I found this e-note to be pleasant to read books, even for long periods of time. You may, however, note that the edges of large letters and very small type will be a little ill-defined. Kobo’s Comfortlight Pro temperature-adjustable front lighting makes the device’s reading and note-taking experience a comfortable affair, night or day. I found its lighting cast consistently across the whole surface of its display.

Improved Note-Taking Experience

There are three features that an e-note device has to nail in order to provide a paper-like writing experience: Screen texture, a well-designed stylus, and an absence of input latency. (That’s fancy nerd talk for the delay between a stylus touching a display before its input is recognized).

The first-generation Kobo Elipsa had a textured display glass that provided some resistance against its stylus when you wrote on it, making it seem paper-like. But its input latency was such that it often became a distraction—waiting to see if a letter you’ve written is going to show up sucks. Kobo’s smaller e-note, the Kobo Sage, suffered from the same issue.

With the Elipsa 2e, Kobo has made a dramatic leap forward in the quality of its e-note writing experience. The display glass of the Elipsa 2e has enough of a tooth that the device’s redesigned stylus meets a little resistance with every stroke its user makes. It doesn’t have the can’t-tell-it’s-not-paper feel provided by the reMarkable 2, or Kindle Scribe, but it's enough to make jotting down quick notes, writing long passages, or sketching a picture on the tablet feel pleasant.

After a frustratingly long time, Kobo updated the number of templates available for users to take advantage of, as part of their note-taking practice. And as for input latency? That’s greatly improved as well. Most of the time, you won’t notice a gap at all. These improvements carry over to marking up PDFs and books on the Elipsa 2e, as well. Users can scribble directly onto the pages of their digital books and highlight passages, just as they would with a dead-tree edition. Doing so feels natural and by using digital bookmarks you can keep track of any notes you make. Your notes can be synced to Dropbox or Google Drive.

There’s Always Something To Read

While Amazon might have the largest number of books to purchase and download to its Kindle e-readers, Kobo’s no slouch. The Kobo Bookstore is home to millions of books and a respectable number of audiobooks to download to your Elipsa 2e. Recently, Kobo introduced an all-you-can-read monthly subscription service called KoboPlus, which, at the time this review was written, cost $7.99 per month. If you own a substantial library of e-books purchased from publishers like Tor or Story Bundle, they can easily be transferred to Elipsa 2e, via Dropbox.

There’s also a world of free content to leverage. Kobo’s devices come sporting one of the best implementations of Pocket—Mozilla’s read-it-later Internet archiving service—around. And, if you own a library card, you’ll be able to check out books downloaded from your local library using Overdrive.

What we don’t like

Erase That’s A Disgrace

My one complaint about the Elipsa 2e’s note-taking experience is how it handles erasing content. Flip its stylus over and use the blunt end as an eraser, just like a pencil! However, unlike a pencil, the digital eraser is relatively inaccurate and forces a screen refresh every time it makes contact with the display. It’s distracting, to say the least.

Convoluted User Interface

Inverting an e-reader’s display to show white words against a black background is a great way to keep from waking up your partner while you read in bed. Amazon puts this feature a swipe away, on all of its Kindle e-readers. If you want to turn this feature on while using a Kobo device, you’re gonna work for it. It’s hidden in a submenu and isn’t immediately obvious to users that are new to the platform. The same goes for anyone looking to peruse the Pocket articles that they saved on their laptops or books borrowed from their library, on Overdrive. These are all fabulous features, with the latter two being ones that Amazon, so far hasn’t been able to match. Sticking them away under sub-menus not only makes it a pain for readers to find and use, but it also fails to showcase some of a Kobo e-reader’s—in this case, the Elipsa 2e’s—best features.

Cover Doesn’t Offer Much Protection

While I respect that Kobo listened to their customers when they said that the protective case that shipped with the original Elipsa was simply too heavy, they may have gone too far in lightening the load. The case, which is available for $79.99, clips onto the spine of the Elipsa 2e and affords a spot to store its stylus in. While the case covers the whole face of the device when closed, the backside of the e-note is left unprotected. Were one to drop the device on the ground, I don’t feel that the case would offer much in the way of impact protection and might pop off, right when you need it the most.

Should you buy the Kobo Elipsa 2e?

Yes: But only if you dislike Amazon

The Kobo Elipsa 2e is a head-and-shoulders improvement over its predecessor. It provides a superior note-taking experience, feels lighter and is just as capable an e-reader as any in Kobo’s current lineup… only bigger.

However, it doesn’t have the easy-to-use charm of an Amazon device. The company’s Kindle Scribe is a polished device that, thanks to multiple firmware updates since it was released, in late 2022, has become even more capable than when it was first released.

I suspect Amazon’s update cadence will continue to push the Scribe forward, during 2023. Having used Kobo devices for over a decade, I can’t say I have the same confidence in the Elipsa 2e. Kobo’s firmware updates tend to flow like mud and, concern themselves more with fixing bugs than offering new features. Be sure that you really like the Elipsa 2e, before you buy one: at $399, it represents a serious investment and, what you see when you first pick it up is most likely what you’ll get for quite some time.