Kobo Clara Colour review: Why would you buy a Kindle?

What do you want in an e-reader? If you’re anything like me, a long-lasting battery life is important, and so is an easily portable design. These days, you might throw a color display into the mix as well. If that sounds good to you, then let me tell you about the Kobo Clara Colour. Kobo is one of the veterans of the e-reader industry, having been in the business since 2010, and its long pedigree shows. The Clara Colour is its latest e-reader, and at first glance, it has everything you want in an e-reader. It’s small, with enough power to keep going for weeks, and, importantly, a full color display with a sharp resolution.

But it’s up against some serious competition in this space, not least the Kindle Colorsoft. Amazon’s first ever color Kindle is most people’s first thought when it comes to picking a new e-reader, but Kobo will be looking to change that. A pricetag a full $100 less than the Colorsoft is an excellent start, but does the Kobo Clara Colour really have what it takes to dethrone the king? Read on to find out.

Kobo Clara Colour specs

Kobo Clara Colour: design

E-reader design is poles apart from smartphone and tablet design, and you might think you’ve dropped through some sort of time portal when you compare the two. Instead of sleek glass and metal builds, even the most premium e-reader devices are made from stout plastic. The Kobo Clara Colour is no different. It’s clad in black recycled plastic, with a textured rear panel with a recessed power button. It feels tough and substantial despite the material, and it has a pleasing heft that helps it to avoid feeling cheap. The recessed power button is also a positive, as it’s easy to find, and much better at warding off accidental presses than the button on the bottom of most Kindles.

Thick bezels surround the 6-inch e-ink display, meaning it’s not much to look at — but that gives you plenty of area to grip while reading. But my word you’re going to need that grip, because the Clara Colour is a very slippery device. The plastic is slick and hard to keep hold of, and even the textured back panel doesn’t provide much in the way of grip. It’s fine if you’re using it curled up on the sofa, or sitting upright, but take the device to bed and hold it above your face, and you start to feel as if you’re dicing with death. Its pleasing heft becomes somewhat threatening when it’s hovering above your face. I was sent one of the official fold cases along with the Clara Colour, and it became a very welcome addition.

This lack of grip is a problem I’ve noticed with a lot of e-readers lately. I have a 2024 Kindle that suffers from the same issue, and it’s puzzling to me. It’s not a problem my 2018 Kindle Paperwhite suffers from, with its soft-touch back coating, and it feels like e-readers have gone backwards where grip is concerned. Sure, it’s easily solved with a case, but a cynical part of me wonders if case sales are exactly the reason for the switch.

Moving on to durability, the Clara Colour has an IPX8 rating for water-resistance, which means it can survive for up to 60 minutes in up to two meters of fresh water. It’s a great device for reading in the bath or by the pool, though we wouldn’t purposefully take it under the water if you don’t have to. Notably, it has no rating for dust-resistance (signified by the X), so keep it away from dusty or gritty environments.

There’s another element of the Clara Colour’s durability to note here, as well — it’s been built be repairable. Kobo has partnered with iFixit to offer parts and repair guides, so that even if your device is outside of the warranty period, you can have a go at fixing it yourself. That’s a major point in its favor, and not one often seen in any device.

There’s not much to write home about where the Clara Colour’s design is concerned. It’s safe and does its job well, but it’s hard to describe it as anything other than boring. Yes it feels reassuringly tough and solid, but it’s too slippery, and I wish it came in a color other than standard black.

Kobo Clara Colour: display

The Kobo Clara Colour has a 6-inch e-ink Kaleido 3 colour touchscreen, with a 1448 x 1072 resolution at 300 pixels-per-inch (ppi) for black and white content. Like the Kindle Colorsoft, color content will drop the resolution down to 150 ppi, but the drop isn’t noticeable on such a small screen. And it is a small screen — at just 6-inches, it’s the same size as the standard Kindle, and a full inch smaller than the 7-inch displays that have become standard for the Kindle Paperwhite and the Colorsoft. It makes the device pocketable and easily transported in a way that larger devices aren’t, but on the flip side, it also means those who prefer a larger screen will find themselves leaning towards the Kindle Colorsoft, or a Kobo Libra Colour.

Size aside, it’s clearly a great screen. Kobo’s long experience shows with the Clara Colour, as the display looks great. Black and white e-books are pinpoint sharp, with even the smallest credit text being easily visible. Color content does have a 150 ppi downgrade, but it’s not noticeable, and the slightly washed out colors mean pictures tend to look like attractive watercolors. It’s not the bold and bright color you’d get from a tablet, but it’s similar to that offered by the Colorsoft, and what we’ve come to expect from color e-readers.

I did have some ghosting issues, more than I’ve come to expect from a comparative Kindle, but those were few and far-between, and not something that should put you off the device. If you’re finding your device ghosting more than you’d like, you can change the settings to force the display to refresh more often, washing the ghosts away more effectively than Dan Ackroyd. After a few weeks with the device, I stopped noticing them altogether.

The smaller size may put some people off, but ultimately, the Clara Colour’s excellent display belies a strong pedigree. This is an excellent e-ink screen.

Kobo Clara Colour: performance and battery

I doubt anyone is expecting the Clara Colour to be a powerhouse on the level of, well, any modern smartphone, and you’d be right to doubt. There’s a positively tiny little dual 2.0GHz processor tucked inside the Clara Colour’s plastic shell, and while that’s clearly an underpowered chip by most standards, it’s worth pointing out that there isn’t all that much for it to do here.

Performance is, on the whole, fast and snappy. The Clara Colour isn’t a buttery-smooth swiper like the Galaxy S25 Ultra, or really, any smartphone. But it does well with what it has, and there aren’t many moments when you’re left wondering if a touch registered or not. That is, as long as you’re reading in black and white. Performance does slow down when color content comes into play, with the increased file sizes and requirement for processing power being the likely reason behind the drop. Color PDFs tended to be the slowest, with a whole second of lag between swiping and the page actually turning. Your mileage will vary on this, depending on how large the files you browse are, but expect some slowdown if you’re browsing large color PDFs.

Storage comes in a single 16GB flavor, half the size of the Kindle Colorsoft’s 32GB. This is a bit of a letdown. Standard ebooks will be just fine with this amount of storage, but audiobook lovers and anyone whose ebooks contain a lot of color pictures will start feeling the pinch once they’ve started piling in the titles.

I’m personally an e-book reader, and leave audiobooks on my phone, where I can choose to use either a speaker or headphones, but those who use an e-reader for their audiobooks may wish to look elsewhere, or simply pare down their downloaded titles. I also have a few large reference books with lots of pictures in ebook formats, but the Clara Colour’s screen is too small to really engage with these titles, so it gets a pass on not really having the file space for a lot of these.

As ever with e-readers, the battery life is measured in weeks, not days, and as such, it’s often a less important metric to judge a device on. The Kobo Clara Colour is as impressive as its kin, with Kobo claiming a battery life of 42 days. That judgement includes 30 minutes of reading per day, so your experience will vary depending on how much you use it. In my time with it, I’ve only had to charge it once after fully charging when it arrived, which puts it around Kobo’s estimations. But even if you read an awful lot more than I do, I don’t think you’ll have any issues with the Clara Colour’s battery life.

As befits a device you’ll charge every few weeks, Kobo doesn’t make much of the Clara Colour’s charging speed. It has a USB-C port at the bottom, and while it’s not going to be as fast to charge as your smartphone, it’s so efficient that even ten minutes of charging the 1,500mAh cell is likely to give you enough power for the day. Since it most likely uses the same charger as your phone, you don’t even need to pack another charger for weekends away.

Minor issues around the storage aside, I’m more than happy with the Kobo Clara Colour’s performance and battery life. Yes, it slows down a touch when dealing with heavy files, but that’s a common issue for e-readers of all stripes, and not something to really worry about.

Kobo Clara Colour: reading experience

Enough about the ancilliary stuff; how is it to actually read on? As you’d hope, it’s pretty darn good at it.

Everything we’ve mentioned in the previous sections really comes into play here; the sharp display means text is crisp and clear, and the strong performance means there’s little lag when you’re moving between pages. While you’re reading a book, you swipe to turn the page, or you can tap on the left or right to turn the page that way. Tap in the middle of the page to pull up the interface, which allows you to jump forwards in the book, change the brightness, font options, and gives access to your reading stats and other settings.

Open the settings and you can customize a large amount of how this works. You can enlarge the tap-to-turn area for both right and left page turns, instead of having equal amounts of screen time for either, and change where to tap to trigger the interface. There are other small changes you can make, but the one I really like is the option to change the brightness by sliding up and down the left edge of the screen.

You can listen to audiobooks too. You’ll need Bluetooth headphones or a speaker to listen though, as there’s no headphone jack or built-in speaker. That’s standard for these sorts of e-readers, though it may be disappointing to those who have used larger e-ink tablets with their own speakers.

The audiobook experience is fairly standard. There are controls to speed up or slow down the narration, and the skip buttons go forwards and backwards by 30 seconds. It’s a little basic, and it lacks the ability to change how far the skip buttons go. The time dilation options also only increase by 0.25 increments, and only go as low as 0.75-times the initial speed, which is a little lacking for those who like to fine tune their listening experience. Still, it works well enough, and it has the same stats button as the reading interface, showing you how long you have left in the book, and even which chapters are the longest.

The volume option is a little annoying. There’s no hardware button to control the volume, so you can only control it using a slider on the screen. I would have loved to have seen an option to have the volume slider work in a similar manner to the brightness, perhaps by sliding along the right edge. Audiobooks don’t seem like a focus here though, which explains the lack of polish.

The audiobook experience is a little limited, but the Kobo Clara Colour really shines when you load it up with e-books.

Kobo Clara Colour: software

Kobo uses its own proprietary software on the Clara Colour, and it’s functional, if nothing special. The main Home page shows you a selection of books or audiobooks from your library, links to the Kobo Store, and an advert for Kobo Plus, Kobo’s premium subscription. Along the bottom, you can access My Books, the Discover page, which is basically just the store in all but name, and a More option. More opens access to the settings, optional Beta Features, your Activity page, the Wishlist, and other extra stuff. It works, but there’s nothing special. There are a couple of interesting Beta Features, like adding web browser, large print mode, and a sketch pad option, but otherwise, it’s a fairly bare operating system. Don’t get me wrong, it works well at what it needs to do, but don’t go in expecting anything groundbreaking.

One area Kobo needs to do better is in importing new books. You can buy new books from the Kobo store, sign up to your public library using OverDrive, or you can hook a USB-C cable to your computer and manually transfer your books. I have a wealth of e-books and PDFs on my computer, and frankly, needing to dig behind it to plug in a cable and run it to the Clara Colour is unforgiveably primitive. The worst part is Kobo knows better; the Kobo Elipsa 2E links with Google Drive, so you can add files simply by putting them in a specific folder in your Google Drive. It’s quick, easy, and should be on the Clara Colour — so why isn’t it? Even Amazon has an upload tool to wirelessly send e-books to your Kindle, so Kobo insisting on a wired connection feels bad.

Ultimately, the Kobo Clara Colour’s software is nothing special, but outside of the lack of wireless e-book transmission, it doesn’t need to be. It’s quick and easy to get into a book, and I rarely felt lost while using it. It’s simple and effective.

Kobo Clara Colour: Kobo store

Kobo runs its own store, and that’s where you’ll likely buy most of your new ebooks. The Kobo store used to play second fiddle to the Kindle store, and while that’s still somewhat true — there’s nowhere quite like the Kindle store for self-published books and content — the Kobo store now has a massive range of ebooks, magazines, manga, and more.

The Kindle store also has an advantage in sheer volume of deals, but Kobo has a card up its sleeve to help deal with that. If you find an ebook anywhere else for cheaper than the Kobo store, Kobo will give you the difference back, plus 10% on top. That’s a great guarantee, and while it can be a faff to submit a claim each time there’s a Kindle sale on, it helps to sugar the pill significantly.

If you read multiple books a month, or even week, then there’s also the Kobo Plus subscription service to consider. It’s similar to the Kindle Unlimited subscription, in that it offers a wide range of books, comics, and audiobooks starting from just $8 a month.

While the Kindle store remains the undisputed king, the Kobo store is far more than a pale imitation now. It’s easy to use, and it was rare I failed to find something I wanted.

Kobo Clara Colour: price and availability

The Kobo Clara Colour is currently available for purchase, and it costs $160. There’s only one variant, and it comes with 16GB of storage. It comes in just one colorway, black — but you can buy the SleepCovers in a number of different colors including Misty Green, Candy Pink, Cayenne Red, and plain black. You can order the Kobo Clara Colour from the Kobo store, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and other stores that sell e-readers.

The Kobo Clara Colour exists in an odd position where it’s not competition for any specific Kindle e-reader, it’s actually competition for a bunch of them. It has a color display, like the Kindle Colorsoft, it’s the same price as the Kindle Paperwhite, and if you’re looking at a smaller e-reader, well it’s the same size as the basic Kindle. The Clara Colour is a good alternative to each of the three Kindle e-readers. About the only Kindle it can’t compare with is the Kindle Scribe — and that’s where its big brother, the Kobo Elipsa 2E, steps into the ring.

When you consider what you get for your money, there’s no hardware reason to buy anything other than a Kobo e-reader. The only real reason to buy a Kindle is because of the Amazon store it’s attached to, and any existing library you might have. There’s no webstore quite like Amazon, and it’s a genuine reason to think twice about stepping away from a Kindle e-reader. But if you’re willing to give it up, or you’ve long avoided Amazon, then you should buy the Kobo Clara Colour.

Moving from Kindle to Kobo

Some people may be upgrading from a previous Kobo e-reader, or will be looking at buying their first e-reader, but many will be looking at swapping over from the Amazon Kindle. So, how easy is to move from a Kindle to Kobo? While buying a new e-reader is easy, it’s very likely you’ll need to leave your Amazon books behind.

This was always, legally, going to be the case. It’s important to note that, as far as Amazon is concerned, the ebooks you buy are essentially leased from them, and you have bought the right to view them for as long as Amazon wants to let you. Amazon can, at any time, remove your ebooks without notice, or make edits to them.

There used to be a loophole in this where, if you owned a physical Kindle device, you could download your ebook files from Amazon’s website, in order to transfer them over to your device through USB connection. Once the files were on your computer, Amazon’s DRM could be removed, and the files converted and moved to an e-reader of your choice. However, Amazon removed this support from the most recent Kindles, and, as of February 26, 2025, has removed the ability to download your ebooks at all. So, unless you downloaded your ebook files before February 26, your ebooks are now locked to your Kindle, and can’t be moved over to a Kobo device at all.

So the unwelcome news is you’re, legally speaking, going to have to leave whatever you bought on Kindle behind when you move to Kobo.

Should you buy the Kobo Clara Colour?

It’s a yes. An emphatic yes, in fact.

It isn’t much to look at, but Kobo’s Clara Colour has got it where it counts. It’s an excellent e-reader, and reflects Kobo’s strong lineage and long experience with exactly these types of devices. The display is excellent, the smaller size means it fits into pockets and bags with ease, and the weeks of battery life means you can forget about battery anxiety. The software is simple but effective, and while I wish it had more storage and an easier way to send them to the device, these aren’t dealbreakers by any means. If a color e-ink screen is a must, then this is absolutely the e-reader to buy. It can go blow-for-blow with the Kindle Colorsoft, and saves you $100 you can spend on e-books instead.

If you’re looking for a bigger screen, then there are better options, like the Kindle Scribe or Kobo Elipsa 2E. But if you’re looking for a great color e-reader to read or listen to books, then there aren’t many reasons not to buy the Clara Colour. If the Kobo Clara Colour had been closer to the Kindle Colorsoft in price, then this would be a harder recommendation. But, as it is, the Kobo Clara Colour offers everything that makes the Colorsoft great, at a significantly lower price. This is the e-reader you should buy in 2025.