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The new Kobo Clara HD is a worthy (and affordable) Kindle competitor

Kindle may be the first name that comes to mind when you think of ebook readers, but Kobo has been making excellent devices for nearly a decade. Its newest model, the Kobo Clara HD, is a budget reader with a few unexpected features.

After months of rumors, Canadian ebook reader manufacturer Kobo has released its newest device, the Kobo Clara HD. The reader is the first budget model to be released by the company in nearly three years. And although it’s one of Kobo’s more affordable readers, it offers some pretty impressive features.

The Kobo Clara HD sports a 6-inch Cara E Ink screen with a 300ppi resolution. It features a whopping 8GB of storage which translates to about 6,000 ebooks. Unless you’re a heavy user, the battery should last for several weeks.

One of the most exciting features to make its way to the Kobo Clara HD is ComfortLight Pro. Instead of using the traditional technology to illuminate most E Ink screens, ComfortLight Pro uses orange and red LEDs for illumination, minimizing your exposure to blue light. While the Clara HD is not the first Kobo ebook reader to feature the technology, it is the least expensive one on the market.

There are a few things missing on the Kobo Clara HD that you’ll find on some of the company’s more expensive ebook readers, however. First off, the Clara HD is not waterproof, so it’s not a great fit for summer beach reading. It also doesn’t include Overdrive integration, one of our favorite features on the Kobo Aura One that allows you to seamlessly borrow books from your local library.

While Kobo may not have the same household recognition as Amazon’s Kindle line of ebook readers, it’s a worthy competitor nonetheless. The company released its first device in 2010 and has become a cult favorite among heavy readers. In addition to its own ebook store with more than 5 million titles, Kobo supports many more formats than you’ll find on Kindle. In addition to supporting most of the major ebook formats, the Kobo Clara HD allows you to view documents, photos, and even comic books.

It’s also easy to customize and annotate texts. With the Kobo Clara HD you can select from nearly a dozen different texts and forty different size options to get the perfect read. You can also highlight passages, bookmark pages, and even make notes within the text.

The Kobo Clara HD is available now. You can pick up the Kobo Clara HD for $130 on the Kobo website, and through various retailers including Amazon and Walmart.

Merely days after the iPhone Duo hit the shelves, images of broken screens on the phone started popping up across social media. Until now, it’s been unclear what’s causing the line of defective pixels that appears vertically along the crease, as well as horizontally, on the phone’s inner display.

Apple has finally acknowledged the issue, which has shown up on iPhone Duo units owned by customers as well as demo units in stores. In a statement shared with Bloomberg, Apple says that not all iPhone Duo units are affected and that those that are tend to show the display fault early on. The company added that users who experience problems with their iPhone Duo display should contact AppleCare for a replacement.

Not long ago, Apple treated independent repair like an act of outright hostility. The Cupertino giant locked down parts with serial-number pairing, while repair tools remained firmly out of reach of anyone outside its authorized repair network. More importantly, the company waged a legal and lobbying battle against right-to-repair legislation.

I've covered enough of these fights over the years to know what a shift looks like. That's why what happened in October 2026 genuinely caught me off guard. The day the iPhone Duo went on sale, what may be the most mechanically complex iPhone to date, Apple pulled off a surprising about-face. It published teardown-style repair manuals for a handful of major components.

Apple's first foldable phone is now on shelves, in short supply, but with an unreal amount of buzz around it. After all, it's the first foldable iPhone, and there's plenty that this phone gets right. But there's also a lot that is either broken or underwhelming. What's peculiar is the dialogue around this phone, and how it has completely overshadowed every other attempt at making a phone with a similar form factor.

I've spent some time with the iPhone Duo, and I've used the Galaxy Z Fold 8 for almost three months now. In my opinion, Samsung deserves more credit. When the Galaxy Z Fold 8 arrived earlier this year, it was celebrated in some circles and ridiculed in others for supposedly copying what Apple would eventually deliver with the iPhone Duo. The dialogue was pretty odd, for multiple reasons. Samsung has been making foldable phones for years, so claiming that it copied a product Apple hadn't even launched was simply absurd.