Kobo Sage Reviews

Verified

Kobo Sage is a well made and comfortable book reading device designed for easy use with either hand. Holding the reader left-handed switches text layout and button mapping so that text is up and lower button advances to the next page. All the touch and swipe events are also remapped for southpaw use. Well done. Monochrome ePaper works well whether reading in bed or in full sun! Type faces, font size, font weight, font spacing, ragged right, and filling and justifying are all user selected layout options. Landscape and portrait layout may be locked but remain responsive to left-handed or right-handed holding of the Sage. Kobo Sage has a simple reading-focused user interface that is free of iPad's creeping feature-ism. The UI has what you need to read and manage Kobo and little more. No cameras, no photos manager, no music player, no distractions while reading. The sleep cover is nicely integrated into the reading experience.

Verified

A very nice product with good ergonomics, it fits in well with my other kobo readers. The only thing it leaves me wanting is a larger storage capacity. I bought this one for my manga and it's already full, all 32 gb. My aura one has all my other books and it's still works like new dispite its age.

Verified

I have had my ereader for over 2 weeks and I still can’t find a way to transfer my Kindle ebook to the new ereader

Verified

Excellent ereader. Easy to use. Love that you can borrow library books

Verified

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 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!

Verified

Light weight and more user friendly

Verified

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.

Verified

I bought Kobo Sage as an upgrade for my old Clara HD I've spent happy 3 years reading on. I was fully aware of the issues people have with it, mainly the poor battery life. I mainly read manga and Sage seemed to be really optimized for this, so I went with buying it and wasn't disappointed. True, Sage's battery is being drained like 6-7 times faster than on my old Clara HD, but the reading experience improved a lot. Sage is much faster overall, screen is bigger and better, the images looks much cleaner, crispier. So I'm pretty happy and would definitely recommend.

Verified

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.

Verified

This larger Kobo allows me to increase the font size while not having to continually change pages. I can go back and forth between two or three books as my mood fits. The lighting can be adjusted for both reading outdoors and reading just before bed. A great product at a good price.

Verified

The Kobo DAge I received was faulty I am still waiting on advice that a replsement is being sent to me Bruce Malone

Verified

Reads books good

Verified

This is a very good ereader, although a bit pricy. The screen is larger but not as large as the top of the range Kobo Elipsa. I haven't used the stylus to make annotations yet, so can't make comment on that. It was a little confusing to get it up and running, but Kobo help actually helped with that! Once done, it's a doddle.

Verified

Terrible battery life. It seems you have to charge it every night, even if only using for 1-2 hours. Tried to get help from Kobo but the primary methods (chat bots) are useless, sending you with links to articles which aren't relevant.

Verified

I was very, very on-the-fence about ereaders. In fact, it took me YEARS to finally make the leap. It was mainly the small screens that held me back, but the Sage with its bigger screen made me take the plunge. The big bonus is the stylus for me as well, as I am learning a new language and also read for work every now and then, so being able to scribble and make notes is really nice. I like how it sits in my hand, multiple options for flipping the page, and the screen is so paper-like at one point I found myself trying to shift my 'book' to read the page on the right as if I were reading a paperback. If you're on the fence and prefer paperback books, the Sage is for you.

Verified

glitches out hardcore all the time, not user friendly, slow, the stylus pen is clumsy and doesn't make for natural note-taking at all! also the intuitive handwritten script to type converter is terrible and doesn't work.

Verified

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 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.

Verified

The best Ereader! The best overall reading experience I've ever had. There are some people with small hands criticize that it is a bit heavy, or the battery is a bit weak. But that is good enough for a Ereader. Perhaps it is not necessary to make the chip so powerful to drain the battery or reduce the weight a bit.

Verified

Smooth, functional, pleasure to read and keep your whole library.

Verified

STAY AWAY!!! I have spent $1000's with Kobo for books and readers. I will now be moving to Kindle. After owning 4 different Aura Ones under one warrantee because they all died, when the last Aura One showed multiple issues, we decide to upgrade to Kobo Sage. The Sage lasted all of 2 weeks of light use before it went completely unresponsive, with no warning. It would not even accept charge (no charge light). Terrible flagship model build quality combined with inflexible service procedures relating to warrantee make owning a Kobo a nightmare. STAY AWAY!!!