Kobo's have comparable (even superior, IMO) hardware to the Kindle line. The thing that everyone who migrates from Kindle to Kobo seems to get hung up on is that it does not have an option to wirelessly sync books that have been sideloaded across devices. This is because Kobo does not give everyone a private cloud like Amazon does (I imagine it would be prohibitively expensive to do so for anyone but Amazon).
It's not a big deal for me, but apparently it's a dealbreaker for some Kindle refugees that they can't start reading a sideloaded book on their phone and pick up where they left off when they open their Kobo.
I have a $350 Kobo Forma and the UI is so slow compared to my $200 Kindle. It takes a long time to startup and it has horrible & slow touch detection which makes it really hard to highlight quotes properly.
I don't see why that should be expensive/difficult. Ebooks are mostly small files. It would be hard to ramp up a gigabyte unless you end up with image laden items such as pdfs.
Synching can be an issue. I had a one of the early kindles, and it was fine until I hit a few hundred items. It would re-index and be completely unresponsive for 10minutes at a go. That could have been done cloud side. In the end I decided I needed to purge loads of documents/titles to get it useful again. But accidentally sat on it. So game over. Moved to a simple Nook and SDCard loads.
I've switched from Paperwhite to Kobo (Aura I think?) and the highlighting feature is really making me miss my Paperwhite.
1. I can't highlight text across pages.
2. There's also an issue in which I navigate to some highlight and the text gets shown in a dark grey against black background, making it nearly impossible to read.
3. Since I can't highlight text properly (thanks to issue 1), I can't simply extract my highlights from a book, so I have to manually type it on a laptop, which is a painful experience thanks to issue #2.
Though I haven't analyzed other devices (because I don't own them), they could easily have similar issues. I personally really want an open e-ink device, but I haven't seen one for sale unfortunately. For now, I do Calibre ODPS server with Marvin app on a phone, but it doesn't really compare.
I have an Onyx Nova 2 and I like it quite a lot. It runs android and has access to the android ecosystem, so I can read my webnovels and mangas and even kindle books without needing to use any external applications like Calibre.
I read this comment on my Nova 2. It's a very nice capable device for tasks like web browsing, email, and note taking (either with the pen or Bluetooth keyboard).
Got my mother-in-law a Kobo Forma. Relatively pricey but I was able to walk her through how to check out a book from her local library via Cloud Library & transfer it to her device. Was a life-saver while the physical library was closed due to Covid-19. I was a little concerned as there were complaints about fabrication but her experience has been very positive.
