Kobo isn’t the first on the color-ereader scene; Boox and Pocketbook have had color ereaders and tablets for years. Both of those companies make beautiful, premium devices that are highly capable and customizable — but they don’t offer the plug-and-play ereader experience of a Kindle or Kobo. Of all the ereaders I’ve tried over the past year, I’ve found Kobos do the best job of combining a user-friendly interface with quality hardware. And now that hardware has a new trick with a color screen on the Clara Colour.

It’s noteworthy that Kobo beat Kindle to the punch in getting a color ereader out the door. To be fair, Amazon is busy doing, well, everything, but it’s safe to bet that a color Kindle will be coming soon. For now, though, Kobo’s Clara Colour is the consumer-friendly color ereader to beat. A beefier processor makes it zippier than its already-fast predecessor, and the addition of color looks lovely, without detracting from the crisp and easy-to-read text. I’ll admit, I’m not an ereader diehard; I often return to my first love, print. But a few weeks with Kobo’s latest has me more excited than ever about reading on this cozy, effortless machine. 

Design and display

Most e-paper devices rely on a display made by E Ink. The Clara Colour uses the company’s new Kaleido 3 panel, which adds a printed Color Filter Array (CFA) layer on top of the existing black-and-white microcapsule layer. The color layer can display around 4,000 colors, with a resolution of 150 dpi. To be clear, a full color page on the Clara Colour looks nothing like what you’d get from the most basic LED screen. E-paper colors are muted and saturated, reminiscent of ‘70s comic book covers. But, also unlike LED, E Ink color panels actually look better under bright light.

Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

The monochrome microcapsule layer creates sharp, 300 dpi text, same as the previous generation. But set side-by-side with the Clara 2E, the Clara Colour’s page does look less sharp. Get close to the screen and you’ll notice noise in the white parts of the page. The warm front light is more amber, too. That’s the nature of the color filter array: since it’s always there, any text you read is filtered through that layer. I have to stress that it’s only something I noticed because I’m writing this review and digging deep into the performance as compared to the previous generation. When it comes to actually reading, I found I preferred the softer, warmer effect of the Colour. It reminds me of the pulpy mass-market Stephen King and Anne Rice paperbacks I grew up reading.

Kobo’s customization options aren’t overly involved, but they grant enough control so you can change things like the typeface, font size, line spacing and margin width, as well as brightness and light warmth. On the outside, the Kobo Clara 2E and the Clara Colour look nearly identical. The screen is slightly more recessed on the Colour model and the soft-touch plastic is more textured, which is actually a benefit because it shows fewer fingerprints. The centimeter-wide bezels are just big enough for your thumb, which, along with the textured back, makes the reader easy to hold from different positions. It’s small enough I can grip it around the back, but I have larger hands, so that might not work for everyone.

With an IPX8 rating, the Clara Colour can handle full submersion in water. I haven’t gone that far with this review unit, but I did survive when I accidentally splashed water on it when washing my hands in the bathroom. Why was it in the bathroom? Because I stash my book near the toilet so I don’t sit there and stare at my phone. It’s the tactic that got me reading again after I had a kid and was temporarily convinced I’d never finish another book. I heartily recommend it, particularly with a reading device like this one that can handle the watery environment of a restroom. 

Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Reading experience

The Clara Colour’s new chip makes loading menus, performing searches and flipping pages a touch faster than with the previous generation. The speed increase doesn’t amount to a drastically different experience, but quicker page turns keep the action going. Like if Murderbot is protecting its humans from HostileSecUnit1 and suddenly there’s another SecUnit at the bottom of the page, you need to know as fast as technologically possible what goes down next. Browsing for a new book and checking out previews is speedier, too, something I appreciate when everything on my dutifully curated TBR list looks like broccoli and I want ice cream.

The UX is the same as all Kobos that don’t support stylus input, with just four options along a bottom menu bar: Home, My Books, Discover and More. Discover takes you to the Kobo store, where you can look for ebooks, audiobooks and titles from KoboPlus, the company’s monthly subscription for unlimited access to a selection of books (aka Kobo’s answer to Amazon Unlimited).

Discover’s recommendation section has a running list of titles called Just for You and, under Related Reads, suggests books you might like based on works you’ve finished. The connective threads between the titles isn’t anything surprising, but they offer a good place to start if you’re noodling on what to read next.

Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Kobo’s deep integration with OverDrive lets you borrow any title your local library has available with just a few seconds of setup and a library card. Clicking the three dots near the Buy button on any book brings up the option to borrow (or place a hold on) the ebook from your library. I admire how deeply Kobo supports the feature, placing something free and public on par with paid books and subscriptions.

Other features are nice to have, like gathering your Pocket articles from the web so you can read them later in the more focused environment of your Kobo. There’s also a beta web browser that I used to look up the Wikipedia entry on the Mason-Dixon line when I read Percival Everett’s James and the one for rook (the bird) when reading Tana French’s The Hunter. The browser’s not equipped for heavy surfing, but that’s a good thing. The extra effort it takes to browse keeps me on target with my reading. At the same time, I’m happy to dig up a little background info without picking up my phone, where the distractions are plentiful and compulsive.

The competition (aka Kindle vs Kobo)

There’s no escaping the fact that a Kobo ereader is not a Kindle. But the advantages Kindle has over Kobo are mostly in the availability of titles, not in hardware. The Kobo Clara Colour is most directly comparable to the standard Kindle. They have the same basic shape, the same size screen with 300 dpi text and 16GB of storage. But the Kindle is $50 cheaper.

However! Amazon’s device will serve you ads on the lockscreen and it costs $20 extra to remove them. It’s also not waterproof and has no warm light. No Kindle has a color display yet, but there are plenty of rumors suggesting that move is (pretty obviously) on the horizon. For now, though, color is another point in Kobo’s favor.

That said, if you’ve spent the past decade amassing a small library on Amazon, you won’t be able to access it on a Kobo without some major, quasi-unlawful finagling. I only have a few Kindle titles from my past, so starting over with Kobo didn’t feel like a loss.

Amazon’s ebook store is larger than Kobo’s, boosted by Kindle Direct Publishing exclusives and self-published books. Kobo has its own self-publishing program, but it’s far smaller. That said, every in-print book from a major publisher will show up in both the Kindle and the Kobo store. Every title I’ve searched for in the Kobo store was readily available.

Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Amazon’s subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, is bigger too, with four million combined audio- and ebook titles available. Comparatively, Kobo Plus currently claims 1.5 million ebooks and 150,000 audiobooks. Kobo’s plan is a tad cheaper at $10 per month to both read and listen, or $8 for ebooks only. Kindle Unlimited is $12 monthly and gives you access to both formats. Neither subscription includes bestselling titles from major authors, but there’s still plenty to choose from.

However, Kobo’s ebook access does outmatch Kindle's in two ways: the ability to shop third-party outlets and an easier OverDrive experience. Amazon uses its own digital rights management (DRM) technology, whereas most everyone else relies on Adobe’s DRM. That means if you buy a book from most major publishers on a third-party site (like ebooks.com or Google Books), you won’t be able to read the ePub file on your Kindle. There are a few extra steps for reading those titles on a Kobo, but it's easy enough. As for OverDrive, reading public library books on a Kindle isn’t hard, but you have to first go to OverDrive’s or your library’s site, find your book and select “read on Kindle” as the delivery option. With a Kobo, you click the three dots next to Buy, select Borrow and start reading seconds later on the same device.

Wrap-up

The big question is whether the addition of color makes the Kobo Clara Colour better and worth the $10 over the previous generation. The faster processor alone makes up for the price hike and the waterproof build, warm front lights and lack of ads makes for a more premium ereader that justifies the $50 price disparity between the Clara Colour and the basic Kindle.

As for the color screen, it doesn’t make much difference when you’re reading a typical ebook. And the extra layer does add some noise to the whitespace and gives everything a warmer glow. But I didn’t mind the minute drop in clarity and actually preferred the softer, cozier appearance of the page. Colors look lovely on the book covers in my collection and recommended titles draw me to them with their muted blues and washed out reds.

You’ve probably heard of that trick where you switch your phone’s screen to grayscale to reduce its appeal. It seems to actually work, so I have to imagine the opposite is true, too. Anything that makes reading material more attractive — and better able to compete with the technicolor onslaught of digital distraction — is a win in my book.

Google's Password Manager now allows password sharing, albeit in a limited way with family members, Android Authority has reported. "With this new feature, you can now securely share your passwords with your family group in Google Password Manager. When you share a password, your family members will receive a copy of it in their Google Password Manager, ready to be used," Google wrote in a support document.

Google first announced the feature in February 2024 as part of Safer Internet Day, but it's finally rolling the feature out as part of its May 2024 Google Play Services update v24.20. Password sharing is strictly limited to members of a family group, so you'll need to create one and add any members to use it.

Android Authority

If you do have a family group, a "share" button should appear as an option in Google's Password Manager. However, Android Authority noted that the feature may not yet be enabled in the desktop version of Chrome. 

Earlier, Google wrote about potential examples of using it, like if "two members of a family are coordinating with daycare through a single account, or a child is letting a parent access their school assignments." 

A poker face is among the many qualities I was born without, so when I unwrapped the Anova Precision Cooker Nano about 14 months ago, I'm sure my visibly confused mug completely undermined my attempt at an enthusiastic "wow, uh… thanks!" What on earth was I supposed to do with this goofy thing? For the better part of a year, it sat in a kitchen drawer.

Don't misunderstand me here: I love to cook. And my dear friends who bought me what most closely resembles some sort of food lightsaber are almost pathologically good gift-givers. But there were two complete misconceptions fighting for space in my head.

On one hand, I grew up watching Good Eats, and Alton Brown's axiom of "no unitaskers!" still reverberates skullwise. My limited understanding of sous vide indicated its primary use case was satisfying those in search of the perfect reverse sear. Frankly, steak doesn't do much for me, and unless I'm making it for a partner it's rarely something that graces my kitchen. This was a totem of carnivorous vanity, and I wanted no part in its rituals.

I also associated sous vide methods with the sort of intimidating, molecular gastronomy-style cuisine that is typically a fool's errand for home cooks. Dry ice smoke infused with rosemary. Alginate spheres of sauce. That sort of thing. Would looking up the cook temperature and time laid out in reference tables on Serious Eats feel more like calculating lathe operations than making dinner? Did I really need my proteins cooked within a degree of medium rare just to fulfill my basic goals of "eat things that taste okay" and "don't starve"? Oh my god, I was going to have to buy one of those vacuum sealers and a cambro to cook things in! This had quickly become a culinary albatross around my neck.

Dear reader, by now you've guessed the twist of this story: I'm an idiot. Not only is a sous vide machine neither of those things, it's actually the perfect tool for someone like me who cooks herself a huge batch of something on Sunday and grazes on it through the workweek. Sous vide is just a crockpot for Millennials.

"I can get an actual crockpot for 40 bucks," you might be saying. Oh, you sweet, misinformed angel, we have no use for such trifles any longer. Yes, both of them free up a burner on the stove for fussier cooking activities. But having granular control over temperature means not worrying that what's cooking on the countertop all day is actually safe to eat. It's also next to impossible to burn down your apartment with a sous vide, so I feel significantly more comfortable letting it run for a few hours while I'm at the gym.

Let's say, hypothetically, you're someone whose executive functions aren't always operating at peak performance (couldn't be me!). Mazel tov, you get to experience a sous vide perk so good it feels like cheating: just put the marinade in the bag. Instead of dirtying a bowl and waiting six to 12 hours to even start cooking, I've been shocked at how well flavors infuse from inside a Ziploc. A few sliced chicken breasts with soy sauce, sake, mirin, oil, the usual mix of ginger and alliums and a little juice from a pomelo I had sitting around? Mwah. Delish.

Better still, it adds no extra time or effort to cook in volume with sous vide, so I made two bags of the aforementioned chicken and froze one. When I was having a Depression Week and didn't much feel like cooking, I defrosted it and cut it into chunks for salad.

To get the obvious out of the way, no, I didn't need to buy a bunch of cambros — a standard stockpot does just fine for me. A Ziploc bag and some understanding of displacement also obviated the vacuum sealer. Using one of these is very much in reach for just about any home cook.

That's not to say it can't have lofty applications. I'll most likely use that temperature accuracy to reliably cook some soft boiled eggs whenever I get up the courage to attempt tonkotsu ramen. Some people have even put them to the task of cheesemaking, which, sure, I'll probably do homemade saag paneer at some point. Why not. But for the most part, my Anova gets used every three to four weeks for relatively unfussy stuff that just keeps me alive and reasonably healthy. Thanks again, Marc and Meg, I owe you a dinner soon.

Starliner, the Boeing-made vehicle intended to carry the next generation of astronauts, has had its launch scrubbed once again. NASA called off the maiden crewed launch after a number of key engineering faults were discovered, and has declined to announce a new test date. Until then, the two personnel expected to soar into the heavens will just have to standby and hope that engineers are able to address the flaws with the Boeing-made craft.

— Dan Cooper

The biggest stories you might have missed

Bluesky finally has DMs, with encrypted messaging coming ‘down the line’

Snap brings its AR lenses to Chrome through an extension

There’s a new Vision show coming to Disney+ with Paul Bettany

New research places the sun's magnetic field close to the surface, upending decades of theories

INDIKA weaves a mature tale of absurdity, hypocrisy and sexual violence

Volkswagen indefinitely delays the ID.7 electric sedan’s arrival in North America

​​You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!

Panasonic S9 hands-on: A powerful creator camera with a patented LUT simulation button

But it’s also missing a bunch of features.

Photo by Steve Dent / Engadget

Steve Dent, our resident camera expert, has been playing with Panasonic’s new S9, its attempt to out-do Fujifilm’s cameras with film simulation. The S9 comes with a dedicated Look Up Table button, which will let you tweak the stills and video with custom film filters. Unfortunately, that comes at the cost of some other key features that may, or may not, be worth the trade off.

Continue Reading.

OpenAI didn't intend to copy Scarlett Johansson's voice, 'The Washington Post' reports

The company says it’s all a big misunderstanding.

Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of using a soundlike when she wouldn’t lend her voice to one of its products. Now, the company has fired back, claiming that its courting of the actress took place long after the “Sky” voice had been cast, and that nothing sinister went down here. Even though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted “her” as a reference to the character ScarJo played in the movie of the same name.

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Multiple Microsoft services including Bing and Copilot, along with ChatGPT internet search and DuckDuckGo are down in Europe, Bleeping Computer reported. Bing.com and Copilot return blank pages and 429 errors, while DuckDuckGo simply states: "There was an error displaying the search results. Please try again."

On its @MSFT365Status X page, Microsoft stated that "We're investigating an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service. We're working to isolate the cause of the issue. More information can be found in the admin center under CP795190." OpenAI also confirmed the issue and said it's investigating. 

Both ChatGPT internet search (available to Plus or corporate users) and DuckDuckGo rely on the Bing API, hence why those sites are down as well. The outage appears to have started at around 3AM ET today (May 23). 

Microsoft was clobbered by another outage in January, when Teams went down across North and South America. The company was also hit by a massive breach that same month, with a US government review board calling Microsoft's security culture "inadequate" and in need of an overhaul.

OpenAI cast the actor of Sky's voice months before Sam Altman contacted Scarlett Johansson, and it had no intention of finding someone who sounded like her, according to The Washington Post. The publication said the flier OpenAI issued last year looked for actors that had "warm, engaging [and] charismatic" voices. They needed to be between 25 and 45 years old and had to be non-union, but OpenAI reportedly didn't specify that it was looking for a Scarlett Johansson voice-alike. If you'll recall, Johansson accused the company of copying her likeness without permission for its Sky voice assistant.

The agent of Sky's voice told The Post that the company never talked about Johansson or the movie Her with their talent. OpenAI apparently didn't tweak the actor's recordings to sound like Johansson either, because her natural voice sounded like Sky's, based on the clips of her initial voice test that The Post had listened to. OpenAI product manager Joanne Jang told the publication that the company selected actors who were eager to work on AI. She said that Mira Murati, the company's Chief Technology Officer, made all the decisions about the AI voices project and that Altman was not intimately involved in the process.

Jang also told the publication that to her, Sky sounded nothing like Johansson. Sky's actress told The Post through her agent that she just used her natural voice and that she has never been compared to Johansson by the people who know her closely. But in a statement Johansson's team shared with Engadget, she said that she was shocked OpenAI pursued a voice that "sounded so eerily similar" to hers that her "closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference" after she turned down Altman's offer to voice ChatGPT. 

Johansson said that Altman first contacted her in September 2023 with the offer and then reached out again just two days before the company introduced GPT-4o to ask her to reconsider. Sky has been one of ChatGPT's voices since September, but GPT-4o gave it the power to have more human-like conversations with users. That made its similarities to Johansson's voice more apparent — Altman tweeting "her" after OpenAI demonstrated the new large language model didn't help with the situation and invited more comparisons to the AI virtual assistant Johansson voiced in the movie. OpenAI has paused using Sky's voice "out of respect" for Johansson's concerns, it wrote in a blog post. The actor said, however, that the company only stopped using Sky after she hired legal counsel who wrote Altman and the company to ask for an explanation. 

If you're wondering if Sky truly does sound like Johansson, we embedded a video below so you can judge for yourself. It's a recording of Johansson's statement as read by the Sky voice assistant, posted by Victor Mochere on YouTube. Opinions in the comment section are divided, with some saying that it does sound like her if she were robotic, while others say that the voice sounds more like Rashida Jones.

OpenAI and News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, The Sun, and more than a dozen other publishing brands, have struck a multi-year deal to display news from these publications in ChatGPT, News Corp announced on Wednesday. OpenAI will be able to access both current and well as archived content from News Corp’s publications and use the data to further train its AI models. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal, but a report in The Wall Street Journal estimated that News Corp would get $250 million over five years in cash and credits.

“The pact acknowledges that there is a premium for premium journalism,” News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson reportedly said in a memo to employees on Wednesday. “The digital age has been characterized by the dominance of distributors, often at the expense of creators, and many media companies have been swept away by a remorseless technological tide. The onus is now on us to make the most of this providential opportunity.”

Generative AI has exploded in popularity ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. But the quality of the responses provided by AI-powered chatbots is only as good as the data that is used to train the models that power it. So far, AI companies have trained their models by scraping publicly available data from the internet often without the consent of creators. But in recent times, they have been striking financial deals with the news industry to make sure that AI models can be trained on information that is current and authoritative. Over the last few months alone, OpenAI has announced partnerships with Reddit, the Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith, the Associated Press, German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Business Insider in the US and Bild and Die Welt in Germany, and Spain’s Prisa Media. Last month, News Corp also struck a deal reportedly between $5 and $6 million with Google to train its AI models, according to a report in The Information.

Google and OpenAI aren’t the only companies striking these deals to train their AI models. Hours before the News Corp announcement, Business Insider reported that Meta, which recently stuffed its own AI chatbot into Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and also sells AI-powered sunglasses, was thinking about striking its own deals with news publishers to get access to training data.

Money from AI companies is increasingly a growing revenue source for a struggling news industry. But some publishers are still wary of striking these deals. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over using content for training AI systems. And the NYT, the BBC and The Verge have blocked OpenAI from scraping their websites.

Bluesky, the open source social media service that began as an internal Twitter project, has gained a key feature as it looks to compete with X and Threads. The service has finally added direct messaging capabilities more than a year after it started onboarding new users.

Direct messages are now available on both Bluesky’s app and website, the company announced in a blog post. The default setting allows users to receive messages from people they follow, though settings can be adjusted to receive messages from “everyone” or “no one.” For now, it sounds like DMs on Bluesky are fairly basic and only support person-to-person text chats, but the company says it plans to add support for media and group messaging, as well as end-to-end encryption “down the line.”

Until then, the company notes that it will be able to access users’ messages in some situations when it’s “absolutely necessary,” such as an investigation into spam or harassment. “In rare cases, the Bluesky moderation team may need to open your DMs to investigate broader patterns of abuse, such as spam or coordinated harassment,” Bluesky says in a blog post. “This would only be done when absolutely necessary to keep Bluesky safe. Access is extremely limited and tracked internally.”

So, like most other social platforms, Bluesky DMs are probably not an ideal space for sharing sensitive information. But the addition of messaging will likely be welcome news from users hoping to make more connections on the service and have conversations out of public view.

Back when we were all stuck at home in 2020 and had to stay on video calls all day, some companies tried to liven things up with augmented reality filters and background replacements. Maybe they caused someone, somewhere to smile once or twice. Although it's hard to argue that they lifted most people out of the doom and gloom of the pandemic, the filters by and large stuck around. 

That's not entirely true in Snap's case. The company used to have a desktop camera app that included AR folders, but it killed that last year. Now Snap is bringing its AR lenses to the desktop in a different way — via a Google Chrome extension.

Snapchat Camera for Chrome can enable AR lenses directly on your webcam. You can then use them for video calls, livestreams, video recordings and so on. Unlike the previous desktop app, you will need to sign in with a Snapchat account to use the lenses. You'll be able to employ any custom lenses you create too. 

Bringing the lenses to Chrome will give you a bit more flexibility, but they didn't appear from the desktop entirely. Microsoft Teams started using the filters last year.

AR lenses have long been ingrained in Snapchat's identity. They're one of the major features that helped the app stand out alongside the early selling point of ephemeral visual messages. So it makes sense for Snap to make use of them in as many areas as possible. While the lenses might liven things up a bit when you're on a Discord call with friends, it's hard to imagine anyone having a shooting star effect or a virtual frog headpiece in place during a serious conference call.

Disney+ has greenlit a standalone show for Marvel’s Vision, as reported by Variety. Paul Bettany will return to portray everyone’s favorite android/synthezoid and reporting indicates that the story will pick up after the events of WandaVision. We have a long time to wait, however, as it won’t air on the streaming platform until 2026.

This tracks with Disney CEO Bob Iger’s recent announcement that it would start being much more picky when it comes to Marvel content. The current plan is to reduce the number of shows from four per year to two. 

As for Vision, it’s not being helmed by Jacqueline Schaeffer, who created WandaVision. Showrunning duties fall to Terry Matalas. He created the criminally underrated 12 Monkeys TV show and acted as showrunner for the final season of Star Trek: Picard, which was miles better than those early seasons. Schaeffer was working on an earlier version of the concept before moving to the forthcoming spinoff Agatha All Along.

While the presence of Matalas may be good news for Marvel fans, it’s bad news for Star Trek fans. Ever since the breakout success of Picard’s final season, fans have been pushing Paramount to greenlight a show they have been calling “Star Trek Legacy” with Matalas at the helm. This would be a continuation that follows the events of Picard season three, spotlighting Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine and other returning characters from the 1990s era of the franchise. Now that Matalas has been snatched up by Marvel, this is unlikely to happen. Between that and the recent cancellation of Star Trek: Lower Decks, it looks like 90s Trek is just about over and done with.