 |
| Kobo Aura ONE: Interior electronics and power supply exposed with back cover removed. |
It was December 12th, and I was 36,000 feet in the air when I noticed it. Thinking I'd do some reading while on a flight, I took out my Kobo Aura ONE eReader and pressed the button at the rear to power it up.
Nothing happened.
Noticing the "Powered off notification at the top of the screen", I didn't think much of it. It seemed that the battery must have been drained, and the device had powered off as it was supposed to. Pulling my power adapter and USB cable out of my carry-on bag, I plugged it into the power outlet below the seat of the Boeing 777-ER that I was on and waited for the Aura ONE to power up.
Nothing happened.
I stared at the screen for a bit, looking at the upper right hand corner where the little square indicator LED was supposed to light up in blue, indicating that the device was charging. It was faint, not lit up bright blue as it usually was. I waited some more.
Nothing happened.
I tried pressing and holding down and releasing the power button at the back for a few seconds as per the instructions to perform a reset.
Nothing happened.
 |
| Kobo Aura ONE: frozen replacement unit, powered off and unable to charge |
Slowly, a sinking feeling began to build as I took in the situation - my
eReader that I relied so heavily on was dead, completely frozen in the
powered off state and I couldn't resurrect it. It had completely conked
out, just a year and 10 months after I had first activated it, as
mentioned in this former post [1].
I was frustrated and upset. This, again?, I thought, after all the trouble I went through the last time. The initial Kobo Aura ONE I had bought had conked out within 2 months of activation [2]. This was the second time this was happening in the space of two years.
After landing, I contacted Kobo support over online chat, and informed them of the situation. They asked me to walk through the usual troubleshooting steps to verify the problem, and sent me the instructions to try a factory reset. I had already done all that, but went through it nonetheless. It didn't fix the problem, and the Aura ONE remained dead. They informed me that since the warranty period had expired, there was nothing they could do, except offer me some store credit and $20 off of their base model Aura Edition 2.
I was mortified. After all that time, money and effort, this was very difficult to swallow. The Aura ONE is not cheap. It sells for $249.99 CAD at distributing
stores like Indigo's Chapters outlets ($279.98 CAD with tax added). The
first one had been replaced after complaining to Kobo support, since it
was still within the warranty period. The warranty period had expired on
the replacement, and it had given up the ghost at a most inconvenient
time.
I was being asked to spend more money for a much lower model that was not anywhere near the device I had initially purchased and liked. I decided to investigate the situation myself, and see if there was anything I could to to fix it. Online searches revealed owners with similar problems. It seemed like it had a dead battery, since the LED lit up faintly while charging. One owner had revived his after charging it for more than 24 hours. I tried leaving it plugged in overnight, then for a whole day, to no avail.
Trying to run some diagnostic tests, I plugged it into my laptop and ran a couple of commands, shown below. The lsusb command at the Linux terminal shows the attached USB devices. With the Aura ONE disconnected, the terminal output showed nothing. When it was connected and the command run, the output showed a "Freescale Semiconductor Inc." device registered. That corresponded to the processor on the Aura ONE's system board. It looked like it was being detected, but not as it usually was, showing up as a USB device in the Nautilus file explorer.
I tried running the dmesg command to see what the system output was for device messages. Again, it showed evidence of a Freescale Semiconductor device being detected, but not much more than that. It did look like it was indeed dead.
 |
| Kobo Aura ONE: USB connection and device messaging information available on Linux |
As a last resort, I noted a post by one
user that had tried finding the battery model number for his eReader,
sourcing it online and replacing it, to get his device working again.
With that idea in mind, I watched a YouTube video of a teardown of the
Aura ONE and tried opening it up from the back using a sharp exacto
blade. Noting the model number printed on the slim lithium-polymer battery, I tried searching for that, without much success. I also tried searching on eBay and Amazon using the specifications printed on the battery, only to arrive at another dead end. It looked like the parts for this eReader were not easy to find or source.
So to recap from my conclusions:
- I had bought a $249.99 device, sold at $279.98 CAD w/ tax
- It came with a 1 year warranty
- Two units failed in the space of 24 months - original & replacement
- No way to download/reflash the software
- No way into the system for diagnostics
- No service centre to repair the device
- No authorised repair shops
- No spare parts available to order
- The offered solution - to buy the base model on the customer's money
- Customer is left to try and repair the unit himself, if at all possible
Having exhausted all my options, I eventually caved in, bit the bullet and bought another eReader on Christmas Eve - a newly-released Kobo Clara HD, after reading some reviews. While cheaper and with $20 off as part of a Christmas sale, I still had to shell out $139+ CAD and was not happy about it. But I could get back on my reading which was quite critical at the time.
Kobo support, to their credit, kept following up with increased offers of store credit. I finally sent them a strongly worded email, explaining what I had to do and asking for answers as to why support for their devices was so bad. I clearly laid out that if the Clara HD also failed and gave me similar problems to the Aura ONEs, that I could not be a Kobo customer anymore.
As things currently stand, the Kobo team reviewed my case and agreed to replace the replacement device with a new one after I shipped it in. I was happy to have my predicament taken seriously. Once the replacement process is complete, I will post about the replacement Aura ONE unit that should be coming within the next month or so. The Clara HD is still active and operating, around 10 days after activation. I will be posting an initial review about that soon.
In any case, this episode has given me a lot to think about regarding Product Lifecycle Management and all the associated factors that go with it. I'll be posting my thoughts on that in an upcoming article.
I hope things will go better with the Clara HD that I'm currently using, and the replacement Aura ONE that I hope to be getting soon.
REFERENCES:
==========
[1] Kobo Aura One: Warranty Replacement Device - Initial System Setup and Test
[2] Embedded System Woes: New Kobo Aura One E-Reader with Corrupted Display, OS/Firmware
[3] https://ask.metafilter.com/307133/Kobo-wont-turn-on
No comments:
Post a Comment