Durobo Krono Review – Trusted Reviews

Design

• Scroll wheel feels cheap
• Minimalist look, plastic build
• Limited ports and expandability

At arm’s length, the Krono looks like this picture-perfect dream of a product which, at last, has brought back physical, tactile controls to go alongside the monochrome display. I’ll admit it: when I first saw images and videos of the device online, it was the rotating scroll wheel on the side that excited me most. 

In an age where smartphones and tablets are controlled in the same way – using a slippery, glossy glass touchscreen – the thought of having this scrolling crown on the side was super refreshing. In my mind’s eye, I’d pictured the motion and feel of it as having a gorgeously tactile click or some kind of resistance, with that aluminium cylinder running across the back hinting at a premium mechanism of some description. 

Sadly, what I imagined and the reality of that scroll wheel are worlds apart. It is, in fact, quite cheap feeling when you turn it, with no physical feedback directly from the mechanism at all. In some instances, you’ll feel some vibration or haptic feedback from the vibration motor inside the Krono – but not from the dial itself. It also feels quite loose and a bit wobbly, so very far from that premium dream. Heart-breaking. 

One other minor design issue is that, because of its size and the way its edges protrude further than the aforementioned cylindrical bar across the back, it’s hard to scroll when you have the phone resting on its back. 

Functionality-wise, what that dial does depends on the context, and it’s not always clear what it’s going to do until you try it. In some parts of the interface it scrolls up and down the page. In other parts, and in third-party apps, it tends to adjust the screen’s front light brightness. There’s nothing you can do to customise it either, which I’d argue is the biggest limitation. 

The Smart Dial menu in the settings has no option to set it to perform specific actions in specific apps. I’d love to be able to set it to turn pages in the Kindle or Borrowbox ebook reading apps, for example. In the default internet browser app, it scrolls pages up and down, which works really well, but it’d be wonderful if this functionality were expanded to other apps I’ve installed from the Play Store. 

It has other staple features beyond scrolling too. You can click it inwards to refresh the E Ink display, press and hold it to instantly start recording a voice memo or double-click to launch the Durobo AI assistant – which, to all intents and purposes, is effectively Google Gemini wrapped in a minimalist skin. More on that later though. 

There’s the breathing light system of LEDs on the back to which you could be forgiven for thinking does absolutely nothing. They’re designed to ‘breathe’ or pulse, reminding you to get your reading in. But you need to set that schedule up in the settings, and beyond that one single function, they really don’t do anything else. No countdown timers, no notification alerts, literally nothing else. 

While the device overall looks like it’s aiming at the minimalist/premium market, the material choices and finer details don’t quite meet those aims. It’s actually quite cheap feeling in general, with most of that rear panel just covered in a pretty standard-feeling plastic, and the front bezels and display seemingly lifted straight from a Boox Palma. Which makes a lot of sense given that Onyx – the company that makes Boox devices – also manufactures this one for Durobo. 

There are some notable omissions too. In a device designed for limited or more mindful use cases, it’s surprising to me that there’s no 3.5mm headphone port for wired audio. So if you want to chill and listen to audiobooks or podcasts, you’re gonna need to use wireless buds like you would with most other devices. There’s no microSD card reader or SIM tray either. 

I will say this though – it’s a much nicer device to look at and to hold than the Boox Palma. I’d much rather this smooth, matte, flat plastic than the unusually textured rear of the Boox alternative. If I were to choose between the two based purely on design, I’d still pick this one – despite it lacking some of the Boox’s features. 

Screen

• 6.13-inch E Ink display
• Crisp, high-contrast text
• Adjustable cool/warm frontlight

As is typical for this type of device, there’s a 6.13-inch E Ink display on the front. Specifically, the E Ink Carta 1200, which is the same panel featured on the Boox Palma 2. It’s crisp, and has great transflective properties and contrast, so very good for readability. 

For an E Ink panel, it’s pretty responsive to page turning and scrolling with a couple of different options to tweak it. You can either have it set to be super sharp or have it more fluid and smooth to refresh. 

Like any good E Ink panel then, it uses the ambient light around it to light up the display. But for those moments when you’re reading in dimmer light, like at bedtime, there’s an LED front light with a two-tone functionality so you can switch between a cooler or warmer light. 

Performance and software

• Stripped-back Android-based OS
• Smart Dial often unintuitive
• Spark app powerful but clunky

The software is based on Android but heavily customised for the E Ink display it runs on. And credit where it’s due, Durobo has tried to make it as stripped back as it can and much better stylised for E Ink than Boox’s – which is effectively just typical Android in black and white – but still offering at least some of the key features you might want in a minimalist product. 

There’s very little in the way of pre-installed apps at all. In fact, you can fit them in a 3×3 grid. If you want anything it doesn’t have, like the Kindle or Borrowbox apps for easier access to books, you can just install them from the Play Store. It’s very much a blank canvas. 

There’s a built-in AI assistant, which is effectively just Google Gemini wrapped in a minimalist monochrome interface, a browser for reading pages on the web, and then a ‘read’ app for reading any compatible documents and files. 

With most minimalist devices, there’s usually a clear sense of the device’s purpose in the software. But my issue with the Krono is that it doesn’t seem all that clear what it’s trying to be. Or rather, you can see the attempt at some form of a focus, but it misses the mark in a few ways. 

For example, I really like how you long-press the dial on the side to start a quick voice memo. This is then saved in the ‘Spark’ app for easy access later. But the Spark app itself (not to be confused with the Spark Mail email app) is limited and not as user-friendly as it should be. 

The interface is so stripped back and minimal that it’s not always obvious how to do specific things. For instance, you can use AI to transcribe and summarise voice notes, but it’s not immediately clear how you do it. As it turns out, you long-press on the voice note recording and then your menu appears, which then gives you the option to transcribe. 

And if you want to access the transcription on another device, there’s no easy native way to access it. There’s no cloud service or app for other platforms. Even using Durobo’s file transfer system on another device like a computer or smartphone, there’s seemingly no way to access the text transcription, so you’re forced to copy and paste it and use another app like Google Docs instead. 

It also took a little longer than I’d like to figure out that the Spark app is also a note-taking app. There’s no obvious “+” button to create new text notes anywhere. Instead, you tap the keyboard at the bottom of the screen. It just feels a bit unintuitive and clunky. And actually, I’d like a separate app for text notes to separate them from my voice notes, but it just doesn’t have that. 

In fact, there’s a lot it doesn’t have that it feels like it should have. So it just feels a bit like, in being so minimal, the software doesn’t quite offer enough to make it useful. And if it has an aim, it doesn’t fully target it with functions and tools to enhance that. 

Think about the ReMarkable tablets, for example. They have scores of notebook styles, a desktop and mobile app for easy access to those from anywhere, easy linking for popular work cloud accounts and a stylus. The Boox Palma has a camera for document scanning, and other basic organisation tools like a calendar, calculator or even a clock with a timer. 

The Durobo Krono Home Screen has a calendar widget, but no calendar app, so tapping it does nothing. So if you want a calendar app, again, you’re gonna need to go to the Play Store to download one. 

In fact, that is the general feeling of the device: that if you want it to do anything beyond web browsing, voice note recording and reading, you’ll need to download an app from the Play Store – and that usually means using an app that hasn’t really been optimised for the black and white E Ink screen of the Krono. 

Still, it does work well as a portable, pocketable reader. With the Kindle app installed and BorrowBox for library book loaning – along with some open source Ebooks from the Gutenberg Project transferred to the device – I could quite happily dive right into a book, and know there’s nothing else on this device that will ever distract me from that, unless I purposefully put messaging apps on it (which I wouldn’t).

The device is smartphone-sized, so it’ll fit anywhere you’d normally carry a phone, whether that be a pocket, handbag, clutch, crossbody bag or whatever. And that’s probably its biggest charm. 

As for that aforementioned transfer system, that’s how you get any files or documents onto the Krono. The process is a little unusual, but it works. Simply open the Transfer option in the device; it’ll then show a QR code and an IP address you connect to in a browser on any other device. It then connects directly to Krono’s internal file system, and you can simply transfer files of all kinds into that interface, and they land on the device instantly – as long as they’re supported, of course.

Battery Life 

• E Ink enables long life
• Around week-plus per charge
• Actual longevity usage-dependent

One of the great things about any E Ink display device, of course, is battery life. That display not needing to be backlit or constantly refreshed means it’s a mostly passive technology that sips battery juice very sparingly. Getting an exact measure of how long it lasts is nearly impossible. 

In my testing, it tended to drop about 10% in a day, suggesting it’ll last about 10 days for me. That fits quite neatly into Durobo’s 7-14 day estimation, though your mileage will undoubtedly be different.

Should you buy it?