Kobo Shine: Installing Tolino Shine Software on Kobo Glo for Android Experience
A newly purchased Tolino Shine can no longer be rooted (without opening the device), but that doesn’t mean the eBook reader is of no use to the modding community. As user “SyreKron” discovered in the English Mobileread forum, you can simply load the software from the Tolino Shine onto a Kobo Glo eReader—and everything works.
He got the idea after seeing the inner workings of the Tolino Shine in heckes’ photos. Under the hood, the Kobo Glo and Tolino Shine look surprisingly similar. His suspicion: the devices are based on the same reference design. A quick test then confirmed this.
Kobo Shine: Android on the Kobo Glo
After SyreKron copied the Tolino Shine image onto the memory of the Kobo Glo, the Kobo eBook reader booted up flawlessly and functions as it should, i.e., touchscreen, Wi-Fi, lighting… everything works. At Mobileread, the combination of Kobo Glo hardware and Tolino Shine software was promptly named Kobo Shine.
For Kobo Glo users and tinkerers, this is great news, as it allows you to run Android on the Kobo device, which is always a nice bonus. Unfortunately, the regular Kobo Glo firmware isn’t based on Android, so you can’t use the standard Kobo reading software in this way. Moreover, it’s not yet clear whether the process is successful on every Kobo Glo device, as the eBook reader has apparently undergone several minor hardware revisions over time, which means there might be compatibility issues.
The safest way to test this is by opening the Kobo Glo and swapping out the internal memory card with a prepared “Kobo Shine” memory card. This way, you can easily revert to the old system in case of any problems. You can find more information in the Mobileread post.
