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Kobo Vox

How about taking one of the most popular e-readers and transform it into a tablet? This was the starting point of the Canadian e-reader company Kobo. They wanted to continue the story of their successful e-readers by transforming them into tablets and strike the competition on the market.

This bring us to Kobo Vox.

Observing the front, we can immediately recognize the capacitive Android buttons, which leads us to the fact that this device runs on Android 3.5 Gingerbread with a customized UI. However, Gingerbread in not actually optimised version for tablets.

A huge disappointment is the lack of Google Play Store and the opportunity to download your favourite applications. The users are provided with a third party application store, called GetJar.

Built from a rubberized plastic material, with a stylish and attractive diamond- shape pattern, it measures 192.4 X 128.4 X 13.4 mm and weights 402 grams. Pretty chunky for a tablet, don’t you think? On the edges, there are the power button, the volume buttons, the 3.5 mm jack, the micro USB port and the slot for the microSD card. We can immediately notice the absence of a back camera.

But nevertheless, it is a practical and portable device, with  a 7 inches FFS+ capacitive touchscreen, capable of multitouch. Of course, this can satisfy the passionate reader, but not the web surfers. Compared to other tablets on the market, the screen isn’t the best, but rather satisfactory. It is bright with clear colours, but with noticeable reflections and low sharpness.

It’s not very responsive and there’s a lag in swiping between homescreens. This can be very frustrating for the final users.

Under the hood, it packs a 8GB of internal memory, 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM, which makes the device underpowered by the today’s standards when it comes to starting the applications or keeping them working- there are a lot of ‘force close’ moments when the applications are used.

Maybe not the best choice when buying a tablet, but hey, it has a bargain price of less than 200 $ and an e-book service which is great.