Those of you who have read my blog know that I am an Apple fangirl, and that I had been very disappointed in my brieftime with the Kobo Vox ereading tablet. That had been my first experience with Android, and although I was very disappointed in the Kobo Vox, I realised that was due to the tablet itself not the operating system. I really liked the 7 inch size of the Kobo Vox, and I had been considering a more general Android 7 inch tablet. I had been seriously considering the Galaxy 2 tablet, but then I heard about the new Nexus 7 and was blown away by the presentation and reviews. Just looking at the specs of the Kobo compared to the Nexus I can tell already my experience is going to be completely different: Kobo Vox: Operating system custom Android 2.3 CPU 800 Mhz Storage capacity 8 GB Memory 512 MB RAM Display 7″ multi-touch FFS+ multimedia display; 1024 x 600 resolution Nexus 7: Operating system Android 4.1 Jelly Bean SoC Nvidia Tegra 3 (T30L) CPU 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 with additional low-speed companion core,[1] GPU 416 MHz Nvidia GeForce ULP with 12 cores Memory 1 GB…
I've had a day to play around with this now, and at this point I'm unlikely to keep it. As I mentioned in my initial post, my main use for this would have been as a multi-platform e-reading tablet. From what I've seen, it's going to struggle to fulfill that purpose, for me at least. What I liked The inbuilt functions seemed to work fairly well. The main Kobo app is almost identical to the one on the iPad and works in much the same fashion. I tested the Email, YouTube and Zinio apps, and again, all of them worked reasonably well. My existing content downloaded to the machine with no trouble. I also found the capacitive touchscreen to be reasonably responsive, which was a criticism I'd read in other reviews. I particularly liked the Kobo widget which brings your currently being read content right to your home screen. Being used to iOS, it took me a little time to get used to Android, but it wasn't that difficult. You also can't really argue about the price – $169 is a pretty good deal – if you're prepared to accept the limitations. I also really liked the 7…
As I received a nice tax rebate today, I decided to check out the Kobo Vox 7 inch e-reader Android tablet. For the Canadians amongst you, FutureShop is offering $10 discount. Now, it’s possible I will return it before the return period expires; the reviews I’ve read and seen on YouTube have been rather negative – sluggish, unresponsive machine, poor quality build – but I will see for myself. I am not expecting it to be comparable to the iPad – Apple’s tablet has a dual-core Apple A5X custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip with quad-core graphics and 1GB of RAM compared to the Vox’s 800 Mhz processor and 512 RAM – and of course with at least $400 difference in price, you wouldn’t expect them to compare. I intend using them for different purposes. I expect my iPad to remain my go to tablet of choice, and the Kobo to be purely e-reading based. The main advantage I’m hoping to get from the Vox is that I will be able to read books from all three of my main sources – Amazon, Kobo and the local library – on one e-reader sized device. This will also be my first experience with Android….