At £169.99 the Vox is reasonably priced too costing as much as an 8GB iPod touch and little more than e-ink eReaders did a few years ago.ĭespite this our sympathy is short lived as the Vox’s battery life hammered a final nail into an already industrially-sealed coffin. As is often the case with custom Android builds, Android Marketplace has been removed, but there is a basic third party app store and reader “Awards” are available to encourage your blood shot eyes to keep going. The Vox also supports the popular ePub standard (absent for Kindles) and in a rare example of hardware prowess, Kobo has also equipped the Vox with 8GB of storage (plus a microSD slot) so the potential is there for all to see. Pricing is reasonable, keeping inline with Amazon for the most part, and there are thousands of royalty free literary classics to be had. Kobo has an excellent, wide ranging eBook store with over two million titles and it has teamed with Zinio to bring with it a further 4,000 magazines. Rather than lambasting the Vox for being so disappointing we are frustrated at an opportunity missed. Meanwhile build quality as a whole feels cheap with squeaks and creaks as you use the Vox which hardly inspires confidence. In addition to the Vox’s gloss facia, Kobo has chosen a textured rubberīack which – while pleasant to the eye – is prone to picking up every bump or scuff and will not wear well long term. There are further poor external design choices too. The unresponsive FFS panel doesn’t help, but regardless of the main culprit it all adds up to an unacceptably substandard user experience. Every action involves a delay, scrolling stutters and even turning eBook pages has a frustrating lag, despite the lack of any transitional animation. Even with the phone friendly Android 2.3 Gingerbread at its core the Vox is sluggish in the extreme. Kobo has equipped it with an aged 800MHz Freescale i.MX51 processor and partnered it with 512MB RAM. As a tablet the Vox is woefully underpowered. That said is the dream alive for an occasional reader who wants a cheap Android tablet? Kobo compounds things further as well by opting for a gloss finish to the display and a thick piano black bezel which means even indoors room lighting reflects heavily and a reading position needs to be chosen carefully.įor anyone buying an eBook reader primarily for, well… reading this will be the end of the matter. At least it’s a step up from your bog standard TN panel as used on some even more ropey tablets.Ĭertainly it is possible to read from the Vox, but in less than an hour our eyes were longing for e-ink or even the iOS Kobo app which takes advantage of the Retina Displays on the iPhone 4/4S and latest gen iPod touch or even the excellent IPS panel on the iPad/iPad 2. The 1024 x 600 native resolution is not the flaw here, but rather the choice of a cheaper FFS panel ahead of the more widely used IPS. If you go down the LCD eBook reader route these are simple trade-offs you have to accept.Īs such the onus is on manufacturers to fit high resolution, bright, sharp LCDs yet Kobo has fitted the Vox with a 7in plastic panel which not only displays lifeless, dull colours but has poor, pixelated text and extremely narrow viewing angles. By contrast LCD offers colour reproduction, greater speed and flexibility but is inherently more reflective, causes increased eye strain and has far greater power requirements. Through its generations E-ink (and its derivatives) have fulfilled their role admirably with paper-like clarity that is easy on the eyes, a pleasure to read in sunlight and easy on battery life. The cardinal rule in creating a good eBook reader is to have an excellent screen. As such Kobo is likely to sell units by the lorry load, which is a great shame because the Vox is an utter mess. Like Amazon, Kobo has priced the Vox to heavily undercut fully fledged tablets as well and, unlike Amazon, it has released the Vox outside of the US which gives the hybrid a relatively easy ride in the run up to Christmas. Forged under the same principle as the hyped Amazon Kindle Fire it dumps humble monochrome e-ink in favour of all singing, all dancing LCD, an Android core and basic tablet functionality. The Kobo Vox is one of the first major brands to try and convince us it is. Folding eBook readers into the smartphone/tablet revolution therefore sounds like a great idea. Your smartphone may not last as long as a dedicated MP3 player or take photos to the level of a premium compact camera, but it means fewer gadgets in your pocket and potentially more money in your wallet. It is at the heart of the tech sector and by and large many agree it is a good thing.
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