Kobo Vox

The Kobo Vox ($199 direct) aims to douse the Amazon Kindle Fire?($199, 4 stars) as an inexpensive tablet and ebook reader. But despite sharing a similar look and feel to the Editors? Choice Kindle Fire, the Kobo Vox lacks the power and polish to compete. It does a decent job as a color ereader, but beyond that it feels dated even next to the year-old Barnes and Noble Nook Color?($199, 4 stars). Its sluggish performance, unrefined software, and subpar reading experience make the Kobo Vox a hard sell, even at just $199.

Design
The Kobo Vox is a black slab, looking a lot like a Kindle Fire or BlackBerry PlayBook?($499, 2.5 stars). At 7.6 by 5.1 by .53 inches (HWD) and 14.2 ounces, it is slightly wider and lighter than the Kindle Fire?s 7.5 by 4.7 by .45 inches and 14.6 ounces. The rubberized black plastic back has the same texture as the Kindle Fire and BlackBerry PlayBook, but Kobo adds a raised diamond quilt design. The build quality is comparable to the Kindle Fire, but there's a little more flex in the case, making the Kindle Fire seem more solid in your hand.? The Vox has a physical Power button and volume rocker, which I found more useful than the Kindle Fire?s single, awkwardly-placed power button. The bezel is slightly larger than the Kindle Fire?s and houses capacitive Back, Menu and Home buttons.? Some people will appreciate these dedicated, off-screen buttons, but I found they caused trouble when using the tablet in landscape mode. The Kobo Vox has standard headphone and MicroUSB jacks, a microSD slot, and a single speaker grille. Like the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet ($249, 4 stars), the Kobo Vox lacks front and rear cameras. The Vox connects to the Internet using 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and I had no trouble connecting to our Lab networks. There's no cellular radio or Bluetooth connectivity.

The 7-inch fringe field switching (FFS+) LCD screen is bright and the 1,024-by-600-pixel resolution makes text look clear and crisp. Kobo went with an FFS+ display over in-plane switching (IPS), claiming the former performs better in bright-light settings. The Kobo's screen is brighter than the Kindle Fire?s IPS screen, but I found the outdoor reading experience to be about the same on both. The FFS+ display also has a narrower viewing angle than the Kindle Fire's screen does. Colors are more saturated and vivid on the Fire. For reading ebooks, contrast is greater on the Vox?the black text really pops against an almost-alarming white background.

OS, Apps, Book Store
The Kobo Vox, Nook Tablet, and Kindle Fire all share the same underlying Google Android 2.3 software. Where Barnes and Noble and Amazon heavily modified their user interfaces, the Kobo sticks relatively close to stock Android. The lock screen is changed, and mimics the side-swiping unlock motion on both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. The five home screens are populated with pre-loaded apps like The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Press Reader and Zinio for newspaper and magazine reading, which are useful enough, but are ?also easy to remove. Unlike the Nook Tablet or Kindle Fire, Kobo stuck with home-screen widgets, including an appealing collage of links to recently read books.

There are four reading-related icons on the bottom of the home screen, along with an All Apps button.? The first three are fairly self explanatory: Read Now, Library, and Shop Kobo. The last is Reading Life, which is unique to the Kobo Vox. ?It takes you to a very neat page that displays your reading progress and statistics, ?including things like total reading time, pages turned, and pages per hour. While not extremely useful, it adds a little more fun to the reading experience.

There are also awards and accomplishments you can earn through continued reading.? Kobo is really pushing a more social edge to the reading experience, with heavy Facebook integration and sharing options. This is similar to Barnes and Noble?s Nook Friends app, but instead of a separate app, the sharing and social functions are integrated with your reading. You can comment on pages and read what other people have to say about the books you?re reading. It?s like a virtual book club, but it would have been even nicer to have a book lending option like in Nook Friends. There's also a notification bar on the top of the screen, displaying battery life, the time, Wi-Fi connectivity status, and alerts.

Gmail is preloaded, but not Google Maps or Google Talk. Instead of the Android Market, the Vox comes with a link to GetJar's Web-based app store. Most of the apps there are optimized for phones, but they look good on the 7-inch screen. Alternatively, you can install the Amazon App Store or sideload your own Android apps from APK files via the microSD slot.

Kobo's store offers a selection of more than 2.2 million ebooks, more than the million or so Amazon claims to offer. But finding books was difficult; for instance, there is no dedicated section for browsing, say, childrens' books or comics. When I did finally find some childrens' books, they looked nice, but as you'll see below, the tablet is sluggish enough that kids would likely become easily frustrated with it.

Performance and Reading Experience
Frustratingly slow performance and an unresponsive touch screen make the Kobo Vox a pain to use and downright cumbersome when compared with the Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet. The tablet is built around an 800MHz Freescale i.MX51 Cortex-A8 processor, and you get 512MB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage (with unlimited cloud storage for Kobo content). The aging, single-core processor really holds the tablet back. The Kobo Vox scored a paltry 1,777 on our Antutu benchmark, which measures how fast components like the processor and memory run. It was significantly lower than the Kindle Fire?s 5052 score. Movements and animations were consistently slow, choppy, and generally unresponsive in my tests. Be prepared for long load times and multiple presses to get your commands registered.

The Kobo Vox also turned in a disappointing Browsermark Web browsing score of 25,051, less than a third of the Kindle Fire?s 76,739. The closest comparison is the Samsung DoubleTime?($49, 2 stars), which is a pretty poor smartphone.

The Vox's poor performance makes reading a drag. Though page turns are reasonably quick, books take too long to load. And I really missed the Kindle and Nook's page-turn animations that help bridge the tactile gap between ereaders and physical books. The Kobo Vox also had a hard time switching from portrait to landscape mode smoothly while I was reading. It takes entirely too long, hanging on a blank screen with a rotating circle icon.

Kobo claims that the Vox should deliver 7 hours of battery life with Wi-Fi turned off. In our battery test, which loops a video with the screen pumped up to max brightness, and Wi-Fi on, the Kobo Vox lasted just 3 hours, 47 minutes. That's considerably shorter than the Kindle Fire, which lasted close to 5 hours on the same test.

Conclusions
With the Vox, Kobo tries to mimic the Amazon Kindle Fire, and fails in pretty much every way. Kobo was able to hit that magic $199 price point, but at the cost of performance and polish. The Kindle Fire is a great product at a budget price. The Kobo Vox, on the other hand, is a budget product with a price to match. There is simply no reason to choose the Kobo Vox over the Kindle Fire, the Nook Tablet, or the Nook Color.?

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